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neon-dynasty · 2 years

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Chrono Trigger - Adrift on the Sea of Dreams

I wrote a little Chrono Trigger fanfic. Enjoy!

In a place that is familiar to all of us, in the most ancient roots of our souls, Lucca woke up.

That she woke up in this place was perhaps the oddest part of what happens in this scene, as strictly speaking, Zurvan is not a place. More accurately, it’s the place between places, at the time between times. It is the space between atoms and galaxies, between ticks and tocks. And more accurately than that, it’s not a place where the mind can awaken. To describe it as the doorway between reality and dreams would not be inaccurate, but it wouldn’t be as accurate as the other two facts presented.

Zurvan is. And also, Zurvan is where Lucca was.

It is not easy to find Zurvan, as every mortal mind strives to move forward. But as someone who had crossed the streams of time as often as she had, her mind was primed for new directions. Backward, inward, and upward through time and space (as well as their opposites) had all been achieved thanks to technology and magic. She was ready for toward.

Indeed, it felt like she was moving toward something as she walked, floated, waded through the fluffy pampas grass. There was a feeling that she shouldn’t touch it, but the more she thought on that, the more it buffeted her face. The fog had a faint pulse to it, and she heard the sound of the sea. Or was it static? Or was it rain?

She oriented her body to be as vertical as possible. It was strictly a matter of perspective, but having up correspond to something and down correspond to its opposite always helped her overcome the queasiness after a trip in the time machine. The technique did not fail her here, and the haziness and grass disintegrated away to reveal a small cottage with a thatched roof. Somehow, this structure made her uneasy, as if it were anachronous to her world. Like a splinter in her mind’s eye. Through the primal sense of repulsion, her human curiosity compelled her toward the house.

She opened the door. Or perhaps it opened itself for her.

---

The interior was that of her friend’s house, but not exactly. There was a black and white checker tile floor instead of the old wooden one. The stairs were also going in the wrong direction, and the kitchen wall gave way into a dark, knotted forest. Other than that, it was more or less Crono’s childhood home.

Part of her expected to see Crono and Fritz running around and playing knights in the corner. Part of her expected Gina and her parents to be drinking coffee and talking, late into the evening. Part of her expected to see herself rooting through the junk drawer in search of a spinning top, or a deck of cards, or a magnet.

Again, a feeling of wrongness pervaded her mind as she saw the house’s sole resident. There was a young woman sitting at the table, head in her hands. Her long azure hair obscured her features, but the aura of sorrow and despair radiating from her was unmistakable.

“Schala?”

At the sound of Lucca’s voice, the princess winced, and stifled a sob.

Lucca approached, feeling more and more repelled as she got closer. In the space immediately around Schala, the house was not the house. The wooden table was marble where her elbows rested. Her chair was a small throne. Parchments with inscrutable writing faded into dinner plates. The light went wavy, and the air gradually lost its familiar scent of baking bread and gained the tang of ozone. The pressure against her own mind inverted, and Lucca felt that she became the pressure herself.

Schala didn’t react to this. She didn’t seem to register Lucca’s presence at all. She wasn’t a dream, however. The ancient princess, here in this house, was more real than anything else. Lucca positioned herself on Schala’s side and called out again.

Schala’s mouth screamed something Lucca couldn’t hear, and the princess’s arm lashed out.

CRACK!

At the moment of impact, everything Lucca saw came apart, rotated in space, and reassembled itself in the wrong order.

At the moment of impact, Lucca felt a jolt in her gut. A spark of something new.

At the moment of impact, Lucca could hear what Schala had been shouting. “Begone!”

At the moment of impact, Lucca saw the princess’s face. In an instant, in an eternity, Schala’s expression changed. Disdain. Hatred. Surprise. Confusion.

Hope.

“I know you. You were there that day. …how are you here?”

The feeling of wrongness was gone.

“I’m not sure myself. I was in a field of grass, or in the sky, or something. Then I focused and saw this little cabin.”

A connection replaced it.

“Cabin? Is that how this place looks to you?”

A realization that their eyes now saw the same thing. The same dream.

“Not anymore. In fact, I don’t think we’re in Porre anymore, Tata.”

“What?”

“It’s just a joke. Do you know where we are?”

“Zurvan. The Sea of Dreams. It exists outside of time and space.”

At the mention of the word “dream,” Lucca started to feel herself being pulled away. Schala’s face went pale and she grabbed Lucca’s hand.

