A/N: I am so proud of this chapter… and yet nervous about it as well. I like to write about places / situations that you don't ever see in real life. Dreamscapes, hallucinations and the like. The problem with writing these kinds of things is that, by their very nature, they're hard to describe. Trying to capture the feel of it all accurately enough so the audience can follow along without getting lost, but not giving so much detail that we drop out of 'dreamscape' into 'really weird looking funhouse'. That's what the majority of this chapter is, so heads up on that one.

Other than that… we see the true beginnings (for this fic) of Bakura and Ryou's 'partnership'! This is so exciting for me, you guys, you have no idea. I have so much planned for this fic, how everything develops for them, how it affects them and Ryou's outside relationships in particular, and then at the end when they inevitably separate… Writing the details of their coming together, I can't help but plot out details for the reversal… and it's gonna be brutal. So. Painfully. Brutal. I love it. XD

Thank you my readers for sticking through the long gaps between chapters. I appreciate forever your patience, and work hard to make sure every moment is worth it. (HEARTS!)

Warnings: Spoilers! Haven't made it through Yu-Gi-Oh!: Millennium World manga and don't want it spoiled, then read that first, then come back. Also, we will probably have a rating jump to M later on. I'll give a heads up before it happens, but be aware.

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! and related characters are © to Kazuki Takahashi.

…

Haunted

Part II

Raven Ehtar

…

The world had disappeared, and resolved itself to a few bright pinpoints of sensation. The cold floor pressing into his cheek. The thunder of his heartbeat, fluttery and erratic as a bird's. The smell, the taste of blood, metallic and cloying. Struggling to swallow, to breathe, to scream, but his throat ignoring every command. His hand, lying limp and inert only inches away, it seemed like a mile. Looming largest of all, reducing all else to a mere inconvenience, the sea of agony at his chest. Sharp, foreign things moved under his skin, scraping and clicking over his ribs. The sound they made he felt all the way down to his toes.

Ryou opened his mouth to call for help, but nothing would come out. He tried to move, to fold his legs under him, get up, rip the ring off and throw it to the farthest corner, but all that resulted were a few scattered muscle twitches. It was like he no longer commanded his own body. Under the agony of the ring's points burrowing into his flesh was the increasingly desperate need for air.

I'm going to die, he realized with terrible clarity. He wondered if it would be from lack of oxygen or if the ring, alive and murderous, would find and crush his heart first.

Distantly, Ryou felt a tear slide down his face.

Suddenly sweet, sweet air filled him. He could draw breath, and did once, twice, but just as he was prepared to cry out his throat closed up again tighter than ever. Ryou would have panicked more, except he was no longer focused on breathing. He was no longer focused on his body at all.

Like a strange kind of film, old memories were rising up before his eyes, taking up all of Ryou's senses. Sight, smell, feel, sound, even thought, he was abruptly reliving small snippets of his past, all jumbled together in a confused tangle of perception. He would have welcomed it as a change from the nightmare reality he'd just been living, except these recollections were far from painless. Guilt, anger, resentment, betrayal, shame; emotional pain was taking the place of physical. Those little agonies he'd hoped were long dead and buried were all fresh as the day they occurred and tearing into him with its old delight.

Ryou wondered if this is what they meant by 'your life flashing before your eyes'…

It couldn't have been so long before he noticed what was different, what was strange in all these memories, though it felt like he'd relived his entire life twice through. There was someone… something?... else there with him. Some foreign presence, just as the ring was invading his body, was invading his mind. He didn't know how he knew, for he certainly couldn't see it, it was more like feeling the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when someone was watching you. It told him that he was not alone, and after a moment, he could tell where it was and what it was doing.

This strange presence was rooting through his memories, traipsing through as they streamed past, picking them up one by one, prodding at them, picking them apart and dissecting them down to nothing. In doing so, whatever it was forced Ryou to relive it all more intensely than ever before, those past shames and mistakes of his all torn afresh and examined by one who cared for nothing of the pain it inflicted. Whatever it was didn't even seem to be aware of Ryou.

It was too much to endure. Ryou couldn't—didn't know how to fight against a phantom in his brain, so he tried to hide. Gathering up as many of those gauze-like recollections as he could, he tried to curl himself around them, to stay as small, silent and unnoticeable as possible. Even his thoughts he tried to keep from wandering, lest they draw attention.

The invader was not fooled. He found Ryou in less than a heartbeat, now enraged at Ryou's attempted defiance, and ripped into his mind with more brutality than before. Whatever protection Ryou had thought he could offer was shredded alongside his resolve.

.

. .

. . .

. . . .

. . . . .

. . . .

. . .

. .

.

He was exhausted. He didn't know how long it had been since this nightmare had begun, or if it was truly a nightmare or some horrible new reality. It all seemed too terrible to be real, but too real to be fantasy. Either way, it was what he was living through now, it was his reality, and it had left him hollow as an egg. He wasn't sure which it was that had exhausted him more, the struggle to keep what made him 'Ryou' private from whatever it was that roved his mind, or the pain that resulted from it. And in the end it had all been useless. It felt as though there were nothing that this invading mind did not now know about him, and yet he could still feel it, whatever it was, drifting around the edges, looking for something new to drag out into the open and examine.

