Author: Spirit0
The Guardians
Most people tried to forget that he was a demon. And most of the time, it was easy to forget. People thought about how young, how kind, how concerned he was for them. People looked at him and saw a thin, muscular fifteen-year-old boy preparing to be a man, working hard to be their future king. These people were proud of him, their prince, and would smile at him, bow to him, give him fruits and vegetables they had grown and crafts they had made. They had no fear of him; he looked just like any of them — Fanelian, and by extension, human. That's why most of the time, it was easy for them to forget he was a demon.
But he knew that with the dragon-slaying ceremony, his rite-of-passage to become king, being in a few days, people were talking now, talking about his demon blood and whether it had cursed the royal Fanel family. Both of his parents had passed away when he was a young child and his brother, Folken, was presumed a coward that ran away or dead after never coming back from his rite-of-passage ceremony. People were wondering if he'd have the same fate, and assumed that if he did, it was from the curse of his Draconian blood.
There had only been one time that he had made the Fanelian people come face-to-face with his demon self. He had been a smiling four-year-old, ready to show off for his adopted sister, Merle, to prove to her that he could so fly, just watch! Merle had begged him not to, begged him the whole time that they climbed up to the roof, but he wouldn't listen. He had been so excited, feeling the light wind and the sun on his bare chest on a warm day, staring down at the ground far below and knowing that he would be soaring above Fanelia, that only he, his brother, and his mother could do such a thing. He let his wings burst from his back, his tiny white feathers falling slowly to the ground below, where people stared up at him and gasped in horror while he jumped off the roof.
He tried to flap his wings once and one of them faltered and he was spiraling to the ground almost as soon as he'd jumped. Panic overtook him, but there was nothing for him to do but watch the ground as it got closer and closer. He wanted to cry. But his mother flew up to catch him before he hit the ground, before he started crying, before anything bad at all could happen to him. She held him to her chest and he watched as her feathers, the feathers of a full-grown, full-blooded Draconian, began falling to the ground, as her wings folded in, to shelter them.
"Van, you must never show your wings to anyone. Promise me," she said, her lips forming a frown he'd never seen before, a frown that made him cry into her chest while he apologized and promised never to show his wings again.
His wings felt like they were crushing him sometimes, though, forced to remain inside his body, waiting to come out and stretch, waiting to soar through the sky. But he didn't let them out, not even this late at night on his balcony overlooking his country, because he was afraid that someone would see him and be reminded that he was a demon and needlessly fear him.
He went back inside his room, pulled back the covers on his bed, and got under them. The night, he told himself, was for sleeping, not for thinking about flying to the moon.
xxx
"God, protect me during night and day, as well as my mom, my dad, my brother, my relatives, my cousins, my friends, and everybody else in the world, Amen."
It was a stupid prayer that she'd made up when she was a stupid eleven year old that she said every night. It was stupid for lots of reasons, one of them being that "relatives" was an all-encompassing word that would make it so that she didn't have to say mom and dad, brother and cousins. Another thing that was stupid about it was that God couldn't protect everyone in the world and she knew it. God couldn't even protect her friend and long-time crush, Amano, she'd found out the next morning, the morning after Amano had been killed by one of his fellow track and field teammates.
But even the day after his death, she still said the prayer before she went to sleep. She wasn't sure if she believed in heaven and spirits and souls, but just in case, she hoped Amano's soul was protected, that it rested in peace in heaven. It was all very stupid, she told herself, but she couldn't change the prayer now, after four years, nearly 1500 nights, saying it.
She was afraid of sleep, though. Before he'd died, she'd seen his death, his being shot, in a nightmare. But like most dreams, it was fuzzy and not based in reality, and she forgot the specifics of the dream only a few hours after waking up. Even when she was telling him about it, she had difficulty explaining it. He'd just laughed it off anyway and ruffled her hair before they went their separate ways to class. She'd forgotten about it by the next day. It was only now, after he was dead, that she was afraid it had been a prediction of the future.
At school, her friends would ask her to do tarot card readings, mostly of their love lives, and even she had to admit that her predictions were eerily accurate. And then her dream, the dream she wished she'd never had, came true. Would her current dreams come true? They were even worse than the first, not in content, but in the way they possessed her thoughts, unwilling to let go. She got stuck in the dream, even when she was awake; she was forced to roll around, to feel itchy, to feel thirsty, to feel irritated, to feel sick to her stomach, to feel sad. She eventually took cold medicine just to make her sleepy, to make her eyes droop, her limbs relax, and her brain think of more pleasant things than being chased by a man with black hair and red eyes and a sword who was trying to kill her. He never actually succeeded in killing her, he couldn't catch her, and sometimes he didn't even seem like he wanted to catch her or kill her, he just stood there, looking at her. But he carried a sword, and always they would both start running again, running through the undefined and unfamiliar setting.
