Welcome to the improved version of Kagome Kagome.

Quite a lot of this prologue has changed. It's over five hundred words longer and has some important changes that'll be important later on in the fic. I'm using this chapter to show you the vast change in Mio's attitude, from before and after the magic hits her. This is Mio at nineteen, cynical of all forms of magic, but excited by little things like the prospect of love. You'll also notice that she's more outspoken and prone to swearing than I had her written previously. That's an important change.

I hope you guys like the new prologue! More to come soon, I promise. I won't be leaving this for another six months to sit here. If I do, you guys can all appear before me and strike me down.

Kagome Kagome

Prologue

"Hey, Mio?"

The call of my name drew my attention from the bright colours of the surrounding festival (and the yaki imo stand I had been reall focussing on with its vendor calling out a chant that gave me a nostalgic need to taste the sweet potato treat again) to the tall girl who had her arm hooked through mine. Our long furisode sleeves twined together and swung with our slow steps; clashing as much as our personalities did. Yuna was a sweet and gentle girl that had the occasional bout of stubborness that you weren't likely to forget. The pink furisode with striking splashes of yellow and green she wore showed off her personality well. I, on the other hand, was to-the-point and loud and rough. The simple screaming red colour of my own furisode exemplified that better than any other design possibly could. I hummed in curious response as my eyes drifted slowly back towards the yaki imo stand. I could do with one of those right now. Nostalgic need was clawing at my belly.

"I wanna go there."

Once again my eyes were dragged from the food vendor to see what had captured Yuna's interest. A snort, reminiscent of an amused pig in brutal honestly, tore from my nose with reckless abandon. "You're kidding. It's bullshit, Yuna."

Yuna pouted and tugged at my arm, dragging me forcefully towards the fortune teller's tent. "Too bad. I think it'll be interesting so we're going."

I followed my best friend reluctantly, a grumpy pout forming on my own face. I had no interest in theiving bullshit like fortune telling. I could already guess what sort of dry pre-manufactured fortune the teller would spout. 'You will soon find your true love, but first you need to buy this expensive piece of shit for it to work.' Fortunes were usually followed by an urgent need to buy this or that expensive trinket to make sure the fortune came true. I didn't have the mindless patience to believe in a telling of your future that would only come true if you threw cash at the teller.

We side-stepped a group of children playing Kagome Kagome right outside the tent and Yuna released my arm from her fierce grip. She disappeared into the tent immediately, mercifully leaving me to sit outside. I busied myself with taking a seat on the wooden bench just outside the tent and turned my attention on the group of children giggling and passing around a silky length of material. A little boy with cropped black hair was dubbed the Ogre and was quickly surrounded by a linked chain of friends as he tied the material around his head.

"Kagome, Kagome," the children sang in unison. I found myself humming along with the slow, almost creepy song as I watched the group.

The bird is in the basket
When, oh when will it come out
In the night of dawn
The crane and the turtle slipped

I licked my lips and whispered the last line in unison with the children. "Who is behind you now?"

Kagome Kagome had been one of my favourite games as a child. I would skip in a circle and sing until I was falling down dizzy with a throat that felt like it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. For such simple mechanics, that game seemed to never grow boring. As long as I had a group of friends, I was happy to keep playing it until we were all forced back home by our parents. Finding your executioner was always an exciting thing. It bought no end of fun to me and my friends.

The children played two more rounds of the game, just as content with repeatedly playing as I remembered being, before the tent flaps rustled by my shoulder and Yuna emerged, clutching tightly to a Daruma doll with one painted eye.

How did I know?

"She told me that I'll find my true love this year!" Yuna giggled and span in a circle, holding her Daruma doll to her chest. She held it out for me to look at. White, decorated with bold streaks of gold.

I jumped up and gave my own excited giggle. "This year? That's amazing!" A love fortune was probably the only thing that would interest me. Who wouldn't want to know about who they'd fall in love with? "Did she say anything else about it? Come one, tell me!"

Yuna just shook her head and pulled back the tent flap. "Go in and get your own fortune. We can talk about them when you have yours too." She bit her lip excitedly. "Maybe you'll get a love fortune, too! How exciting would that be?"

I had to admit, that would be pretty exciting. I'd love to hear all about the man I would fall in love with. My mind was already running through possibilities as I ducked into the tent. Would he be tall? Handsome? Would he be a man of good wealth? Wouldn't it be just incredible if I fell in love with a tall, handsome man that came from a lot of money?

