Written by Kat Aclysm

Why such an obscure title? It's Latin for 'burning inside with violent anger', just appropriate for the nature of the fic you're just about to read.

NOTE: 451°Farenheit is the temperature at which book-paper spontaneously catches fire and burns. Just another useless little fact you may not have known.

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Ever since he was very young, it was always a pleasure for him to burn things. Whether it was throwing wood on a campfire, tossing aerosol cans into the blazes and laughing in delight as they exploded, or casting another's clothes to the inferno as a practical joke, Sephiroth loved to burn things, just like any child. So, like any child in a sense, expressing one's anger with fire was only a natural thing for him to do.

It was a special pleasure for him to see things char, blacken and change. Almost a primal instinct in one sense, to take and set fire to something just to watch the flames magically bend and distort the object to it's ruling and final will. To watch the blazes emaciate and destroy almost filled him with a sense of power, for this ancient beast known through all ages of time as 'fire' is thine to command and no one man can stand in it's path once it has been awakened.

Nibelheim. Quiet little mountain town, out of the way from nearly everything, and abundant in Mako energy. Sephiroth scowled deeply as he stepped into the edges of the town, burning inside with violent anger. He just HAD to take his rage out on something..... and this place seemed like the perfect target.

Anyway, in Sephiroth's eyes, these people deserved to die. They must have known about the experiments conducted here, the Jenova Project, and his own birth. Why, if they had been a little more voluble with their protesting, maybe the man's childhood wouldn't have been so.....

....non existent.

Maybe, if things had turned out the way they should have, that is, Shinra getting into major trouble for conducting experiments on humans, Sephiroth would be just a normal kid. Just a humble college student studying to earn a worthwhile degree, with friends, a social life, and maybe a girlfriend.....

The grey haired warrior shook his head angrily, and banished those thoughts from his head forever. He was a SOLDIER, a grown man able to stand on his own two feet, not a daydreamer. Dreaming of halcyon days was a frivolous purpose, and got him nowhere in life.

As he thought about his days as an experiment, it all made sense to him now. Having no mother and no father would have made him the perfect lab rat, being cooped up in a room with a glass wall all day, being fed strange liquids, being forced to give samples of just about every bodily fluid he could think of, being hooked up to weird machines, weight, height, endurance, concentration and attention span measurements, and having to take part in test after test for as far back as he could remember.

The thought of his childhood days filled the man with so much hatred, just the very thought of all the new information he had learned from the Shinra Building made the man break beyond all bounds of his sanity that he lifted his head to the sky and cried out in rage.

"This town must die!!!" Sephiroth declared to the world above him, fists raised to the sky. "For every memory and feeling this place gives me, this town must die!!!"

With the small fire Materia in his grasp, with this small object of innocent pure beauty, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands summoned the works like some amazing conductor playing all the cataclysmic symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal remains of the former quiet mountain town in which was his birthplace.

Within seconds, the town was ablaze. Summoned fire magic did it's work with more haste than just a simple candle flame sparked from a match head.

Sephiroth grinned the fierce grin of all blacken-souled men singed and driven back by flame.

But what had driven such a young man to hurt and destruction? What caused the normally level-headed First Class SOLDIER to lose his sanity?

One would have to look back to a few days ago, when this all began.

Just mere days ago, he had discovered his origins, how he was created, and how he was brought into life. His purpose? Just the end product of some nobody's experiment, just a laboratory specimen, bred and built up to grow into a weapon of war. He was brought into this world with no purpose other than to be Shinra's slave. But now he would create his own world to rule by destroying theirs.

As the 20 year old SOLDIER elite watched the houses of the small town twist and contort to the inferno's will, he allowed a small chuckle escape his throat. He wanted almost, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a twig while he watched the shrivelling and dying of the shrubbery on the lawn near what used to be someone's house, while the porch went up in firefly embers and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

He hated.

He hated.

He hated everything. Everyone, everything, and every object in existence created by man. He wanted to destroy everything. For now, life had no more meaning to him. It was just a series of random events that distracted the soul from finding out the true meaning of existing.

Sephiroth believed to himself that he had a greater destiny than just the end result of someone's work. There just HAD to be more to him than what he was, just a man.

Masamune in left hand, Sephiroth took one last look at the twisted agony on the faces of the townsfolk, and smiled. He proceeded slowly to the town's exit. He swore, as he walked through the wall of fireflies in front of him, that some day, he would find out his true destiny.

Even if it meant he had to sell his own soul to find it.

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~Fin~

Writer's Ramblings:

I thought up this fic when I was lying back in bed, unable to sleep, trying to rack my brains about what to do with the next chapter of my epic fic, and how to end it. For some reason, I thought of that FMV where Sephiroth walks off through the burning embers of Nibelheim, off towards an unknown future. I'd always wanted to write about his thoughts during that period of his life, during that sudden change from leadership to destruction.

So, like I do with all of my thoughts, I turned on the 386 that lives in my room, popped up a notepad and finally typed this up. By the time I was feeling tired and finally ready to fall asleep, this entire fic already existed.

- Kat