This routine of being paralyzed by dreams even when awake, being chased by the man with the sword, the taking of cold medicine to fall asleep, continued each night. She fell asleep during most of her classes at school. Her teachers let her off the hook, because they knew Amano had been her friend and that he'd just died and that she must be going through a rough time. She did not tell her mother about her problems sleeping. Her mother looked at her daughter and saw how tired she was, but said nothing. Her mother only seemed distressed about it once, when Yukari had called her to inform her, in an anxious I-don't-know-what-to-do voice, that her daughter had fainted at a track meet. Yukari had waited for her to regain consciousness, talked to her briefly in an attempt to cheer her up, and then walked home with her.
She took a shower when she got home, then did her homework and ate dinner and did some more homework. Then she attempted to go to sleep. She fell asleep, but a few hours later woke up, plagued by her raven-haired assassin. She crept downstairs to take her cold medicine.
But there was none left. Every night, she'd realized there wasn't much medicine left, but had forgotten to go and buy more every day. Now she only had a few drops. That wouldn't do anything. That wouldn't keep the itchiness, the anxiousness, and most importantly the assassin, away. For the first time in over a week, she felt alert, awake, while trying to think of ways to make herself the exact opposite: apathetic, asleep.
The only real solution was to go out and buy some more cold medicine from the 24 hour convenience store a few blocks away. She went back to her room to put on clothes. She put on her school uniform, even though she had a fleeting thought that perhaps the skirt would make her a target for sexual predators and decided that she didn't care, because the sword-wielding killer in her dreams, she decided, wasn't a sexual predator.
It was a quiet walk to the store at 2 AM. There was no one else walking around and only a handful of cars passed by her on the way there. Funny how less people made it more creepy. When she entered the store, the sales clerk looked immediately towards the door. Funny how the one person in the most lit up place she'd been so far was the one who scared her the most.
She placed the cold medicine on the counter and went to pull out her wallet. She didn't notice that the man at the counter did not scan the cold medicine and tell her the price.
"I need to see your I.D.," the clerk said. She looked up at the sound of his voice. He was looking right at her with his tired brown eyes and a solemn frown.
"What?" she asked.
"I need to see your I.D. To see if you're 18. I can't sell you cold medicine if you're not 18."
"Why?"
"You could get high off of it . . . or overdose," She knew that the sales clerk thought she was already high off of it . . . which meant she was more likely to stupidly overdose on it.
"Oh. Right. I'm sorry for the inconvenience," she said, reaching for the medicine to put it back on the shelf. The clerk grabbed it first.
"It's okay. I've got it. You should just go home," he said, sounding concerned. She figured his real motivation was that he didn't want anything to do with her if she actually did overdose or get killed on the way home.
She started walking back home, resigned to the fact that she had to tell her mother that she was having trouble sleeping and that she honestly needed to see someone, a doctor that could prescribe her sleeping pills or a psychologist that could sort out her jumbled-up mind, so that she could sleep again. She could feel her eyes start to water with tears. That's all she wanted. To sleep peacefully again. Why couldn't she just go to sleep?
xxx
Lying in bed, his hand placed on his forehead, Van wondered what life was like on the Mystic Moon. He got up and walked out onto his balcony so that he could see the Mystic Moon, as if this would make his imaginary visions of life there more real.
There was a lot of blue on the Mystic Moon. Water, he supposed. Oceans. He'd never seen the ocean. If the Mystic Moon had oceans, were there mountains there, too? People? Draconians? The Mystic Moon didn't seem too mystic in his mind. It was probably exactly like Gaea. There would be no Draconians there. And even if there were, they'd be considered demons, just like here.
He really needed to go to sleep. His dragon-slaying ceremony was tomorrow. Funny how the reason he needed to go to sleep was the same reason he couldn't go to sleep. Ironic. He leaned on the railing of his balcony and did not smile. He half-expected his swords-master, Balgus, to come in his room and tell him to go to sleep. Balgus usually had good timing like that. And Balgus had complete confidence that Van would succeed at slaying a dragon.