The interior of the tent was hard to see with the thick smoke curling from a criminal number of incense burners dotted around. I coughed into a curled fist as I scrunched my nose against the penetrating bitter scent. A sweep of the room told me that, while it was packed with all sorts of trinkets ready to be sold off to any hapless sap that thought that these fortunes would be true, there wasn't a teller present. Confusion brought my brows together. From what I could see, the only exit of the tent was the one that I was stood in. The teller couldn't have left without Yuna and I seeing her. I certainly hadn't seen an old kook while Yuna and I were squealing over Yuna's fortune.

Disappointment and relief swept through me in equal parts. There was a part of me that wanted to have my fortune read, and be told about the man I would fall in love with. An equally large part of me still thought that it was all bull and a total waste of my time. A fortune couldn't be real. Nothing as wooly as predicting the future could actually be real.

I took a few steps into the tent and looked around again, just to make sure I hadn't missed the old woman. She could have been hiding behind large red Daruma dolls stacked in the back corner. No, she really wasn't in the tent.

I made my mind up to just sit among the large plush pillows piled in the centre of the tent for a few minutes. That'd give me ample time to come up with a fake fortune to share with Yuna, and it would save me from having to actually hear my own fortune.

The pillows were comfortable, I noticed, as I dropped to my knees admist them and shifted around so my legs were curled underneath me. I folded my hands together atop my lap and looked around. If I hadn't thought this place was a crock of shit before, the lines of Daruma dolls in colours I had never seen a doll to be told me that right away. Had the woman painted them odd colours and given her own meaning to them? How stupid.

"Who is behind you now?" The whispering sing-song voice in my ear, and the cold breath that ticked over my neck and cheek because of that voice, made me jump and yelp out a strangled 'fuck' as I clutched at my chest over my heart. The woman hunched over me was smaller than my own tiny four foot ten and swaddled in layers upon layers of purple cloth. Her wrinkled face was framed with shaggy white hair and inset with glassy black eyes. A gnarled grin stretched her thin lips. "Come, let me see that lamp of yours, little Mio. Let me see what your future beholds."

I swallowed back the lump that had formed in my throat and watched warily as the woman hobbled around the pile of cushions and dropped to kneel opposite me. She reached out, patting the top of my hand before drawing it from my lap and into hers. She tipped my palm upwards and began tracing the creases and lines on my skin. My hand trembled slightly in her grasp.

"You're an old soul, girl. This isn't where you belong." Nails scraped down over the blue veins of my wrist. "Hm… Ah, there. You belong there." A quiet croon left her lips. "You've got quite a journey ahead of you, girl. Adventure. Hardship. Love." Here was where I perked up, thoroughly interested. Love was what I wanted to know. "That love. It's real. Oh, you silly girl, don't doubt it," she scolded, nails biting into my wrist. "Never doubt love. He's your husband! Yes, yes, he'll do you well. It's true and pure. So beautiful. "

A husband? I was going to get married, and from the sound of it, the loved that we would share would be beautiful.

"Tenseiga will cry for you." I didn't recognise the word tenseiga. What was that? A name of something? The sudden shift from love to something crying for me made me feel a little uncomfortable. "You'll cheat death. Again and again. The human that refuses to die, he'll call you." I echoed the morbid word, my hand twitching in hers. Death? The teller's nails bit into my skin, anchoring me in place. "Fear not, girl, you'll cheat it." I wasn't too sure that comforted me. "Beware the healing man, dear girl." The quick change in subject of my fortune was starting to confuse me. I knew fortunes were never meant to be perfectly straight forward. Some interpretation was necessary, but this fortune was changing with the wind.

A gnarled hand cupped my cheek gently and my slate grey eyes lifted to meet the pitch of the teller's. She had a soft look in her eye as her thumb stroked my cheek, just like my mother used to when she'd wipe away tears. "The healing man will be your death," she whispered. "Run from him. Find your way home. Go to your daughter. Limp. Fall. Protect her from hungry teeth."

Trying to make sense of these fortunes was giving me a headache. I pulled away, but my wrist was seized in a tight hold that pinched my skin sharply. "Let go of me. Please."

The old woman shook her head. "This is important, girl. Find the man with the golden soul. He'll be your executioner. Your salvation. Let the heat lead you to him." Speaking of heat, the stinging pinch of my skin was beginning to burn. It wasn't the sort of burn I associated with being pinched. With a group of friends like I had, pinch burns weren't uncommon. This wasn't that. This felt more like the times I'd burnt myself on a hot pan while was starting to get really painful.

