Card Captor Sakura Fan Fiction ❯ Invoking ❯ Image 05: History ( Chapter 5 )

Disclaimer:

I don't own card captor sakura.

Invoking

by: carpetfibers

Image 05: History

_________________

Enter the storyteller,

with weaving words

hidden pictures

and Truths oft taken as lies.

Hail him.

Watch him.

And mock the truths.

It's how we sleep.

________________

Phase One: Ten Annums Ago

Spring

The Night Before

The thin coverlet over his father's face lay with a stillness that he longed to violate. No motion stirred the lightly embroidered sheet- neither the wind of breath or the rise of a chest. Hayako stared at the red and gold and black threads with unseeing eyes. His sister had already passed upon the family title on his shoulders. The elders greeted him with the respect any Marrey leader was due. The ladies of the clan lowered their eyes, and the lords averted their proud chins in signs of homage.

The sheet clung to the dead body beneath it like a whip to a bloodied back.

It wasn't a question of fairness; it wasn't even a question of sadness. The violence that filled his breast came with the knowledge that all the acts and motions of loyalty had yet to be earned. He had done nothing except be born, and in his sense of right and wrong, that was the worst of qualifications. But his father had decreed it with his last words.

So at fifteen with still hairless cheeks and ungangly hands he was his clan's leader. He, the third child and only surviving son, was the Marrey prince. He, with the eyes colored by the words of fables and legends, was the land's power. Hayako gripped the edge of his tunic with a calloused palm and stepped out from the room of mourning. He'd give the order to burn his father's body once the ceremony was finished.

It was in his own chambers that he allowed his shoulders to slump forward with the weight of his new position. The back of his mind jarred with the tingle of energy that came whenever his sister was near. Kaho, who looked more like the woman in the portrait of the great hall with each annum, had not fought the naming of him as the new leader. She had been a silent presence during the past two days; silent but seen, always seen.

Even now, as she stood near the edge of his bed, half of her beautiful face hidden by the shifting shadows of the night, he could see each infinitesimal contour of her jaw and the slightly parted gesture of her lips. She had waited to speak, but now the waiting came to an end.

"Hayako, I dreamt again," she said as if there had already been ages of words passed between them.

He shifted and pressed his forehead to the cool surface of his bed's pillows. "And?"

"You must refuse the title in tomorrow's ceremony. You must refuse it." Her thick braid swung forward with the suddenness of her words. Her brother kept his eyes closed and drew on the solidity of the cloth beneath his cheek.

"I won't refuse it."

He heard her sharp intake of breath and the soft step of her feet as she crossed to his side. Her silk smooth hands pressed to his arms and her words hurried after.

"Brother, believe me! I can't see it all, but if you become the Marrey leader, disaster will come- not just for our clan but for all of Tesar!"

Hayako's young mind registered the urgency of the speech and passion of the blood that flowed beneath his sister's flawless skin. That same mind was acutely aware of each tiny hair upon his arm that she touched and the feel of her breath pushing away his dark bangs.

"I will accept the title, Kaho."

"You can't Hay-" she began but he cut her off with four soft words.

"I have dreams, too."

He stood abruptly, wrenching his arm free from her contact. He stepped with the weight of his position and title- he stepped with the tragedy of a boy thrust into manhood. He lowered his green eyes to his sister's mahogany and smiled with a bitterness akin to happiness.

"Kaho, I have dreams, too. I see what the future brings, but unlike you, I believe it can be changed. In the morning, I will accept the elders' rites and take up the Marrey sword as its new owner. And in the evening, after Father has been sent into the Fidean winds, I will open the front gates and bring in the girl who will decide the future for all us. No words or warnings of yours will change this. And if you fight me-" the softness in the clouded eyes changed to steel, "If you fight me, Kaho, I'll have no choice but to send you away."

Kaho felt a limpness overtake her limbs. The blood beneath her skin seemed to run too slowly and her heart seemed to beat without pattern. This emotion- this sensation!- she knew what it was with entirety. Fear.

She stood and walked to her brother's door, her head bowed in consternation. "As you deem it, Lord Marrey."

The new lord of the Glass ny Marrey castle refused his shoulders to fall or his eyes to water. There was a new day to rise in a few uairs' time.