Despite all his swordsmanship training, he had never killed anyone or anything in his life, minus a few bugs that he found crawling in his room. He had never been in a fight that wasn't controlled by and fought under the watchful eyes of Balgus, who would never hurt Van. He had no desire to fight or kill things. Violence only perpetuated more violence.
And he still didn't understand why he had to kill a dragon anyway. What had the dragon done to him? Nothing. Sure, the Fanelian city was protected by mountains and walls to protect themselves from wandering dragons, but wasn't that only natural? The dragon didn't know any better. It was just trying to live the only way it knew how. And why shouldn't it fear humans? He was human and he was the one hunting the dragon.
He remembered asking his brother when he was only a little boy why the Fanelian princes had to kill dragons. His brother had simply said that it showed they were worthy of becoming king, that they would be strong and be able to protect Fanelia. Folken had said all of this with a smile on his face, not a malicious smile, but one that showed Folken found Van's sympathy towards the dragons just as commendable and courageous as killing a dragon was supposed to be.
He wondered if the dragon he would fight would be the same one that killed his brother.
The dragon he would fight. He gripped the railing of the balcony. The dragon he would fight. It was a definite thing. He would do it. He had to do it. Because if he didn't, he'd be like his brother. Weak. Cowardly. Dead. He didn't want to fight the dragon, much less kill it, but he definitely didn't want to die. No. He had to kill it. He had to show everyone he wasn't cursed. That he'd make a good king. He had to show that he was strong enough to protect his people. So he had to kill it. He had to.
"These are such selfish reasons to kill a dragon . . ." he whispered to the night. He gripped the railing more tightly. Protecting other people wasn't selfish, he told himself. That was the main reason he had to kill the dragon. If he failed, who would rule Fanelia? It would leave Fanelia open to political chaos and foreign invasion. He would hate to see the rural country his forefathers had founded be forced under the control of one of those more urban countries, like Astoria or Zaibach. Especially Zaibach. He'd never heard anything good about Zaibach, with their new technologies and emphatic studying of history.
Time passed. He did not sleep. The sun rose and he did, too, his eyes feeling tired by his mind alert, fueled by the adrenaline of anxiety. Today was the day. Today was the day he'd kill a dragon. That he had to kill a dragon. He threw on his clothes and went down to breakfast. Nobody spoke to him because it was plain that he did not wish to be spoken to.
"I will escort you to the edge of the forest at the base of the mountains, Lord Van," said Balgus. Van mounted his horse and nodded. The weight of his armor made him pity the horse.
Many Fanelians lined the main road to see him off. Merle clung desperately to his leg, telling him over and over to be careful. He found that he could smile at her and reassure her that he'd be all right. He could lie to Merle, if it would wipe away the tears that were forming in her eyes.
They reached the edge of the forest in what felt like no time at all, compared to the night he'd spent lying awake, waiting and waiting for the sun to come up so that this day could begin and then come to an end. Van and Balgus sat on their horses staring into the forest for a moment.
"You'll want to leave your horse somewhere safe, Lord Van. Somewhere where the dragon you are fighting can't harm it."
"Yes, Balgus."
"You will return by yourself, with the dragon's heart, the Guymelef energist, to prove that you slayed the dragon and are Fanelia's rightful king."
"Yes, Balgus."
Balgus stared at Van and Van stared back, stared openly at the scar that went from Balgus' scalp, across his left eye, sealing it forever, almost to his chin. Balgus had many scars. Van had never asked about them. He knew that Balgus had been through many wars and fights to protect Van's father and mother when they were still alive and he wondered if the swords-master could even remember how he'd gotten all his scars.
"Remember, Lord Van, that the dragons can sense your fear and your anger. To gain an element of surprise, you must rid yourselves of these emotions. And remember that only a dragon's stomach can be pierced by a sword. The rest of its body is covered in protective scales."
"I'll remember all your advice, Balgus."
"Then I know that you will succeed, Lord Van," Balgus said, before he turned his horse around and kicked it into a trot. Van watched the trail of dust become fainter and fainter from his mount.
xxx
He waited outside a dragon's cave all day, but no dragons came until nightfall; this made him regret even more that he hadn't been able to sleep. His adrenaline had started to wane during the day, during the hours of crouching outside the cave, waiting. But he could feel the adrenaline coming back when he spotted a dragon coming towards him. The dragon did not see him. He waited until the dragon was closer before he sprang.