Panicking now, and with a pained gasp, I threw my weight backwards and tore my wrist from her grip. The sensitive burned skin of my wrist screaped painfully against the cotton of my furisode as I clutched my arm to my chest, but I hardly paid attention to it at all as I backtracked, pushing myself back towards the exit.

"Let that serve as a reminder to you," the woman called out as I pushed myself to my feet and stole out of the tent. "Find the man with the golden soul!"

With my head down, I hurried right past Yuna and barreled straight into someone. Arms wrapped around me to steady me. "Hey, are you all right?" As my head tilted back to get a look at the warmest brown eyes I had ever seen, all I could notice was how strangely cold the man's body felt against my own. I was no blushing virgin. I'd felt many a man's body against my own in the past, of all temperatures. I'd been with men that had cold, clammy skin and men that felt like a furnace was burning under their skin, but this man felt like ice through the fabric of my furisode. His brows drew together with worry. "You okay?" he repeated, hands sliding up my arms to rest on my shoulders.

I shook myself back into reality and took a half step backwards. His hands fell from my shoulders and slid back down my arms to encircle my wrists. I hissed in pain as fingers brushed against my burnt skin. "You're hurt," he noticed immediately, pulling my hand up to get a look at my wrist. "That looks nasty. Here, there's a medical tent not too far away. Let's get you looked at."

I found myself sat on a bench with the man knelt in front of me, tending to the burn on my wrist without really knowing how I got there. I felt out of sorts, like my brain wasn't quite matching up with my body.

"You're lucky you bumped into me," the man sad with a friendly grin as he began unpacking a first aid kit. "I'm volunteering here in the medical tent tonight to get a bit of experience. I'm at Todai at the moment, training to be an MD. Wow, this is really weird. How'd you manage to burn it into this shape?"

The painful mark on my wrist was burnt in the shape of an almost perfect crescent moon. "I don't know," I muttered through stiff lips.

"Oh, she does speak!" the man joked. "I'm Saburo. Think you can tell me your name?"

I huffed. "Of course I can speak. I think being burned by some crazy old woman is enough to warrant a little shocked silence, don't you?"

"Someone did this to you?" The worry was back in his eyes.

Would anyone believe me if I told them that a woman burned a crescent moon into my wrist with her bare hands? "No, it was an accident. Just a freak accident." Freak was right. I was pretty sure that I'd never be able to tell anyone what really happened. I would have elaborated, but my attention was caught by a family of three rushing into a tent. A little girl was kimping on a bloody leg and whimpering quietly as she was ushered up to sit on the bench next to me.

"Oh, Kagome, be brave. You'll be just fine once you've been patched up." From what I could tell, the girl was being very brave. Her whimpering was already fading out and she didn't have tears in her eyes. She just sat patiently on the bench, waiting for someone to come to her.

I hissed when Saburo spread something onto my wrist and the girl leaned over to look at my wrist in interest. "That looks like it hurts."

"It does." It stung a hell of a lot more now it was being cleaned, though.

"You're not crying, though." Her gaze turned up to me and I was taken aback by the brilliant crystalline blue colour of her eyes. The only people I had ever seen with blue eyes had been Westerners, but this girl was very clearly a Japanese native. "You must be very brave." A grinned a big gap-toothed smile and continued on without missing a beat. "I'm Kagome."

He hand grasped my arm and I was filled with a warmth I had never felt before, like the touch of her hand was bringing with it the most wonderful feeling of warmth and belonging. A feeling that I had always dreamed of when thinking about being taken into a lover's arms. To feel it from a little girl that couldn't be any older than ten was a very strange thing.

"I'm Mio," I replied with a tiny smile.

I apologise greatly for anything Mio says in this chapter that insults anyone or their beliefs. Her opinions and mine are very different on many matters; among those the importance of objects in faith. I'm religious myself and prey to many 'trinkets.' That is important to me. Mio has a different belief that is, I know, quite insulting to those who do have beliefs that involve objects of any kind. I apologise to anyone that felt insulted or attacked by the mention of Mio's opinions here.

Once I get the first chapter up rewritten, I'll be taking down all the chapters after this one and rebuilding the fic from there. There'll be a notieable change in plot, a change in writing style and a change in chapter length after this.