Eh heh..well I'm well aware that I put some pretty damned weird stuff in here...and didn't always explain it overly well. So- submit your questions here and I'll do my best to answer them! I'm answering them in the order they came so they will be vaugely disjointed. Gomen!

Please note- if you've skipped ahead to this appendix- there are spoilers galore. So if you don't want to know what's going on before you see it all play out, please skip back now.

1) Why was Palom not affected when wandering through that "shadow graveyard" of worlds?

- No black wizard/mage would have been fazed by that place. As users of Black (Dark) magics, the actual powers of the Champion and the "Moon" itself won't hurt them. They're completely aligned.

2) Why didn't Palom die when impaled on the sword then?

-The sword was a conjured one. Basically a spell given form. It falls under the same rule as the the shadow-graveyard's spells.

3) So why did Palom pass out then?

-Even if something normally isn't harmful to you, if you introduce it in a great- or direct enough- manner, it can still shock your system. The end result was a comatic state.

4) Wait a minute- one of Golbez's spells DID hurt Palom.

-Yes, it did. That was the "Bane" spell, a Black Magic spell from Final Fantasy I. Black Magic and the powers of the champion ARE two different things. We already know Palom's not immune to simple black magic.

5) Just what the hell was going on in chaps 16 to 18??

-Golbez was using a spell to subdue Cecil and Porom's minds so he could control their bodies. Chaps 16 and 17 were the 'dreams' Porom and Cecil were trapped in. 18 was what was actually happening.

6) Who was the robed figure in both Cecil's and Golbez's dream?

-That was the "actual" alternate world Golbez, keeping an eye on the shadows he was using to reach into the final version of their world. To keep the balance, he'd divided his own essence between dark and light and knew he'd better keep an eye on them- especially the dark one.

7) Why couldn't anyone tell that Palom was still alive?

-Think of trying to use a nightvision scope by day. You'll be blinded. Trying to detect Palom's life through the overflow of Dark magic left by the sword was much the same and thus, quite impossible. If Golbez hadn't remembered that spells of that sort had failed against Palom up until that point, he would have thought him dead too.

8) Why did Palom wake up all of a sudden?

-Lets see YOU sleep through suddenly getting doused into a very cold ocean. The shock to his system plus survival instinct causing his body to realize a few things- primarily that if he stayed in that state, he was dead- forced him to awake. Sometimes the only way to get a person out of one kind of shock is to introduce them to another.

9) Why did Golbez go crazy anyway? The other one didn't!

-No, he didn't, because HE never went to the Dark Moon. When he arrived, it was too late to save his reality- so he used what remaining time there was to try to warn the remaining one. The dreams always took place in Baron, cuz that's where he was. You could say he was the real hero of the story, for all he got little screen time.

10) So there's HOW many Golbezes?

-Three, total. #1 - Our favorite egotist and the one who's PoV this story follows. #2 - The Dream-Golbez. He divided his nature among the dreams,but all those "three" different Golbezes were, were facets of him. #3 - Appears for just one chapter- he's sort of a living incarnation of all the past Golbezes who DID go to the Dark Moon. He and #1 become on in the same for a few chaps. When the moon fades, he finally "dies", restoring #1 back to his proper conscious state.

I'm quite aware some aspects of this story were hard to follow, and Neo17 gave a suggestion I break it down for easier following on the more blurry points. For this..I think I will do it as a sort of timeline.

Pre-story: Cecil begins having dreams of the Dark Moon. These dreams are the result of a Golbez from another reality attempting to warn the final reality of the danger coming their way. The Golbez of that reality also begins to desire strongly to return "home"- partly from his own wishes, partially because- with his distance from the center of the trouble always increasing- that was the only way the "other" Golbez could contact him.

Chaps 1-4: These are all fairly straight forward up until the dream-business. With Golbez now on the Blue Planet- the other Golbez can contact him now. However, with the facets divided to contact the two brothers without further disturbing the balance- Cecil's dragging HIS brother into the dream in which the Dark golbez existed upset things somewhat. Also, Cecil's ill health was a direct result of the dark-Golbez's attempting to kill him nearly every dream. The cloaked figure- an avatar of the mind's true consciousness- was all that was keeping him from dying in those dreams and thus in reality.