He'd misjudged the distance and the size of the dragon, though, and the dragon's yellow eyes locked on to his figure in a heartbeat. The dragon bared its teeth, its forked tongue going from side to side. He tried hard not to think about how one of its teeth was the length of his arm. The dragon let out a squeal of warning before it sprang at him, forcing him to roll out of the way and be off guard.
He dodged the next attack and got back on his feet quickly, running towards the dragon, holding his sword in both hands, ready to jam the point into the dragon's stomach. But the dragon's tail was faster than his legs and it took all his balance and strength to jump back before its barbed tail tore him in two. "Shit," he said under his breath, conscious of the dent its tail had made in his armor.
It only got worse. He could see the fire burning in its throat for only a second before it came shooting out of its mouth. He'd only had a second to unlatch the shield built into his the armor on his arm to protect himself from the fire. The shield was a useless piece of charred, smoldering metal after the attack.
He had no time to discard the shield. He started to panic and realized that now it was too late to dodge. If he let the dragon get close to him, let the dragon touch him in any way, he was done for. But he couldn't jump out of the way. It would crush him with its giant feet. A flash of wings came into his mind. He could fly away. But what about the armor?
He took his chances since the other option was assured death.
It hurt a bit, forcing the muscles he hadn't tried to so much as flex for over ten years to sprout from his back, to fit through the cracks at the sides of his armor, the place where the front armor plate connected to the back, to launch himself into the air, to fly. To fly for the first time in his life. To fly for his life. To outfly the dragon, when it realized what he was doing. To fly away to the Mystic Moon.
xxx
She was glad that going back was always shorter than going somewhere because she was starting to become scared of the dark. The streetlights only made it scarier, in a way, the way they cast her shadow and the shadows of trees, cars, making them look like shifty people, ninjas. Except ninjas weren't real. She had to keep reminding herself that everything that existed in the dark also existed in the daytime. And the stuff in the dark didn't attack you in the daytime.
The last street she had to cross was up ahead. There were no cars going through the light. She looked behind her every once in awhile, scared of sounds she wasn't even sure she'd actually heard. She could see the headlights of a car far off down the road. She was almost at the light when she saw a flash. Lightning. She started walking faster. Something flickered on her left that wasn't lightning. An attacker. She jumped and balled her hands into fists, as if she actually knew how to fight and had any strength. Her hands fell to her side quickly, though, when she realized it was a long white feather. She was at the corner when she saw another one and reached out to catch it.
Then she was watching the corner, the ground, the Earth get smaller and smaller. The car passed at a crawl below.
xxx
He flapped his wings and went higher. He was flying. The dragon was flying, too. But he was faster than the dragon. He heard its angry screech as it tried to keep up, struggled to rise higher and higher, before it gave up.
Even though the dragon didn't pursue him anymore, he kept flying higher and higher, because he hated himself, hated how he had failed, just like his brother, had failed and had been reduced to his demon-self. What if someone saw him? Knew how he'd cheated during his rite-of-passage? He would never be king. His people would be forced to remember the curse his Draconian blood had brought upon them and become leaderless. They would have to exile him. He flew higher and higher.
The dusk turned into night in a flash. Literally. He stopped flying and just hovered, looking around. There were all these lights on the ground that didn't look like fire lamps. There were stars in the sky, but there was no Mystic Moon. A small, white circle hung in the sky. It looked like the moon that hung beside the Mystic Moon, only smaller. Was that possible?
The land below had trees and grass and houses, he could see, but the houses looked strange. They all looked so . . . ornate. So much detail put into the roof and the wood surrounding the windows and the doors and even the material the actual house was made of. And there were all these winding paths between chunks of houses. Roads? Why was nothing next to them? No houses or stores? And how was that sign bright like that? He shouldn't be able to read it in the dark. And why were there parallel yellow lines splitting what he supposed was a road? And honestly, why was there different colored, man-made rock that lined all the roads?
A person was walking on these man-made rock tiles along the side of the road. He supposed it was a girl, since she was wearing what looked like a skirt. A very, very short skirt. Could she not afford better clothes? And what was with that bland top? Very unbecoming. And what kind of heathen girl was she, to be walking around in this darkness, even with all these bewitched lights around? She should be at home, sleeping.
Moving lights. He spotted them in the distance, moving rapidly. He couldn't make out its body too well. But a creature that had lights that projected for eyes! He was glad that creatures on Gaea didn't have such abilities. And this one seemed so fast, too. It was sticking to what he thought was a road for some reason, though. Maybe it was just a path for all these creatures. And that girl was about to cross its path.
