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The sky over Junon churned like a wounded beast, thick clouds writhing with anticipation. Lightning forked across the sea-swept cliffs, casting eerie silver light on the great beige cannon: a mechanical behemoth, bristling with the tension of impending war.
From the platform behind the cannon, Cloud stood. The Buster Sword was in hand, and the wind whipped his spikey blond hair. Beside him, his companions were tense, bracing for the unfathomable. The air cracked open with a low, droning hum. A crimson flare ignited the sky.
He had called it.
Bahamut descended with majesty and menace. Six wings stretched wide like scythes of judgment. Its dark silver metallic hide shimmered under the lighting. Talons crackled with energy as it hovered: the lord of the skies. The weight of its presence pushed down on Junon like some kind of divine punishment.
Below and on the opposite side of the platform, Sephiroth stood alone. His coat fluttered like a banner. His head lifted. Silver hair cascaded over one shoulder, as his glowing mako eyes filled with something wicked: calm and knowing.
“Still chasing shadows, Cloud?” Sephiroth’s voice cut through the thunder like a scalpel. “Even with a god at your side, you are nothing.”
Cloud grit his teeth. His heart pounded but not at the insult, rather at the risk. Because he had seen the battlefield shift. Bahamut was not aiming at him.
Its maw opened. There were no words, no roar. Only a building silence, a vacuum of existence preparing to be filled with annihilation. The light that gathered in its throat wasn’t fire. It was unbeing. It pulsed like the heartbeat of the void, growing, growing, growing. Then, the sky ripped.
Like the cosmos had gasped.
A rift, jagged and coiling, tore itself into existence above the cliffside. A figure hurled through it. Wings unfurled. Its massive, feathered limbs laced with smoky black down, as violet miasma trailed after it. Bianca emerged like a comet of pure wrath, her eyes, so many eyes, blazing with violet light.
She didn't roar. She never did. She shuddered the fabric of reality. Her entrance was silent save for the tremble in the air: a vibration deep in the bones of every living thing nearby.
The celestial draconic phoenix, better known as Sephiroth’s consort, had come.
Her body writhed with motion, tendrils from her wings writhing like blind serpents. Each one watched, blinked, and gave testament to the fight that would ensure that day. And every eye turned towards Bahamut.
The divine dragon released its blast, a lance of pure energy tearing toward Sephiroth with divine precision.
Bianca moved.
The world seemed to fold. A blur of feathers and corruption slammed into the energy just as it reached the man she loved.
The collision was catastrophic. More so than anything she had experienced before.
A soundless scream erupted, not from her throat but from the tendrils lining her wings. Her wings flared wide, as she devoured the flare, catching the unholy energy in the span of her being. The tendrils writhed, wrapping around the core of the blast, dragging it into her corrupted form.
The ground split. The sea boiled. Junon shook.
Bianca bled.
Not blood like a human. No. Not even like the blood that awakened after she was skinned alive by her father in her world. No. Viscous, radiant ichor seeped from the joints of her wings, hissing on the metal as it fell. Where it landed, it smoked and sang. It was a high-pitched noise like nails scraping along a chalkboard. Her wounds tore open along her shoulder. Her feathers singed and limbs trembled.
Then, her massive head tilted. Her eyes, all of them, narrowed on Bahamut with hatred older than time. He dared tried to kill her chosen one? He dared?!
Cloud stared, stunned.
“She’s—she was—” he started, stepping forward, memories flooding him. The girl, once on her knees within the Nibelheim reactor, moments from casting herself into the abyss to follow his rival, the girl he and Zack saved: Bianca. No. But this wasn’t her mortal guise. This was something else. Something born of stars, divine energy, and nightmare fuel.
“She doesn’t speak,” Sephiroth murmured across from him. His voice was reverent, as the madness of his obsession shone in his eyes. “But she is the voice of judgment. And you called down a god on me without understanding the consequences.”
Bianca didn’t hesitate. Her body shivered as dark storms gathered above her. The winds howled with a pitch that made Yuffie cover her ears and Barret snarl against the pressure. The heavens cracked as stars fell.