Phase One: Ten Annums Ago

Spring

The Feast

The secondary lord had not a face for description other than that his smile was wide and true. He raised his goblet high into the air, his statured arm poised in salute. The object of his hailing rested on a levered platform and sat covered in the Marrey robes. Hayako bowed his head in silent acceptance of the tribute. His green eyes moved across the full hall, scanning over familiar faces, while his ears drank in the words of his people. There was one face that he refused to rest upon. His sister sat at the other side of the hall, in the position of Lady of the Anmoch. As he too carried the family colors over his shoulders, she wore the family jewels across her naked neck. His grip upon the slender disk in his hand tightened as the time drew closer to what his dreams foresaw.

"A demon! My lord, a demon !"

The cry acted as a vacuum and murdered all other sound in the hall. Again the stricken man cried out, his body stumbling through the front hall doors.

"My lord!"

Hayako stood up, and with a shutter of his eyes the disk extended to its proper form. The sword in his hands glowed with the metal of an older age, the green and blue rainbows shimmering a different light across the room and across the clan. He swept the sword in a smooth arch and followed the motion with words.

"Take me to her," he ordered.

The man whose cries and trembling had halted with the sudden vision of the fabled Marrey weapon shuddered back to life with the directive.

"My lord, but she's a demon!" he screamed.

"Take me to her," the fifteen year old Marrey leader demanded, the authority of his sword cradling each word. The poor guard shook with a terror but finally obeyed. As a whole, the hall gathered to follow their new leader past the tables of feast and drink and into the dry grounds of the outer yard.

In the cracked moonlight, centered before the crags of a Joshua tree, lay the demon of which the guard had cried. Her small body was curled into a ball, and translated in the paleness of her skin was a deep crusting of blood. Hayako's eyes drank in the form: the small child's torn clothing, the caked clumps of sand dusted hair, and of hidden eyes that he knew would match his own. When the eyes had their full, the hands cried for a chance of their own.

He knelt beside the child, the blue green blade of the Marrey grasped in his hand. His black hair dipped across his tanned cheeks and with the movement of his fingers toward the child's face, her eyes opened. A jolt of knowing coursed through his mind and in that moment, with tears tasting at his lips and jaw, he grabbed the unnamed girl to his chest. The sword flashed with the sudden contact of flesh to flesh between them and in that sand drop the Marrey son gained a new color to his face. A brilliant white now framed his brow, a pure white that would forever mark him of this instant. And then followed his own desperate cry against the end the dreams had shown. His words echoed across the dry grounds and only his sister understood the full meaning of them.

"She's mine!"

End Phase One

____________________

Philologious

Experiment with this:

A hand that's not a hand,

A mouth that's not a mouth,

And lips that are not lips.

Try tasting-

Try touching.

____________________

Phase Two: Eight Annums Ago

Summer

Cree Feayr and Fillui

It crackled like bare lightning in the desert. Jagged and broken, the sound sliced through the salient boulders, trailed into the clay ridden sod, and up through the bare feet of the huddled members of the Fillui. There were no other sounds but for the rush of staggered breaths and shifting of toes in the dustless dirt. From beyond the walls protecting and blinding the gathered women and children, came the familiar howls of their Clan's namesake: the wolves of the caverns. Normally a soothing tone, the cries that filled this night were ones of pain and terror as the age old beasts were being slaughtered by silent foes.

When the sun had crossed the center of the sky, the Cree Feayr had arrived.

And now the men of the clan fought with tooth and nail along side their animal brothers for survival of their family. Their leader had spoken just moments before with few words that said much and said it all.

"Stand true and guard the most important. We are the Fillui."

His son glared with a trembling of helplessness and frustration. His arms were bound behind him and his feet snarled into a brace. He was refused a chance to fight. He was told that his time had yet to come and that in all things he was to be the importance that must be protected. He was the clan's only hope and future. His father said these things with a quiet voice and wet eyes.

And Syaoran fought back the wetness in his own matching gaze, for he knew as his father knew: on this night, the dead would pile across the rocks of the surface and the current leader of the Fillui and father of the Li would be among them.

Another of the inhuman cries echoed in dimly. The cry rose within his ears and with a frenzy he fought at the bindings. Just one more fighter might mean the difference! The silent whimpering around him roused a sense of impotence. Damn it but he was a Li! Forced to sit as such and be among those considered weak- it was an effrontery to his name. The violence in which his wrists fought and pulled matched the film of blood and sweat drenching his hands and running through his fingers. There came two more cries and with a cry of his own the bindings broke.

A crimson stained hand wiped back at his overgrown hair and dove through the huddled mass. Arms and hands groped for a grip to do their duty, to guard the most important, but their object was listening to his own directive. He must save his father; he must save his family. The crowd parted at the edge seeing his purpose and with a speed only acquired in panic and fear he ran through the maze of caves and tunnels, each step rising with the slope of the land toward the surface.

