Author's notes: Dear Etro...I had this thing formatted out nicely...but just screws it up. Not what I need on a bad day.
- The girl who fell from the sky -
The first time he had his sights on the girl before him, she was the color of winter and death was circling around her shoulder like crows, waiting for it's prey to succumb to Etro's gate before before the feasting could take place.
She was just another conveniently misplaced casualty of war and Kurasame Susaya was the soldier, a defendant and judge of the battlefield. She was just another pretty face. He kept reminding himself as he shouldered her lithe form over to the make shift medical wing that she was not her.
xXx
The era was a thin line between 600 and 800-
It mattered not. Kurasame Susaya's fluttered open from a sudden slumber. The world around him was silent despite the display of ruins and chaos washing over his hazy vision.
His arm was bent backwards in an impossible position. He had no idea if the muscle was disconnected from his nerves.
A shadow loomed over him.
Miwa.
His leader, his object of desire, the woman who had given him a reason to live.
Her lips moved. She was dying and like him, she was waiting for her turn in line for an audience with Etro.
"Death." Miwa mouthed out. "Death cannot claim you. You must live. The king needs to know of the traitor who hid under the same crimson flag."
The pain that shot through his hastily repaired nerves was nothing compared to the pain his heart felt when Miwa crumbled before him like a lifeless doll. Ugallu. She spoke of the ancient pulsian word for Death but the exact term slipped his mind. Death was haunting them all along. Glenn was the Reaper. The traitor. That bastard...
16 year old Kurasame Susaya delivered the news of treachery over to the King back at Rubrum without fail.
xXx
"You're awake." The instructor of Class Zero noted as the girl before him flailed, trying to free herself from an array of wires and tubes.
The girl gave him a pointed look. Her accent weren't of pulsian origins. It took the team of white mages several minutes before they can reach a certain level of understanding.
Miwa had that same accent. As the icy blade of death gazed over the woman fighting against Kazusa's needle, he realized that Miwa had the same phobia of needles as well.
But her name wasn't Miwa. Miwa was dead. Cienna was not Miwa at all.
xXx
Kazusa restrained the limp 16 year old. There was no need for someone to hold onto him but within the past 24 hours, the young man had already attempted to take his own life after returning to the peristylium.
He was the last of the elite knights left and everyone in the academy knew of his relationship with Miwa. Sweet, innocent little Mi-chan who was a year older then him.
Kurasame didn't protest or move when the sleeping drug was injected into his left arm. He was too tired to fight against it.
He was exhausted.
Exhausted of living.
xXx
Fiction. That was what her concept of him was built upon.
The young girl was the same age as Miwa. No, she would've been the same age as Miwa had she still been alive.
Despite his instincts telling him to leave her be, Kurasame had insisted that on dragging her back to the Peristylium. His actions did not go unnoticed. The most feared ex-hero of the battlefield simply did not go around picking damsels out from the battlefield.
His actions merited himself an audience with the king himself.
Principal Khalia Chival VI gave a fleeting glance to the tiny little woman who was dolled up in the peristylium's standard frock before sweeping a questioning gaze at the icy blade of death.
The reasons he spoke of fell upon the girl's ears as nothing more but a beautiful poetry in a language that merely existed in her world.
"What did you tell him?" She asked when the meeting was adjourned.
"Nothing you should concern yourself with." His English was rough, coated with an accent resembling the Hungarian language. "What you should concern yourself with is how you will be living your life here from now on."
Cienna flinched. It was as if they viewed her as a burden and Kurasame did not even pause to deny that the girl was nothing but a nuisance he wanted to get rid of.