“No! Please don’t leave!”

Toward and away. Repulsion and attraction. Pressure and relief.

Lucca saw the fading princess. She hadn’t known Schala, not really. Their paths had crossed in an ancient kingdom a couple of times. A few months ago, or a dozen millennia, depending on the perspective. They were close in age. At once the princess was timeless and young. Lucca felt a kinship with Schala. One had to be the older sister, and the role would change depending on the perspective. They weren’t related by blood, any more than every human on the planet was related by blood. But in this moment they were related by the shared dream, both of them present in Zurvan. They’d briefly met, but they were lifelong friends, depending on the perspective.

Everything stopped fading, and Lucca clicked into place.

“It looks like I’m not going anywhere just yet, kid.” She straightened up, trying to put on some amount of deference to royalty. “I’m Lucca. It’s a pleasure to officially meet you, Your Highness.”

The princess, for the first time in an eternity, giggled. “We’ve known each other for thirteen thousand years. You can call me Schala.”

---

The two talked. They shared their thoughts and their stories. The more they connected, the more solid the ground beneath their feet was. The more Lucca could focus on the details of the world around her. There was a feeling that “here” was the space immediately around her and “there” was unfathomable. Where the boundary was could have been anything from a few footsteps to countless light years, but Lucca was getting the hang of it.

“It’s wonderful that you’re here.” Schala smiled as she said it, and realized she was smiling, perhaps for the first time in her existence. “Everyone who arrives here is dreaming. To them, I’m not real. I’ve seen millions of people, and they’ve all passed through. It’s been so long since I’ve had someone to talk to and I’m glad it’s you.”

“I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible. How long have you been here?”

“Time doesn’t really work like that in Zurvan, or at least it didn’t until three months ago.”

Three months was an uncomfortably specific amount of time.

There were things both had avoided mentioning. Lavos. Janus. Crono. Whether there would be time for these stories was irrelevant. As they talked, it became clear that there was a problem that needed to be solved, and as good as Lucca was under pressure, she preferred her mind to be as clear as possible before working on solutions.

It had been two months since Lucca and her friends had killed Lavos. It had been two and a half months since Janus had joined their cause, insisting upon calling himself Magus. It had been three months, almost to the day, that she’d lost her best friend.

They’d broken all the rules of causality to bring him back.

Or had they?

Of course they had. They used the Time Egg. And the doll from the fair.

No, they saved the Chrono Trigger so that they could bring Crono back when it was safe.

No, they saved Crono right away.

No, they couldn’t win the doll.

No, they pulled off their time heist.

No, they screwed it up.

Conflicting memories filled Lucca’s head, to the point where she thought she would split. She fell to her knees. Up was no longer the opposite of down, and the world spun.

Schala put a hand on Lucca’s shoulder, grounding the young woman. The princess’s expression was a kind of opaque Lucca had never seen on a human before. She spoke in a tone that brokered no argument.

“Hold your breath. I find it helps.”

And with that, they plunged deep into the Sea of Dreams.

---

Lucca tried to hold her breath. Tried to orient herself so that up and down made sense, tried to grasp a sense of causality. Beneath the surface, however, there was chaos.

It was the stuff that everything was made of. Time, space, history, probability, emotions, magic, science, knowledge, wisdom, decisions, all happening at once in the same primordial soup. Lucca knew what it was to be a point on a line in one dimension. She experienced two dimensions, and three, and so on. It wasn’t chaos, she realized. It was everything in every order.

In this everything, Lucca noticed a small crack, glowing white. Her curiosity allowed her to follow it. She pursued the jagged fractures and saw that they branched and grew larger and larger and larger until she came to the heart of the break.

There was a vaguely human-shaped hole in reality from which countless cracks were radiating. Lucca shifted herself to get a better view.

The figure, or the absence of a figure, felt familiar. Lucca was filled with joy and sorrow looking at it. It was wrong.

Through the shattered substance, Lucca was able to make out an outline. Broad shoulders, stout frame, and long hair, blown back into clumps of spikes. On the other side, she saw the essence of Schala. It reached out to her through the fracture in reality.

“You were supposed to save me.”

---

Lucca jolted up in her bed, gasping and sweating.

And Lucca remembered.

Image source: https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5187248

#chrono trigger #fanfic #lucca #schala #zurvan

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