The light of the summer twilight crossed his damp face just as his feet touched a ground slick with an unnameable liquid. His unclouded eyes widened in horror and, for the first time in his young life, fear. The Cree Feayr walked in ghostly resemblance to his Clan's brothers. The sallow mouths dripped with darkened blood, the yellow of their fangs tangled in gristled flesh. His mouth opened in suit of his eyes, and the tallowed amber flickered with the crimson and black color scheme of the cave's morning.

From the dulled senses of this portrait, Syaoran heard the shout of his father. His hand found reason before his mind registered the motion. He wrestled the training sword from his back and called upon the blessings of the gods of fire to light a path toward his father. Flame gathered and shot out creating a second red to the colors. Strangled cries from the firryn traveled in wake of the heat, the wire and rotted flesh of the Cree Feayr scorched into ash and curdled putrescence. The sword slid and dove in shadow and light, his gifted and skillful movements striking into the fiends that snarled and snapped in grotesque imitation of the Fillui wolves. It felt like seconds and might have been aeons, but he finally reached his father's side.

There came not remonstration or anger, but gratitude. His father's wearied hand fell onto his shoulder and with it the weight of the evening's fight and desperation.

"I forgot that you were not just a Fillui, Syaoran." His father's words sounded like broken rock in the too still air. Where wind should have howled and dust should have whipped, there was only peace and calm. He tried to still his father's words, not used to the sudden show of weakness in their cadence. But the Li Clan's leader was a man who few could silence.

"I forgot that you were also my son." His hand cleft to the Fillui sword, the talisman from which it normally rested now transformed into a gilded handle. In the fading light, Syaoran's eyes were widened yet again by a sight unseen. A smile- not the tight lipped ones of good manner or coarse humor, but of a thing altogether different- spread across the dried lips and parted with a recklessness of one who had finally found the end of his line of fate.

"Fight with me, Syaoran. Fight with your father and give this man the greatest honor of his life."

With but ten annums marked on his mother's mirror, Syaoran nodded and stepped into the last moments of the day.

When the jaded moon passed its second haunt, the last of the eternally dying firryn tore through the edge of the Fillui's swords. With his chest heaving from the first battle of his youth, the new leader of the Li Clan accepted the family's sword. The handle rested in his palm, still warm from his dead father's grip. When his steps returned to the heat of the caves, his name was no longer spoken to his face, for he was no longer a child to be mothered and tendered. He was the Airidh.

The Airidh.

End Phase Two

_________________

Crescent of the sky,

Broken,

Misused,

And sodden by tears of many a face.

Messenger of the sky,

Each soul is like you.

Broken,

Misused,

And drowned by tears of a single face.

I love you still.

_________________

Phase Three: Six Annums Ago

Ruadh River, the Hastel

Summer

The throbbing in her mind tore with a frequency only matched by that of a beating heart. It struck and stabbed, cut and seared, and try as she did, her eyes would not close and give her rest. The men who had taken her watched with shallow leers as the one they called leader checked the flow of her blood. His chapped and clammy hand pressed against her forehead repeatedly and with that slight touch the pain increased enough to force screams from her mouth. A few of them laughed at her cries, but it was not them who frightened her. It was the ones who licked their lips and tugged on their belt buckles- they were the ones that caused the part of her mind not torn by the pain to quake in terror.

They called her a special one.

They had lured her with their caravan of cloths and fine needles. And they called her a special one. Their coarse hands had bound her in a cage beneath the silks and muslin and carried her far from her family's lands in the northern Braile Valley. She recognized the first of the rivers with its dank color and harsh odor that neither wrinkled the nose nor endeared it. The Dubh River, the mightiest of the three river city of Abhainn. But its familiar waters were left, and a second river chosen.

They chortled and stuck dirty fingers in her hair when they called this river by its many names. The 'Red Whore,' the 'Bloodied Harlot,' the 'Virgin's Rape,' and then finally by the one given it at the turn of time and creation: Ruadh. She glimpsed the clear waters painted a bright shade of crimson. Her father once told her of this river, of how legend said it became red from the blood of many during the earlier times. That a great war had stained its waters forever into scarlet and that now the great river tided not by the moon but by the spirits of the ones trapped beneath it.

