Arbiters of Fate

Cloud wasn't sure what he expected as he walked through the rift. Horror. Monsters and abominations. But instead it was very similar to what he had just left. He looked around suspiciously, to find Barret doing the same.

"Don't know about you, but looks normal to me," Barret grunted. Aerith frowned, looking at the horizon. She nodded.

"Over there," she said simply and Cloud narrowed his eyes. A stream of whispers, enveloping buildings, pillars, and destroying them. Almost ... consuming them.

"Okay, that ain't right!" Barret exclaimed, turning and running. The whispers enveloped the heroes, separating them. Cloud could feel them compressing around him, almost **** the breath out of him before he was free, on a floating patch of roadway and debris. In the distance, the whispers were swirling around the Shinra Tower, wrapping around it and animating it, as some sort of unnatural monster. Cloud swallowed, his brain telling him to flee, but his heart instructing him to fight. He ran towards it, only to find Tifa and Barret.

"You're alive!" Barret said.

"Happy to see me?"

"Wouldn't go that far."

"So that thing… that's a Whisper too, huh?"

"Looks a lot more like an "arbiter of fate" than the others." Cloud reflected on that. For a meathead, Barret was occasionally insightful. But then smaller whispers began to swarm them. Fortunately, between Cloud's lightning spells, Barret's microlaser, and Tifa's fist, they managed to cleave their way through the mass.

As they fought their way to the center of the maelstrom, they ran across Red and Aerith. The twosome ducked behind an unmoored piece of a pillar as the arbiter fired a ray at them that caused the platform they clung to to almost shatter. Cloud saw a vision ... of Red, running through a parched desert on a dying world.

"What the hell did I just see?" Barret said, shooting the microlaser to no effect.

"A glimpse of tomorrow if we fail here today," Red said simply. More whispers appeared, and Cloud eventually saw a glimmer of hope: with every whisper they defeated, the arbiter weakened. The five set themselves to their task, using every weapon and spell in their arsenal to get closer to the arbiter.

As the arbiters powers weakened, the visions increased. Cloud saw Tifa again, burning to a crisp at the meteorite flew towards the Planet, promising apocalypse.

"This can’t be our future…" Tifa said, shuddering.

"The future is always a blank page," Aerith said, placing a calming hand on Tifa's shoulder.

They ran on, till they were face to face with a malevolent, 70 story building. Cloud hacked at the whispers, seeing gaps in the defenses of the beast.

"Barret," Cloud said, "Aim for the 50th floor." If the arbiter had a heart, that had to be it. And it was exposed.

Barret aimed his microlaser at the arbiter, carving it, causing it to shudder in anguish, almost tearing their platform apart. Cloud and Aerith reinforced it with magic, the spells shooting stories high to attack the arbiter. And suddenly, it was all gone, replaced by a new locale, brightly lit, quiet, and peaceful.