Chapter 1: Prologue to a Bond

"Come on! You have to eat! You'll die if you don't!" my overly energetic friend wined while waving a chocolate bar in my face.

I push her hand away, a sigh of annoyance escaping my lips. I understand her concerns, but she has a habit of voicing them loudly and in public places. Besides, she knows I haven't wanted to eat since we entered this country and every time I do it just gets vomited up later.

"I'm fine Ri, really! I'm just not feeling hungry." I explain.

Hands on hips, she sticks out her lower lip at me, pouting for all she's worth. Sulking is typical Arisu (AKA Ri) behaviour, she has a tendency to act like a child when she can't get her own way. And I thought I was the younger one...

We met a few years ago and she hasn't changed one bit since we did. Her golden hair still falls just past her shoulders and her ocean blue eyes still gaze out beneath her sweeping fringe. Her tanned skin and natural flirty attitude along with her dress sense (which allows comfort to go hand in hand with flaunting curves and cleavage), means she gets constant harassment wherever she goes.

She sighs and flops down on her bed next to mine (we are staying at the small town's only inn). "I give up!" she groans, making me chuckle at her.

"Well," I say standing and heading over to the door, "I'm off to grab yo- I mean us some supplies. So try not to get into too much trouble while I'm gone."

She waves her hand at the comment and I leave the inn, glad to have got away with the small slip, and head into the small town we are spending the night in. It is only a little town with only one main supermarket in it which I find I have no choice but to use to collect the things we need, food for Arisu, and a new stock of oil for me. I like the motorbike to be nice and clean when it rides as we travel round on it. I really do love my bike.

Once I finish shopping I quietly leave and begin to walk back to the inn in deep thought. The thoughts being reasons why I am not able to eat since coming over to this country, it is really eating at me. Because of this I stop looking where I'm going and after a few moments I bump into something I presume to be a person, knocking them, and myself to the ground.

"Ouch!" I hear a feminine voice say, and I see a girl just a little older than me from the look of her, sitting on the ground opposite me.

She seems to be a local, and average in the looks department I would say (but I do travel with Arisu so she might be good looking but I honestly don't really care). Her hair is a similar shade of brown to mine, but hers is tied back in a long plat that falls down the length of her back. However, unlike me, her eyes are a stunning shade of emerald green that are so different to my own dull stormy blue orbs.

"I'm sorry." I say to her as I stand, shopping bag in hand and offer her my other to help her up with.

She takes my outreached hand and I help her pull herself up back onto her feet. Standing, to no surprise on my part, she stands a good head taller than me. I really hate being such a midget; even Arisu is at least a foot taller than me!

"It's alright." She says brushing dirt off her long yellow dress. "Are you a traveller by chance?"

"Yes, I'm spending the night at the inn with a friend." I say, not quite sure what to make of this friendly woman.

"My name is Kanan, what's yours?"

"Nicola."

"I've never heard a name like that before."

"It's quite common where I come from."

"Really?" she says, eyes sparkling. "And where do you come from?"

"A place called England. It's a place far north west of here."

"Wow!"

"It's nothing special." I say, giggling at her amazement at the home country I find so normal.

She offers to show me around her home town, which I accept and the two of us chat as we walk through the streets. She tells me about her life here, and I smile at her as she does so, adding in a comment or two here and there. She seems to be a nice person from what I can tell.

We reach a small house near the edge of the town after a while of sight-seeing and she invites me inside of it. Her home is a cosy little place, a bit messy, but it is the kind of mess that comes with a house being lived in and makes the place feel warm. In the living room I sit on the worn brown sofa and look around the rest of the room. An odd thing I notice as I do, there are no family photos.

Kanan goes into the kitchen off from the living room to make us some tea while I sit and take in the room. As I gaze around something catches my eye on the coffee table just in front of me. I pick it up and open out the old book that looks as if it might have been some kind of dairy at some point. I flick casually through the first dozen or so pages than freeze as the small snippets of writing suddenly change.