It was when her violet eyes fell on the fabled Ruadh that the meaning of their words grabbed her. Special one special one special one special one- and she understood. Because faces opened in screams that no longer sounded and the hands clutched on weapons no longer potent glared from beneath the Ruadh. She could see them as real as the coarse boards under her thighs. She had the ability.

It was then that she began to truly fear what it was these men wanted from her.

"Tomoyo, it won't hurt if you don't fight it. Think of your mother, sweetie. You don't want anything bad to happen to her, do you? So let go of the tears and rest. Simply rest."

Their leader's smooth voice spoke like the eye of a great cyclone, in perfect peace and calm. She might have listened and obeyed had not he mentioned her mother. And so she fought their entrance into her mind. She'd block their prying hands and be brave, because that was truly what her mother would want.

"Such a beautiful child. Surely, Tomoyo, you wouldn't want anything to happen to you?" His mouth lowered to her ears, while his fingers continued to probe into her mind. The sickly sweet breath blew into her cheek with his words. "I can't protect you from all of them. Men are barbarians, my sweet Tomoyo. They don't think of age or propriety, and you are so very beautiful. You're a special one."

She shuddered, and with the part of the power that was awakening with each stroke of his hand in her mind, she forced him from her. The sound of his scream echoed dully from behind the sheen of fear and adrenaline coursing through her. She was suddenly aware of each part of her body, of the way her foot curved into an arch when she pressed the ball into the chair's stand; of the way her knees touched only briefly before shooting up into her thighs and past her stomach into her throat. It all gained colors such as she had never seen. The tears fell even as the men took her from the chair and into the metallic room.

In the middle, the table waited.

He spoke again, even as he strapped her arms to the cold surface and held her head still. "That was foolish, what you did. Tomoyo, you silly spoiled thing, we'll forget you made that mistake. Rest, lie still, be calm. If something happened to your mother... or even worse, to you! My poor sweet Tomoyo, you've never felt a man's touch, have you? You don't want it to be now. No, no, certainly not..."

He continued and she prayed. A very foreign thing, but she prayed. She had no gods or idols to beg a savior from. All she had was a dim memory flowing from the back of her thoughts: the moon when it stood whole and a great power. Men created it, and she prayed to it. Surely, such greatness would save her. Surely, surely, it would.

The sharpest, yet smallest of pricks slid across her forehead. It was only as her cheeks became wet with the slick of her blood that she returned to the present. Her eyes focused on the lips of her captor. His bottom lips dripped with dried blood, and in horror she realized that there was the stench of death on him. Her pupils grew until the whites of her eyes vanished- the Cree Feayr!

The shouts of others tore the undead fiend from the table side and from her eyes. The edge of her blood tangled into her mouth and with the faintly metallic taste she pulled free from her bindings. Only the thought of survival remained in her horror filled mind. The room lay empty but for the pristine table and a red stained knife. She crawled beneath the table and waited. Disjointed images of the Ruadh and the fiend who had spoken of her mother and of a man's touch raced through the dying ability of her mind. In between the different reds, she saw a third figure- a boy- no, a man racing with speed and decision through the barge. His fists and dagger struck down the creatures that had taken her from her father's stables and her mother's long gowns.

She saw as he stabbed into the leader of the creatures and began his climb to the room where she sat huddled. And as the last of her ability died, true vision showed him at her doorway, his hands stained with the black blood of her captors.

And then he said her name.

"Tomoyo!"

End Phase Three

____________________

The sleeping earth awaits my steps,

Like an infant learns the taste of meat-

The teeth of nature team for blood

And strength.

I fancy myself like this mouth of thirst and hunger.

I crave the entrance of the bitter,

Of the sweet,

Of the salty,

And of the dark part of man's soul.

Call me gluttonous.

___________________

Phase Four: Three Annums Ago

Fall

The Garden

The tree's once leaf laden branches hung limp and bare. Winter was still a full lunacycle from birthing, yet the fall was brutal in its painting. She crossed her palm over the brittle husks of bark that lay in strips across the trunk. A long one fell into her hand, and the soft brown left behind from the wound matched the bangs swept across her brow by the morning winds. Sakura pushed back at the unruly strands and fought down the sigh that rose with her lazy gestures.

Restlessness had taken her. It filled each of her waking moments, infected each attempt at speech, and burrowed into each tangled thought. The restlessness was spreading throughout her, and of late, the dulled coolness of it had changed into a scolding heat. Her only times of respite from the flutter of nervous energy in her blood came with her wanderings across the moors. While the castle of the Glass ny Marrey crouched deep in the Fidean Heights, the thick grasses of Madir were but an uair's walk.

