Her face. Someone else’s face. Why was she..?

Rydia grabbed a wipe to remove the makeup from her face. Maybe this was just some incredible skill with it on the maids’ part…

Still, the girl staring through the mirror was not Rydia. Her eyes were the wrong color, her hair was the wrong shade and hue of green, her… Why hadn’t she realized before that she spoke with a stranger’s voice?

Her mind in a stranger’s body, in a different world… Surely she wasn’t the only one. If she could find Cecil, Rosa, Cid – she’d even settle for Edge – she’d… she’d… Well, she’d feel less lonely, even if she had no idea what she’d do.

Suddenly, Rydia was overtaken by a wave of exhaustion. She set the wipe on a table and wandered back to her room, her mind struggling to process her predicament until sleep took her to dreaming.

The world burned around Rydia, everything burning, the heat of fire eliciting screams from everyone in the village around her. A girl wailed for her mother… A girl, just like Rydia. She couldn’t let history repeat itself…

She found her body turned to stone when she tried to take a step, all her body except her eyes. And her eyes, her ears, rose upward and found the sobbing girl. The girl was trying to bring her mother away, trying to save her, although it was hopeless… The girl’s own flesh burned as she walked…

Rydia was back in her own flesh, burning, her tears of pain evaporating as they fell. She could smell the smoke of her own burning flesh. Her vision began to fade and-

Rydia woke up sweating. She couldn’t- She couldn’t do anything-

Still feeling the scorching heat, she tried to cast Blizzaga. Blizzara. Blizzard. Not even a snowflake came. She tried to summon Shiva, and all that appeared was a harsh, hot, sandy wind blowing through her open window.

Not even the breeze could relieve her… The pain of her mother’s death hit her like an elixir against Lugae. How long had it been… eleven years? Eleven years of hers since Cecil had destroyed everything, albeit by accident, and the heartbreak and burning fire still felt like she was watching her life fall apart.

-

“-Anna! Are-” The tan man burst into her room. “Oh. Not Anna… Just… …Why were you screaming?”

‘Anna…’ Was this..? No… “I… I was having a nightmare… and I remembered when my mother-” Rydia choked on a sob and somehow found herself gripping the man’s clothes. She needed someone to trust, to hold… And somehow she could tell this man was trustworthy…

“I once knew a girl whose mother died… She held herself together somehow… She told me I should too, that I was an adult, too old to mope about my-”

“...Edward..?” She had to ask. All those things, those were what she’d told Edward so long ago. And he’d been in love with a woman named Anna, so maybe… Her voice came out as a shaky whisper. “You… You are Edward, aren’t you..?”

“The- How did that possibly… Are you Rydia?”

She nodded slightly in response, still clutching to his clothes with a death grip. “Edward… Oh, Edward… I thought I was alone…” Slowly, her trembling stopped, and she released him.

Before, they had both been a similar height. Edward was a bit short. Here, though, in the bodies they’d been given, Edward towered over her. It didn’t particularly matter, but it was strange to tilt her head so far just to meet his eyes.

Rydia whispered the words to Blizzard again, overwhelmed by the power of the desert’s heat combined with the lingering hallucination of flames. Still, it meant nothing to magic and she was left sweating.

“Your magic won’t take effect?”
She told him the Eidolons wouldn’t respond to her summoning either. The only spell she’d successfully cast so far was Fire.

“Oh… They don’t craft harps here, either, as it seems. The man I’ve… become, so to speak… apparently invented some sort of automatic bow, a poison spray, and a machine that makes a horrendous noise…” Edward looked a bit sick talking about them. The machines must have felt as wrong to him as they did to Rydia, but he had to live in a castle of them, and she was only visiting…

She was here, and he was here, and the strongest commonality between them was that they’d both journeyed alongside Cecil to save the world, so maybe that was the pattern and everyone else who’d fought alongside Cecil was also here; maybe Cecil himself was here, even, and if anyone could get them all back to their own world and bodies, it was him.

Rydia – or whoever the girl was whose body Rydia had been sent into – was supposed to have lost her memory, so she didn’t know anything about the girl. However, Edward likely knew a bit about who he’d become. She asked him what he did know.

It took him a minute of thinking to come up with the answer. “He is King Edgar of Figaro… good at inventing machines… flirtatious… His brother ran away from home, apparently, although the brother is here now.”

Rydia asked him why he had come back. According to Edward, the brother’s explanation hadn’t made sense to anyone, and he was now acting quite out of character for how he’d acted when he’d left. He’d left around a decade ago, though, so that could be said to be evolution of his character over the years.

Was it too much to hope that he was one of them in the same predicament?

“King Edgar!” A younger man wearing the armor of a Figaroan soldier burst through the door. “Everyone’s been looking all over for you! Kefka’s here, and he’s getting impatient!”