Aerith was silent as the party made its way out of Midgar and into the wider world.  She felt wistful.  Midgar was a corrupt and brutal place, to be sure, but it was the only home Aerith had ever known.  The sprawl of the slums and the uncanny metal sky evoked comfortable familiarity for her. And now, for the first time in her life, she'd be leaving all of that behind. But it wasn't just that.  Everything was different now.

"You seem a bit preoccupied," Tifa said.  She had slowed to match Aerith's pace.  "Is everything all right?"  Tifa had a way about her that put Aerith at ease and in a mood to talk.  Aerith saw her as something of a big sister.

"I know it's a silly thing to be focused on given...everything," Aerith said, gesturing vaguely behind her, "...but it's hard for me not to feel a bit homesick already.  It feels real now, you know?"

Tifa smiled and nodded.  "Believe it or not, I know what you mean.  Already, I miss Marlene, Seventh Heaven, the brokenhearted slum."  She glanced back at the city, already vanishing behind them.  "More than ever in my life, I feel like I'm venturing into the unknown."

"I'm a little surprised," Aerith said.  "You always seemed so...sure of yourself.  Composed."

Tifa shrugged.  "I had a routine.  I had the bar, Avalanche, the broader anti-Shinra movement.  I had a world that I knew my place in.  Now, I really don't know what's going to happen.  Everything feels so uncertain."

Aerith acquired a far-away expression.  "Things are very uncertain now," Aerith said, choosing her words carefully.

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"You...don't just mean us leaving the city, do you?" Tifa asked hesitantly.

Aerith shook her head.

"That thing we fought...it changed something, didn't it?"  Tifa asked, knowing but not understanding Aerith's unspoken answer.  "The world we saw in those visions was one possible future?  One possible world?"

Aerith looked down at her feet.  "We have fundamentally decoupled ourselves from the path ordained for us, Tifa."  She no longer spoke with the chipper cadence so characteristic of the young flower girl Tifa had originally met.  She sounded somehow very old, burdened with a lifetime of memories and knowledge too intricate and vast to ever adequately convey.  "A rupture has opened along the course that had been carefully established for this world eons ago."

"We did all of that?"  Tifa asked, astonished.

"No.  At least, not just us.  We lanced a wound that had grown ripe with necrosis and pain.  An infection has been roiling beneath the surface of this world for eons.  And now, a kind of wild and violent chaos has taken the place of the rigidity with which our world was otherwise destined to live, grow, and die.  The carefully curated garden has been replaced with the unpredictability of the wild."  She looked at Tifa with fear in her eyes.  "The planet's voice has become confused and dissonant."

Tifa placed a hand on Aerith's shoulder.  "But it isn't necessarily bad, is it?"

"You said it yourself," Aerith said, smiling grimly.  "Before, the world was small.  And we were, all of us, quite small relative to the grander scheme of things.  Now, our roles are considerably more complex.  We are the shapers of a new world to come.  We've slipped the snare of fate.  We're like Him now."

Tifa shook her head, knowing to whom Aerith was referring.  "We are nothing like him.  He's a murderer and a megalomaniac."

"We're the planet's answer to that.  I pray ceaselessly that we don't fall sway to the temptations of this terrible burden we must now bear."