I gaze into the pencil shaded eyes of my younger face in shock. How is my face in this? I turn the page. There I am aging. I turn the page. Another drawing of me. Again and again the image of a face I have not had since I was eight looks back at me with a child's cheerful gaze and carefree smile. At the last page of the book I find the last picture and I stop to stare at it.

The last of all the drawings is different from all of the ones before it. In the others, just below my smiling face would be the same handwritten phrase, "I wonder who my dream girl is?" but this last image of me is different. In this picture, the smile has vanished and tears run down my cheeks from eyes that have become lifeless, the childhood innocence that was there before, gone. Then, in the bottom right corner is the handwritten note which makes me shake.

"Please don't cry. Your smile always lights up my dark dreams at night. Brighter than all the stars. Without you, I would never have found my way. I will find you, so please smile, because I'm the one who loves you my beautiful moon. I will make you shine again!"

"Okay the tea is ready!" Kanan says as she sets the tea down on the coffee table.

She freezes as her eyes all and lock onto the book in my hands. A look of horror spreads from her wide eyes across her face. It seems that I have just seen something that I shouldn't have. She reaches for the book and I let her snatch it out of my hands then clutches it to her chest, her hands trembling.

"You should never read another person's diary!" she says in a panic.

"Whose is it?" I ask, a numbness starting to overcome me making my shaking stop.

"My brother's."

"Well, have you read it yourself?"

She glances down at her feet in shame and whispers, "yes."

"Do you know why he drew me in it?" I ask, boring the question into her with my eyes, the numbness fading away now.

She lets out a deep trembling sigh at my question and sits down beside me, still clasping it to her chest. She remains quiet for a moment and I let her collect her thoughts together so she knows what she is going to say.

"Because, back when he was about eight years old, he would dream of you every night and this went on for just over a year." She finally says, a sad expression crossing her face.

"How is it even possible?" I ask.

"I really wish I knew the answer myself." She says shaking her head. "I thought that you might know, seeing as it was you he drew and that's why I purposely bumped into you earlier. I'm sorry about that."

"It's alright."

"No, its not. I used you just because I wanted to know more about him and to find a flaw in you I could exploit." She insists, looking down at her feet again in guilt over her actions.

"Why?"

"Because I lo-" she begins then stops halfway through, a blush spreading over her cheeks.

"Because you love him and so you were jealous of a girl that he dreamed about right?" I finish for her.

She looks up at me blushing with wide, shocked eyes as I look back at her with a calm expression. Her mind whirls as she wonders how I could know about her feelings for him, but the confusion is fleeting and she does not dwell on her crazed thoughts. But, how do I know? This is a simple question that if asked I could not answer when I was young, but I can now.

Answer: I'm a witch. No weird hats, cauldrons or brooms though. But the magic is real. Mine is a bit wild and this causes me more than my fair share of hassle than I would like. It is hard to gain control of and the thing that I still have not gotten the hang of even after all these years after my power awakened is the reading of minds. But I guess it could be worse, at least now I don't absorb everything and make the poor, unfortunate victim, I mean person, faint like I used to. So I guess I have improved at least some.

"Well of course I do!" she says dramatically. "He is my bother after all!"

"You may know that, but you don't feel that way about him, do you?" I respond and she sighs, placing her head in her hands, letting the dairy fall onto her lap. Looks like I hit the nail right on the head.

"No." She sobs out and the tears start to fall. "I know it's wrong, but I can't help but love him more than I'm supposed to!"

I reach over and put my arm around her shoulders. She accepts my offer of comfort by turning and burying her face into my shoulder, clutching the fabric of my shirt on my back and shoulder with her hands. I feel the tears staining my shirt and I feel her shake as the sobs rock through her as she cries her heart out. The truth finally rushing out in a moment of realisation and all of her pent up emotions along with it.