Chaps 5-10: Dream sequence and intial explination time as Dream-golbez makes a final last attempt to get through our heroes' thick heads and drive into them what needs to be done. As some guessed- Klu Ya was also in on this, but as an observer. Given the priveledge most of the dead seem to have of 20/20 hindsight, he figured it his job to take up the slack when the Dark Moon finally devoured that reality.

Chap 11: Self explanitory.It was only right to show Cecil's view on the things that had come to pass thus far.

Chaps 12-15: Still more dream sequence (my, these are lazy people! Always sleeping! *snicker*)- this one being Klu Ya making his own last bid to try to get his sons to understand, though he only has enough strength to contact one of them. A history lesson is presented here, as well as the view that in the long run- perhaps it wasn't really Chaos or the Fiends that were the actual villians to start with. It also naturally set the stage for the rise of the Dark Moon into that reality once Golbez had formed a misguided plan of attack.

Chaps 16-22: Gah. These are the hard ones to explain. ^^;; I'm pretty sure this is the point at which I began to lose people eh? When Golbez attempts to bring himself, Cecil, and the twins to the Dark Moon, he basically falls into the trap that's been set up for his other incarnations in the past. Seperated from his companions and mind wiped of past memories,this Golbez becomes a blank slate for the afore mentioned third Golbez (see FAQ above) to use as his host to attempt to finish what was begun. He then uses the power of the Dark moon- which Porom and Cecil, as users of light magic are vulnerable towards- to break down the mental defenses of the white mage and paladin, while Palom remains safe due to his own nature As a black wizard. Once the Road had sufficently sapped their will, they were allowed to reach the Temple- where they had no mental strength left to combat the stronger traps waiting there. Golbez struck each through their weakest points:

Cecil - his weakest point has always been his greatest strength as well. Any time an action in his life has truly been successful and meaningful at the same time has been with the support of others.When forced into such a situation alone, against a completely confident foe- his will began to waver. From that point on, it was childsplay for Golbez to overpower him and "steal" the idea of the crystal sword from him to later create his own version of it when he had to face that sword.

Porom - she was a victim of her own sense of compassion. By pitting her against two priorities - saving the people of the blue planet and saving existance itself- all he had to do is wait for her to sink her own ship trying to chose between the two, even as she tried to understand WHY she had to. A ship can't sail in three directions- so in the end, she defeated herself after he set the stage. He just had to watch and wait.

Palom - being what he was, his weak points were actually more protected by the moon, not exposed and emphasized like those of his sister and friend. Golbez chose to try to simply eliminate him physically, using his own friends to do it- but Palom got the chance to physically disrupt the spellstructure. Anyone familiar even vaugley with magic circles or diagrams knows that so much as an object passing OVER them can break them-landing directly in them can disrupt their spell permanently.

The Battle - this was the final trap. By entering confrontation with Golbez, Cecil was doing precisely as he shouldn't have. It was a situation very similar to when he became a Paladin, but using far more grandiose trappings than a mirror-image. When Golbez drew the moon's power to himself- which in turn was tied to the Blue Planet- the trap had been completely sprung. Golbez only fought long enough to ensure both world and balance had taken so much damage that the death of either champion would kill it one way or the other.The world was so heavily damaged by the Moon's rise and their battle that it couldn't survive a drastic upset in the balance. Only Golbez's well-thought action of keeping their party balanced between Dark and Light (hence his refusal to bring Rosa if Rydia could not be found) kept it from working as he had planned.

Chaps 23-26: Basically a tying up of final loose ends and forshadowing for the sequel. Cecil and Golbez are still nothing like friends, everyone thinks Golbez was showing his true colors on the Moon, and Palom had to be woken up from his catatonic state to really save Golbez's bacon.The magic used in this one is old school symbology magic rather than anything to do with final fantasy's original spellsystem-something I'm fairly sure the Lunarians DO know about, old as they are. And the restoration of Golbez to himself came in the form of the "composite" third Golbez dying with the moon. Do expect some side effects from this to turn up in Dark Guardian.