At night, when all slept and dreamt of stories and fantasies, she crossed from the stoned walls and into the wilds of the moors. She had no fear of getting lost in the fog or of the beasts that haunted the grasses. There was only the steppe, the sky, and the moon. The heat jumped under her skin. Indeed, there was the moon. The mere thought of it excited her, drove her, tantalized her. It was almost wanton in the sensation and when the wind struck her bare skin and the mists sunk between her lips-

"So this is where you were hiding." Sakura tightened at the sudden intrusion on her reverie, but she shrugged from the reaction and let her lips widen into a smile.

"Hayako," she greeted.

The white haired Marrey leader smiled in return and walked up to the young woman's side. He let his eyes wander over the thin green dress that pressed against her body. Her slim curves molded into the wind's fingers and not for the first time he thought of the day when it would be his hands pressing against that soft skin. She stood unaware of her posture, unaware of her affect entirely, and this warmed him even more.

"You shouldn't disappear so often, Sakura. It makes it hard for me to find you," he chided teasingly.

She laughed lightly, the sound joining the wind as it whipped past his ears. "Ah, but that's the point of the game! I run and hide, and you are to find me. But of course, you've forgotten the most important part of the game, already."

Hayako unbuttoned his formal jacket and undid the heavy gold belt that was required for his addresses to the Marrey council. Now more at ease, he quickly picked up the end of her banter. "And just what would this 'most important part' be?"

She laughed again and whirled around, putting distance between them as she replied, "To tag me, naturally!"

His laughter matched her own as he gave chase. She dipped into between the bare trees, her shoes losing themselves along the way. He saw her as a blurred image of green, as swift as the fauns of legend. His breath was racing when he finally pulled within an arm's length of her. He smiled widely as he saw her eyes turn in alarm at his nearness. She increased her pace and she might have made it into the safety of the castle's inner rooms if not for the sudden appearance of a conveniently placed raised root. With a surprised cry, she tumbled forward into the soft, yet cold grasses of the garden. He fell beside her, and with the smile still steady on his pale cheeks, he patted her forehead.

"Tag."

Sakura closed her eyes in mock surrender and slowed her breathing. The restlessness had vanished for the time being. She dug her fingers into the moist soil, and, ignoring the frigid blades tickling against her bare arms, she decided to simply lay on the ground as was a little longer.

Hayako didn't mind. Safe from the eyes that matched his own, he let the smile fade from his lips. She was fifteen now- old enough to be married by Marrey customs. Kaho said repeatedly that it was too early yet- but- he longed for her eyes to open again. They gave him peace when little else would. They stilled his worries and silenced his fears. Her jade intoned eyes reminded him of the vision he had for the future. While his sister saw only ruin and destruction, he saw, with this girl's help, the glory of his clan rising again. A new age would be born and no longer would the people of Tesar spend their lives on the scraps of the past's supper.

He watched as the thin skin over her eyes fluttered, and he decided.

With the first soft press of his lips against her throat, Sakura's eyes flew open. She tried to speak but words left her. She tried to pull from his grasp but motion deserted her. He traced the contour of her pale throat to the line of her jaw with his lips. One of his hands grasped her waist, holding her immobile and pulling her to his chest. The other folded through her loose hair. It was with his sudden weight against her tight chest that speech returned.

"Hayako!" she cried, the eyes that entranced him wide with confusion.

He drew back only far enough to hold her gaze. "I want you to be my partner in life, Sakura."

"Your partner?"

"I want you to be my wife."

Again she could only echo. "Wife?"

He nodded and lifted one of her limp hands to his chest, pressing it against his heart. "I've dreamt of it. You're to be my other self in all things- the land, the clan, the future."

She shook her head, the confusion fading to embarrassment at such ardor. "But, Hayako, I'm hardly the one to be your equal- I'm an orphan with unknown lineage and I have no magic! I have no ability at-"

His grip tightened on her waist and cut off her words. "It has not awoken, but when it does, Sakura- yours shall be the greatest the land has seen. With you at my side, the Clan's future will be preserved and the land restored. I have seen it, and I tell you on my honor as a son of Marrey, you will be like the moon restored."

At his words, the half tamed heat in her blood stirred and her vision drowned into pure scarlet. In the waking world, she fell limp in Hayako's hands. On the other side, on the watery world that she now walked, the Madir moors exchanged their grasses for wheel cloven earth and strewn bodies. A full moon danced overhead and lines of dazzling light scattered through the torn soil, searing with a flameless fire. She struggled to close her eyes to the vision but there came only more.