"It's not your fault you feel like that." I say rubbing her back in circles soothingly.

Her sobs quieten as she regains her composure as she calms herself down. I give her the moment. I know how it feels to loose someone you love, mine a physical loss while hers is a mental loss. She had lost her brother to a dream, as for me, I had lost my farther to death.

My mother died in childbirth, so ever since I was born it was always just my dad and me. He was my whole world, a world where there was just him and me in it. I was happy, in that innocent way children seem to be, completely clueless and numb to anything bad in the world around me. But then, one day a single man changed me forever. He came to our house, and the fire was lit. My home burned. My dad told me to run, to get away, but I only got as far as the tree line behind our house that spread out into vast woodland before I stopped and turned. It was too late; my dad was gone and left was just the corpse of what he was on the floor. Blood was everywhere: on my dad, on the grass and on the man with the blood-stained knife standing above him.

I froze.

My body shook.

Then I screamed and my whole world shook.

That was the fateful day when my magic awakened and the ground under my feet literally shook. Usually a witch awakens her powers at sixteen, so I was an early bloomer considering that I was still a child, but I only found this out later.

That was when all the pain came rushing out and all I could think in the heat of rage and sorrow was the word burn. And that is exactly what the man did, he burst into flames so hot I felt my tears turn into hot steam that swirls up off my cheeks. I don't know how long I stood there. The whole time I was screaming so hard I could feel blood curdling in my throat and I couldn't stop crying for so long that the steam from my cheeks had burned them, turning my face bright red. All I could think for all the time I stood there, drowning in sorrow was, "may everything burn!"

This was my revenge, for my dad and for myself. That day I changed from a child into a killer. Some might say that I had become a sinner. All I knew was that this kill was my first, but unfortunately, it was never my last.

Kanan pulled away from me and dragged me out of my own thoughts to my relief, rubbing her eyes to wipe the tears away. She coughs. I simply wait for her to speak first and this did not take her long to do.

"Sorry." She says sniffing.

"It's fine." I reply in a soft tone.

"You must think I'm disgusting."

"No, but I am surprised that you do not seem to hate me."

"Why would I?" she asks, looking up at me from her slumped position next to me.

"Because your brother somehow fell in love with me, well a dream version of me anyway." I explain.

"Well, when I first saw you, yes, I hated you so much after I got over the initial shock that you were real. But now, I just can't hate you, you are just too nice." She says smiling.

"Thanks." I say smiling back at her.

She then looks down at her brother's dairy in her lap in deep thought. She picks it up in her hand after a moment and extends it towards me with a determined look on her face with a steel gaze to match.

"I want you to have it." She states firmly.

"No, I couldn't." I respond but she pushes it into my hands.

"I'm not giving you a choice in the matter." She says with a smile and retracts her hand, then stands.

"It's getting late." She says, looking up at the clock hanging from the wall across the room.

I glance up at the clock and she that it indeed has gotten quiet late. And, that I am in trouble with Arisu when I get back to the inn. She is not going to be happy at being made wait hours for me to bring back her lunch, which she will now have to class as her dinner.

"Yeah, looks like it is." I say standing, slipping the diary into my shopping bag as I do so. "I should be getting back now."

"Well, thanks for listening to me." Kana says as she sees me to the door.

"You're welcome and I promise that I will take good care of his diary." I say.

"Goodbye then Nicola, see you soon." She says, waving as I step through the door into the street.

"Bye Kanan, it was nice meeting you." I respond.

But as I walked away from her down the street, I heard a whisper that I found cold, but would not know the eerie meaning to it until a few months later when the two of us met once again, only this time, she would be different. She would be dead.

"Sooner than you would think my friend."

It made me shiver as I walked down the street, into the dim twilight on the beginning of a new era in my life. An era haunted by a crying boy from the long-forgotten dreams of my past that suddenly came flooding back. And the haunting of the dream boy's twin sister that forced me to remember them.