The girl had stopped walking and seemed to be looking at something in her hand when he swooped down and lifted out of the path of the Light-Eyed creature. He had to beat his wings harder to lift two people, even though she didn't feel too heavy cradled in his arms.
She focused her attention on the ground first before turning to him, her lips slightly parted and her eyes wide, much wider than they should've been normally. He stared back at her just as blatantly, wondering what she saw in him, because all he saw was a girl with ridiculously short hair, an uncouth outfit, and eyes that could look pretty if they didn't look like the eyes of a crazy person, although he was already pretty sure she was a crazy person.
"Am I dead, too?" she whispered, still looking at him.
"No . . . I saved you."
"Saved me . . ? I thought you were supposed to kill me."
"No. I saved you. From that creature."
"Creature?"
She wasn't just crazy, she was dumb, too.
"The creature that was coming towards you. With the eyes that could project light."
She looked down at the road. "You mean the car?"
"Is that what you call those creatures?"
"They're machines . . . What are you talking about?"
"Machines?" he asked. "Like Guymelefs?"
"I must be dead . . ." she whispered again, looking away. "Or dreaming . . ."
"Neither," he insisted, beginning to fly again. "Would you be able to feel the wind like this, if you were dead?"
She wrapped her arms around his neck and closed her eyes. "Put me down!" she screamed into his ear.
But the darkness had changed again. The Mystic Moon was back in the sky. He had returned to Gaea with this girl in his arms. He had run away from his rite-of-passage by exploiting his demon powers, and now he could potentially be seen with a foreign girl in his arms? He blushed at his lack of forethought. He landed quickly and set the girl down on her own two feet. She held onto his shoulders.
"Please let go of me," he said, conscious finally of the metal biting into his bare skin beneath the armor. He had no shirt to wear in front of this girl, which was indecent.
"I'm sorry . . ." she said, stepping away from him.
"What's your name?" he asked, feeling that it would be an important detail, considering he was now stuck with this girl.
"Hitomi. Hitomi Kanzaki."
"I'm Van Fanel, prince of Fanelia."
"Where are we . . ?"
"Gaea."
"I'm either dead or dreaming."
Something snapped in him, because he knew she wasn't dead and that this wasn't a dream, that her being here was the result of something terrible, of him being a failure, a demon, a curse, and that he didn't get to write himself off as dead, no, he would have to live with the consequences, with her. The best he could hope for was execution, the worst, exile. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her and watched her eyelids bunch together from the pain.
"I told you you were neither dead nor dreaming."
"Okay . . ." she whispered and he released her.
"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said, looking down at the ground. "But the pain is proof that you're awake and alive."
"I saw you kill me in my dreams," she whispered. "It keeps me up every night."
He stood silently in the dark for a few moments before saying, "I would never kill you, even in your dreams. We should sleep."
"Sleep . . . here?"
He didn't know exactly where they were, so, "There's no other choice."
xxx
He woke up to the sound of her screaming. He grabbed his sword and turned towards her until he realized there was no one there. She was screaming in her sleep. In her nightmares.
"Hitomi . . . wake up." He didn't want to yell, but he knew that she hadn't heard him. "Hitomi! Wake up!" Still nothing. He had to shake her awake.
She opened her eyes and slapped him across the face with the palm of her hand. She placed her hand over her mouth. He didn't know whether it was from regretting that she hit him or whether she was suppressing another scream.
"Who's there?" came a voice from the woods. Van put his hand on the hilt of his sword instead of answering. A man with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a sword at his side approached from the left. Van had no idea who this man was. But Hitomi seemed to know.
"Amano . . !" Hitomi said.
Word Count: 4,902.
AN: I admit, it's like a bad trip on LSD (or what I imagine a bad trip on LSD would be like). But ya know, it could only be so long, and I focused more on the beginning than the end (when I started running out of words). Basically, I thought 1. Van's Draconian blood needed to be more important 2. the similarities between Allen and Amano needed to be creeper and 3. wouldn't it be more interesting if Van was supposed to kill Hitomi or something?
It doesn't really address what would happen or why they'd meet other characters. That's what your imagination is for. Although I will say, I imagine Dilandau as a failed experiment by Zaibach to create another Draconian.
Hope it wasn't too bad.
-Spirit0
