Title: Strange Shore
Fandom: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1,305 Words
Content Notes: A dark story for a light-hearted game.
Author Notes: This is a fill for the Viceroy of Fantasy badge.
Summary: Benjamin returns to the Land of the Five Crystals.

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The sounds of the sea, from the calls of the gulls to the washing of waves upon the beach, brought Benjamin back to his senses, and he opened his eyes, a little at a time, turning his head to try and spit the taste of brine and sand from his mouth. The boat he had constructed to escape from the last island he had visited had not been up to the harshness of the ocean, and it had been destroyed in a storm, leaving him to cling to its remnants as the waves tossed them to and fro. He had not expected to live through it, but he had, and the storm had deposited him upon yet another strange shore.

"At least I escaped that prison," he croaked, rolling onto his right side and wincing at a pain that lanced through his ribs. "You're still there, aren't you, Tristam?" No answer. He had not seen Tristam for at least ... most of a decade, as far as he could reckon, and the prison he remembered had been on the other side of the world. Life since then had been a series of escapes, first from the prison, then from one peril to the next, until he had gone so far from civilization that he had become like the creatures of the deserts, islands, and jungles he had learned to inhabit, almost more beast than man.

"Don't think this is another island." He forced himself to stand up, ignoring the pain in his side, shaking off his dizziness as he staggered up the beach. "Can see cliffs 'n' things here. Too big. Maybe ... water up there." His body begged him to lay down again, but he paid no attention to that. Surviving in the wilderness had required him to build up a will strong enough to ignore the needs of the body, to surpass them, to stay alive in conditions that might otherwise damn him. He paused only to check the rags that wrapped his feet, to ask himself how quickly he could relearn walking on hard ground.

He managed to find a trail that had been carved up the face of the cliffs, including markers that anybody could follow. "People? Here? Real people?" He did not think too hard upon the question, instead focusing his energy on climbing. It did not take long to find a spring, to marvel at fresh water gushing effortlessly from the earth as he plunged his face into it and drank. "Don't even have to work for it here. What kind of place is this?" More climbing to do, and it took him most of the day to get to the top, to look at green grass stretching for what seemed like miles upon miles in all directions.

"Feel like ... I should know this," he mumbled to himself, and he thought he could see, in the distance, a small town. "So ... there are people here. Got to get to 'em." He almost expected monsters to emerge from the brush, a condition to which he had long been accustomed, but ... nothing, only the rushing of the winds through the grass. "Got to ... get to 'em." He did not care that he looked a fright, a shambling figure in rags and chains, long of hair and beard, wild-eyed and wire-framed, almost more scars than skin. After all, he had not seen a mirror of any kind for months, perhaps years.

Almost night by the time he reached the outskirts of the town. The calm of it amazed him, and he stopped to ask himself if it might be safe to approach – everything a trap, always a trap, he had learned. And he noticed a warm light bobbing towards him in the darkness – a lantern, carried by a young woman. Blonde hair. A familiar face. She noticed him, looked at him, did not seem troubled by his appearance. A familiar face. Why did he recognize her? Memories started to bubble up from a place deep inside his soul, and, as she regarded him in silence, he croaked a single name: "Phoebe?"

"Phoebe's my mother's name," she replied, "but it doesn't surprise me that you'd know it. The Crystal of Light said that a stranger would come back to us, only to be a stranger no more. Come with me." His instincts told him to refuse. Every helping hand that had been extended to him on his long journey had been turned against him. And yet ... he could not deny what his memory was trying to tell him. Tristam had been his friend, his comrade, but there had been others, others back in the far country that he had once left, that his captors had all but burned from his mind with their tortures and isolation.

He staggered after her, and she offered him a hand to steady to his steps, not recoiling from the calluses and filth on his own hand. Phoebe ... had a daughter? Then is this ... Aquaria? Too large to be the Aquaria of his memory, and the young woman before him seemed the same age Phoebe had been at the time of his departure. If I am not imagining all of this, if this place is real, how long ... have I been gone? He recalled rumors of the Land of Five Crystals that others had passed to him on his journey, rumors of a paradise governed by the strongest and most inviolate of magics.

A sanctuary. The young woman led him up to the altar, and there he saw a hooded figure clad from head to toe in white. That figure turned to look at him, and, in the depths of the hood, another familiar face, a little older, perhaps, but still Phoebe. No mistaking the light in her eyes upon seeing him. He opened his mouth to speak, but none of the words he could summon seemed like they would fit, and she simply ran up to him and threw her arms around him, not caring at all that he looked like he had been dredged up from the depths of a dark and nameless place far from her home.

"I knew you'd come back, Benjamin," Phoebe said, "I just didn't know when. To think it's been so long –" Tears flowed freely down her face. "People stopped believing it'd ever happen. But I didn't. And here you are." She separated from him, looking deep into his face. "The things you've seen – I can't even begin to imagine. No one knew anything about the world outside this place, but now –" She shook her head, collecting herself. "There's no need to talk about it right now. Let's get you healed and cleaned up first." She seemed like a leader. Perhaps she had become one in his absence?

"Thank you, Phoebe," he rasped. "Missed you." He looked up at the ceiling of the sanctuary, at the clear night sky he could glimpse through the windows above him. "Missed everyone. Everything." He smiled to himself as she helped him towards one of the rooms. "Used to think I only had misfortune in my future." A small bark of a laugh. "But ... it turned into the opposite just when I needed it most, huh?" She smiled over her shoulder at him. Behind him, he could feel her daughter looking at him in the same way. "She looks just like you, Phoebe. Could almost ... be your twin, you know."

She had tears in her eyes again when she looked at him. "When you're all better, I'll introduce the two of you. I promise." For once, his instincts told him to believe her, if only in the smallest of whispers, and he started to think that he might not be dreaming.

END.