Translation credits to Galvea@GameFAQs.
CHAPTER 6: NOEL KREISS AND PADRA NSU YEUL
It is 7 in the morning, and Aoede is navigating her way through a market that has already begun showing signs of activity…
She is somewhere in the subtropics, and all around her people are dressed in colourful ethnic costumes. From the market she enters a backroad, and at the end of the alley there’s a wooden two-storey house, a little plain but far from shabby. It is an open structure, suited to the humid climate, and the door might as well not have been there. Aoede calls out a greeting as she enters the house, which turns out to be a lot better kept than expected.
“So it’s you.”
A voice calls out from the second floor, and there, leaning on the railing of the open stairwell, stands a young man. The sunlight from the windows leaves his face in shadow, but his eyes gleam in the dark. Aoede thinks to herself that these eyes, clear yet inscrutable, are like those of a hunter coolly sizing up his prey. Like the eyes of a bloodhound – or a cat.
In a flash, the young man jumps from the stairwell and, without making a sound, lands on his feet before Aoede; all this reinforces Aoede’s impression of Noel Kreiss as a cat.
Noel: “I heard from Snow. So you want to know about “that other world”.”
Aoede: “Yes, if I may. I used to be a part of that world too.”
Noel: “So I heard. But I’ve never had the opportunity to talk about it. No one would believe a story like that.”
Without relaxing his stance, Noel asks Yeul, standing in a doorway behind Aoede, for her opinion. Yeul looks at Aoede for a long moment, and decides she can be trusted, because Aoede will believe them. Noel, with a sigh, says that if Yeul says so, it must be alright. Aoede hears the gentle turn in his voice, and thinks that, for Noel, Yeul’s opinion and judgment must come before everything else.
They sit down and begin to talk. Yeul sits stiffly, her back ram-rod straight, while Noel is the very picture of relaxation, but Aoede knows that she must not be deceived; underlying Noel’s relaxed posture is the assured knowledge that he can handle anything that might conceivably happen. It occurs to Aoede that Noel is not only like a cat, but also has the aura of the vigilant guard dog.
Noel relates his story, his life in AF700, the Farseers, Caius, and his time-travel adventures with Serah.
Noel: “Serah’s death, the destruction of the world, they weren’t the fault of Caius alone. I had a hand in it too.”
Aoede: “But it was a trap set by Caius, wasn’t it? You just didn’t know it then. Snow told me that it wasn’t your fault.”
Noel: “It’s one of those things you can’t shrug off as inevitable, and it isn’t something you allow yourself to forget either. I couldn’t stop thinking there might have been a different way, or how I might have done better, and prevented all of it… I had 500 years, more than enough time to second-guess myself and regret my actions.”
“…Eventually, I even came to understand how Caius must have felt when he tried to destroy the world for Yeul.”
Aoede is surprised at his frank confession, and Noel begins to talk of how he led his life in the Age of Chaos. Aoede explains she’s heard about the Conseil de Renaissance, and how it was the core of human society.
Noel: “It was thanks to Sazh and his pep talks – you know, “When things look ugly, it’s time for you young ‘uns to step up!”, things like that. I was grateful to have work to do, to fix my mistakes. I couldn’t think my way out of the darkness, and without something to do, I would have lost it.”
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FINAL FANTASY XIII: Reminiscence Tracer Of The Memories
General Fiction[FFXIII ORIGINAL NOVEL] Written by Daisuke Watanabe. Aoede is a journalist who wants to uncover the truth about the "Another Life" . Follow her journey where she gets to meet the heroes who she believes have saved the rest of the humanity.
