Noel Kreiss x Reader | Final Fantasy XIII-2
✓ COMPLETED + UNEDITED | 2018
After the fall of Cocoon had rendered much of the land infertile and uninhabitable, the existing civilisations were forced to resort to hunting and foraging for natural resour...
"They speak of anomalies—of a strange energy that warps time itself. Things that shouldn't exist here are appearing near the gates. Things that shouldn't happen are happening. They call this phenomenon the 'paradox' effect."
- Serah Farron
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Chapter I | Graveyard of Dreams
The crystallised gate was shrouded with dark mist, throbbing with energy, thick black vines crawling along the ground towards him. Noel slowed and eventually stopped in front of the gate, the eddying mist brushed past his face with cold, damp hands. Serah and Mog stood a short distance away, also staring into the paradox.
Paradox. A tear in the timeline, an anomaly in the temporal boundaries of the earth. They were an agent of change, the causation of overlapping timelines, of splintered pasts and uncertain futures. A consequence of Etro's intervention into the fate of the l'Cie, of Chaos' alteration of the timeline, of Valhalla's awakening. They caused monsters to appear where they shouldn't exist, people to disappear into altered time frames. They caused glitches in a person's memories, forced them to forget things they wanted to remember, remember things they wanted to forget.
Noel sometimes wondered if he was a living paradox. The last survivor.
Noel crossed his arms, feeling the slight flutter of apprehension he always had when standing before one of the anomalies. "Are we going in?"
Serah nodded. "Guess so. The more paradoxes we solve, the more we fix the timeline," she reminded him, propping her hands on her hips and squinting into the mist. "Wonder what's on the other side."
Noel braced his weapon against his shoulder. "Guess we're about to find out," he said before stepping through.
He landed on the other side with a stumble, his knees buckling and sending him sprawling onto the wet grass of the plains in which he had arrived. He was back on his feet before Serah and Mog made it through, picking blades of grass off his shirt with a small frown.
"Where... are we?" She mumbled, looking around. Noel also lifted his head and saw that they had been stranded amid some sort of ruins. The buildings he imagined had once stood tall were now reduced to heaps of rubble and ash, their graves stirred by a melancholy wind, a picture of fallen splendour.
"I don't know," Noel admitted, his eyebrows coming together in a slight frown. "I can't see anything but ruins." He kicked at the remains of what looked like a table, the wood splintered and rotten. His foot tore through it easily. "Guess we should look around. Try and find an artifact or something that needs fixing, something that shouldn't be here."
"Might be easier said than done," she said, sifting a pile of rocks with her shoe.
They walked slowly through the crumbling bricks, feet crushing dust and cement. A fog had rolled over from the smudged horizon, shrouding everything in grey dusk. Noel kept his weapon drawn in case anything decided to take advantage of the growing shadows and ambush them from the rocky crags and outcrops that splintered the landscape around them.
