Prologue
The Beginning
Disclaimer:
The Shaman King series does not belong to me.The original story belongs to Hiroyuki Takei and Shoen Jump.
Hiro Hayashi is a slim girl. She has night-black hair and the tips of it were bright red. Her eyes were the color of coal, and she was very tall for her age. Hiro loves running, jumping and swimming; she gets along quite well with animals, especially dogs. Her favorite animal is the wolf, because it is so majestic and fierce. She used to live with her mother and younger brother, but now she lives with her grandparents.
But Hiro is different from other people. Ever since she was six years old, she had been able to see the spirits of the dead. It started the day before her 7th Birthday, on a beautiful winter day.
There was a cold breeze blowing through the leaf-less trees that surrounded Hiro's back yard. Hiro and her brother Haru were in the back yard playing Tag, a game where you had to tag another person. Airi, Hiro and Haru's mother, had just gone inside to check on the chocolate cake that she was baking, for the upcoming celebration. Then Hiro noticed a large black wolf pad lazily by her and reached out to pet its course fur. The wolf, being a wild animal – although dead – growled and snapped at her hand; his teeth had made contact, and blood immediately started to flow out of the wound on her hand. As the wolf bounded away, Hiro began to cry and Haru, not knowing any better, also started crying. When Airi heard her children wailing outside, she ran out to comfort them. Hiro was immediately taken to the hospital, and she got a scar from the bite. While Hiro had not known at the time, the wolf she had met was a spirit – the first of many that she would run into.
More and more frequently, Hiro continued to see spirits. Not just in her house, but around the whole city. Once she was a disgusting and deformed person and ran behind her mother for protection, thinking that she would protect her from the spirits. When her mother asked what was wrong, Hiro told her about the spirits; Airi, not being able to see the deformed man, thought that Hiro was just making it up. She told Hiro not to worry, and that they wouldn't harm her.
But more and more often, the spirits would come close to Hiro, and time after time she would run to tell her mother. One stormy autumn night, after the children had gone to bed, Airi began thinking about the strange sights that her daughter had claimed to see. My father was able to see spirits, she thought silently to herself. What if Hiro got that, that curse, from him? With that thought in mind, Airi ran up the stairs to the room in which her daughter slept, and shook her awake. Out of fear, Airi threw Hiro out of the house, telling her that she should never come back again.
Hiro did not know what she had done to deserve this, but she kept a calm and clear head. Even at the age of eight she knew exactly the way to her grandparents house.
It was a long, hard walk to their house, but eventually she made it. They were shocked to see her at such a late hour, all muddy and tired, but immediately let her in and put her to bed. Her grandmother, Asako, then phoned Airi to ask about why Hiro was alone on the streets in the middle of the night, but Airi said that she had no idea who Hiro was, and that there had never been a person named Hiro in her life; she had no daughter, only a son named Haru. Enraged, Asako threw down the phone and went to talk to Hiro's grandfather, Fusao. After a long discussion, they decided to raise Hiro as their own, which also meant teaching her the ancient arts; they were the ones that taught her how to control spirits and the history of shamans. Before too long, Hiro chose her spirit ally; it was the wolf that she had seen in her back yard. He was named Tsuki, and he had followed her around ever since the day they had met.
Hiro kept in touch with Haru, but to do so she had to climb the wall that separated the back yard of her old house and the street. Airi knew about these visits, but there was nothing that she could do about them. Hiro was Haru's sister, and there was nothing in the law that said that they weren't allowed to see each other. Besides, Airi had tried to abandon her daughter. If she called the police, she would be caught and go to prison. Hiro told Haru everything about shamans and that she had learned from her grandfather. But to Haru's disappointment, he was not a shaman; he could not even see spirits. As Hiro grew up and reached the age of thirteen, she decided that she wanted to participate in the Shaman Fight. If I could become the Shaman King – or Shaman Queen, she thought to herself, then mother might welcome me back as her daughter. From that moment on she decided to train extra hard, and she watched the sky closely for any sign of the telltale shooting star that would signal the beginning of the Shaman Fight.