It was her first.

It was not her last.

And, as it was to be for the next three annums of her life, she woke with an image pressed into her vision, coated in the same scarlet that matched the coming of her visions. A forgotten crest of a family long exiled to the north, to caverns deep beneath the sunlit warmth of the surface. There would come one from this lost family of old, from this family raised beneath the touch of the sun who would be like herself.

And, as it was to be for the next three annums of her life, the first words from her lips with the fading of such visions was his name.

"Syaoran!"

Phase Four: One Annum Ago

Winter

The Moors

He came again this night. When sleep had started its pull into her thoughts, he crept into her bed and began his ritual. Even as she shook her head no, he'd undo the buttons on her gown and run his fingers across her bare thighs. When she opened her mouth to say the no, he placed his lips against hers and took what she had not given. He always stopped before consummating, but it made no difference in her mind. And each night, as he left her bare with unshed tears across her cheeks, he'd ask.

"Will you be mine?"

And each night, as he stood in the doorway with his shirt tail loose, she would say no. Sakura was certain the madness would take her entirely if he did not leave her be. She understood what it was he wanted, that it was more than a physical desire, but she was still a girl. And the dreams that came after he left each night, they showed another man for her future. The young, naive parts of her heart felt the urge to blush and stammer at such romanticism. The older, more aware part of her mind, brought to life by her growing ability, forced such urges down with the heady glimpses of the present and their meanings.

So, she slipped from the walls this night, after he left. She wanted not to dream, not to see. She wanted only to feel the thick Madir grasses beneath her feet and the frigid air of a winter sky.

Sakura breathed deeply of this air, the rush of it filling her mouth and nostrils with the taste and tang of heather. The cloudless sky revealed fathoms and leagues of stars, but no moon. Her blood flowed with regular rhythms, and she silently thanked the night for this evening of respite. It was as her feet fell onto the damp leaves of the harfir brush that she sensed his arrival.

She turned to face him without fear, for while her hands lay empty, she could run like the wind if needed. But with the first glance of his face, she knew with the part of her mind that ruled her ability that he was friend and not foe.

The same wind that chased down from the Marrey gardens and swept across her cheeks, fluttered to his brow and brushed back the ocean colored hair. Beneath the shock of color peered two twilight tinted eyes. His cloak hid whatever else he carried, but a trick of light from the stars that seemed to bend at her will centered on the skin above his wrist.

Her green eyes widened until they filled her face and she stepped forward without being aware of it.

"Who are you?" she whispered.

He smiled slowly with lips that opened to flash white teeth and a red tongue. The laughter flowed forth with relief and thankfulness dowsed into it. "I'm here to serve you, Lady."

"Who are you?" she repeated, this time with her full voice.

His eyes softened and he took her hand. "You must be so lonely, my Lady, lonely and confused."

She wanted to step back, to retrieve her hand, but the moment held a force to it that prevented all such pulling away. She could but stare with her eyes and breath in the air that froze and rebirthed.

He placed her palm against the tattoo above his wrist and let her feel the indent of the sun and pentagram across her skin. He knew that soon she would understand it all.

"My Lady, in less than an annum's time, you will awaken. I have come to serve you, to protect you, to guide you as that time draws near. I will not leave your side, even if you ask it."

He paused and released her hand, turning his eyes from her face for his next sentence. "I'm guided by the same powers that send your visions, so trust me as you must trust them."Caution and distrust argued against the want to believe his words. Sakura licked her lips

and was struck. A vision of late recurred across that second plane of sight. The man's face overlapped with the river of red and a dagger inlaid with a strange depiction. She gasped as the symbol shown through the blood and gore, as a black sun rose against a five pointed star. With her intake of breath, the vision faded and the symbol's owner waited with understanding etched across his brow.

She waited for her lungs to rest and then finally answered. It was the same question she had from before, yet her tone answered his own query.

"Who are you?"

And he smiled yet again, bowed, and took her hand to his forehead, inciting the rite of the ancients. "I was christened Eriol Hiiragizawa."

She, in turn, took his hand and placed it to her brow. "I'm called Sakura."

End Phase Four

________________

Amber,

And tinted glass-

Like the stones you once wore across your throat.

Did you see a reflection hidden there?

Or was it the dream behind the jewel?

Riches,

Beauty,

Perhaps even a touch of truth.

But still,

All glass breaks.

_________________