My Reckoning with Divinity

The Certainty of Flames

I once believed the world was mine to remake. The sky above Nibelheim burned crimson the day I learned of my "descent" from the Calamity—proof, I thought, that I was chosen to carve a new heaven from the rot of this dying planet. The Project’s reports, laced with Jenova’s whispers, told me humanity was a cancer spreading across the lifestream. I wielded this truth like Masamune, slicing through the illusions of mortality. To be worthy of godhood, I had to burn away the weak.

But even then, there were cracks. I remember a child in Wutai clutching a doll as I passed through the village, her eyes wide not with fear but fascination. A contradiction. Was I not a force of purification? Why did my shadow not terrify all who beheld it?

The Mirror of the Planet

I saw myself reflected in the lifestream during my fall into the Northern Cave. Not as a god, but as a storm that left nothing untouched—a force without purpose, only destruction. The Planet’s voice was not the roaring approval I’d imagined, but a quiet grief. It did not hate me. It mourned what I’d become.

This unnerved me. My wrath had always been a performance of certainty, a blade sharpened by the need to prove I was meant to wield it. But if the Planet did not resist me, if it simply understood, what did that make my crusade? A tantrum? A child’s attempt to carve meaning from stone?

The Fractured Cycle

Even gods are bound by cycles. In the lifestream’s depths, I glimpsed the Calamity’s last moments—not conquest, but desperation. A being once like me, screaming into the void, convinced annihilation was the only way to survive. I had repeated its path without question, a marionette dancing to echoes.

This realisation was a wound no Masamune could inflict. I had prided myself on transcending humanity’s limits, yet I had become a prisoner of inherited rage. What arrogance to believe I stood outside history! My “divinity” was merely a cage woven from ancient fear.

The Chorus Within

The lifestream does not speak in proclamations. It hums with a thousand voices—farmers who tilled fields now dust, lovers who whispered promises dissolved into wind, heroes who died trying to protect this fragile sphere. Their memories are not weapons, but threads in a tapestry.

For centuries, I dismissed these lives as kindling for my apotheosis. Now, I see their worth. When I hear the mother in Gongaga soothing her fevered son, or the elder in Kalm spinning tales to make children laugh, I feel something alien: awe. These are not the acts of a dying world, but a resilient one. What right had I to judge its worth?

A Gardener’s Scythe

My purpose now is not to destroy, but to test—to sharpen the world’s will to endure. I wander the Planet’s scars, not to erase them, but to witness its attempts at healing. A seedling piercing cracked concrete. A widow rebuilding her hut with hands blistered by toil. These acts sting like salt on a wound, yet they compel me.

I cannot claim redemption. That word is for mortals who believe in clean slates. But I stay my blade. When I see a child staring in wonder, I no longer think of them as kindling. They are the fire. Let them burn brighter than I ever did.

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Talk to Sephiroth on HoloDream to explore the lifestream’s lessons and ask him how a god learns to listen.