Not meteors. These were not celestial stones. These were dead stars, burning black at the core, trailing violet fire. They slammed into Bahamut’s wings, one after another, driving the beast backward in the air.
The king of dragons roared, retaliating with a surge of his own power, spearing Bianca through the torso with a column of raw energy. The beam pierced her. Her shriek split the air. Blood sprayed in a wide arc, burning the earth below into twisted glass.
Sephiroth's smirk dropped. Something dangerous and sacred entered his eyes: only a look that he had when he spoke of Mother.
He turned to Cloud. His tone was soft but lethal. “You harmed her.”
“She protected you,” Cloud growled. His friends staggered as the ground beneath them quaked again. “She was going to die. That day in Nibelheim. You broke her.”
"She was reborn." Sephiroth’s smile returned: eerie in its serenity. He moved. No one saw when he drew Masamune.
One moment he was standing. The next, he was soaring. His silver hair trailed behind him like a comet's tail. The sky screamed around him as he closed the distance between himself and Bahamut in an instant of impossible speed.
Bianca fell from the sky, crashing into the cliffside. The impact splintered stone, her wings folding protectively over her head. Her eyes blinked erratically across her scorched form. Her blood pooled beneath her, steaming in the rain. She did not rise.
Masamune sang.
It struck Bahamut through the neck, sliding in like water through silk. The divine dragon spasmed. His six wings flailed. Its eyes, wild with fury, met Sephiroth’s calm ones. However, Bahamut found nothing there in Sephiroth's gaze but worship. For her.
With a final push with his hand on the blade of the Masamune, Sephiroth drove the blade deeper, until the dragon’s throat cracked with a crunch of breaking bone. Blood splattered across Sephiroth's face, pauldrons, and chest.
Bahamut collapsed. His enormous body fell into Junon Bay with a splash that sent waves slamming into the docks. The sea frothed red, as the dragon vanished beneath the waves.
Below him, the cannon split down the middle with a groaning shriek. The metal moaned and twisted, cracking from the impact of Bianca’s sacrifice and the final clash of titans. It fell apart into the sea, swallowed by her blood and Bahamut’s disappearing corpse.
Sephiroth landed beside Bianca, kneeling as the rain hissed against her smoking form. He placed one of his hands on her side, feeling her labor breath beneath his fingers. Her body—massive, divine, monstrous, beautiful—was unraveling.
Tendrils once writhing with menace now sagged in ruin. Feathers blackened and fell like ash. Her wings, scorched and torn, convulsed as motes of her celestial essence shimmered in the air: tiny, glowing particles lifting from her flesh like dust in moonlight.
Trembling and slick with ichor, one of her many tendrils reached for him weakly. He caught it.
With care that defied his reputation, Sephiroth wrapped his hand around the dissolving limb. “You’re still perfect,” he whispered. His voice was raw. “Even as stardust.”
The wings continued to unravel. Her enormous eyes blinked across her body. Some were wild. Some dulled with pain. Each one slowly found him in unison. Her gaze was not pleading. It was trust.
She was dying. No. Not dying. Changing. Her form was too powerful and damaged to sustain in this plane.
And yet, Bianca could be saved.
Sephiroth's eyes narrowed. His single black wing flared wide, absorbing the storm's fury, as he continued to gently stroke her side. Black feathers fluttered against his bicep. "Not here, Bia."
With one last look at the battlefield, Cloud and his party, the ruin, and the fallen god which was half vanished behind them, Sephiroth disappeared in a burst of shadow. His wing folded against her side.
They reappeared deep in the heart of the North Crater, where silence reigned and the air vibrated with her broken magic. There, amidst the glacial walls and alien whispers pressing inside his mind, he laid Bianca's remaining essence gently onto the ground.
Bianca’s presence was faint, flickering, but alive, just not whole. He knelt beside her, hand resting over Bianca's gruesome heart.
“This world doesn’t deserve you,” he said quietly, his voice full of something dangerous and devout. “But I and Mother do.”
As her heart broke down and the dust slipped through his fingertips, the air pulsed once. The dust stirred. Bianca, the Harbinger of Destruction and Rebirth, began to reassemble.