And Ryou still fought, clutching at the memory of safety, of privacy in absence of anything else left to protect.

… stop fighting me…

Ryou's eyes, long forgotten with the rest of his body, flew open, darting wildly around from where he'd fallen to the floor, searching for the voice. He was alone. There was no one else in the room who could have spoken to him. Surprised to find that he could breathe once again, he took a deep breath, preparing to call out for his mother, his sister, anyone who could help…

… Ryou…

… and nearly choked at the sound of his own name.

No one in the room, he realized, but the 'something' in his mind. Now it was speaking to him. Ryou didn't try to answer the voice that whispered in his brain, only tossed his head and curled into a ball. Mentally, he tried to do the same, to become invisible.

… relax… it only hurts because you resist…

Ryou shook his head again, and felt his whole body begin to tremble. He wouldn't be fooled!

"Ryou."

The voice was so clear, so real to his ears, Ryou opened his eyes again. It was dark now, the sun had set since he had fallen to the floor and his light hadn't been turned on, so the whole room was cast in deep gloom. Through the shadows he thought he could see a pale hand very near his own. Like his hand it was slender and the same length. Even the shape of the nails and the way the wrist bent to follow the arm looked like his. Except… Ryou squinted. The edges of the person were fuzzy. Soft. Incomplete. He almost thought he could see through the stranger's hand to see the pattern of the floorboards beneath it. It hurt his eyes, trying to focus and resolve what he was seeing into something coherent.

Ryou followed the arm up and up with his eyes, past the wrist, forearm, and the hem of a soft cotton tee to the shoulder… The other's face was cast in deep shadow, obscuring his features so only part of a cheek, chin and the suggestion of a mouth could be seen. A few locks of hair, pale as his own, escaped into the small piece of light coming from his window.

The figure flickered, just for a second, and Ryou blinked, trying to convince himself it was an illusion. For just a second, the other's skin had transformed from moonlight pale to sun burned brown, his entire frame seemed to grow larger and firm, and then just as abruptly flickered back again.

"Ryou," the impossible apparition said. Ryou heard him speak, saw the vague suggestion that must be his mouth move, but he also heard the words in his mind, like an echo. "Don't fight me anymore, and the pain will stop." The head tilted slightly, and Ryou thought he could make out a soft smile amid the darkness. "And then you can sleep."

It sounded so good, so deliciously wonderful that Ryou let his defenses halfway down before he thought not to. It was enough. The presence slipped past his shields and even further into Ryou's mind, to places he hadn't even known existed, searching, searching, searching.

Ryou almost slammed his shields, puny as they were, back into place at the renewal of that foreign touch. But at the mere thought of that a needle of pain lanced through his skull, making his body twitch. It was just as the other had said: struggle was what brought the pain, if he remained still and open then there was none. Whoever the other mind was, he was still roaming about, but now he seemed a little bit gentler.

Ryou made himself relax, to only be aware of it and not to interfere. Whatever was being done to him, it seemed the lesser of two available evils.

The other presence was definitely searching for something specific among Ryou's memories. He could sense it from the way they would be turned over and over like they were objects and the methodical way they were rummaged through. Ryou wondered what it was the other was looking for, how someone could possibly find a memory like he was doing, and why, but couldn't concentrate enough to work it out. He was too tired, his thoughts too sluggish and dream-like to focus properly. It didn't seem so important now that the pain was gone. He just wanted to rest awhile…

Another question nagged at him, though, kept him from welcome oblivion. More than what he wanted or why, who was this other consciousness, and how did he get into his mind?

Slowly, he drug open eyes that had drifted to slits, but the glimpse he had hoped for of the one sitting next to him in the shadows was thwarted. He was gone. All Ryou could see now was his own hand, lying limp on the floor.

He let himself sink back down to that dreamlike place in his mind, but not so far as to lose consciousness completely. Much as he wanted to sleep, he wanted to know more about the other mind first, and it seemed the only way he would know that would be to be where he was, sorting through Ryou's deepest memories. He imagined himself standing at the other's shoulder, watching as he rifled through Ryou's past, and just as in a dream, the imagining of it made it so. He didn't notice Ryou at all, so concentrated was he on his task. He was treating Ryou's memories more carefully than before, but it was obvious he still wasn't finding what he wanted, and was becoming frustrated.

It was strange looking at him, because it was like seeing, but there was nothing visual to register at all. Nothing like color or shape to remember later, but he could still 'see' movement, emotion and attitude translated to him as expression and posture, when there was no face and no body to express.

"What are you looking for?" he asked, all unmeaning to.

The other froze, and Ryou felt that he turned to look at him as his attention came to include him. For a moment, Ryou thought he might ignore the question, or pull away from him completely, but eventually he answered. A memory, he said, the voice purely within Ryou's mind. A memory of yours that is like one of mine.

"Why?" Ryou asked, and became aware that he was speaking the word as much as thinking it.

Another pause. Then, Convergence.

The single word explanation did nothing to dispel Ryou's confusion, but he accepted it anyway. In his current state he couldn't find the energy to ask the other to be plainer or to question who he was. Instead he allowed himself to drift away like a wisp of smoke, coiling between those memories of his that the other personality had already gone through. The way they were arranged, it was familiar and comforting, though he knew he had never been in this place before. He drifted, observing scenes as he passed until he came to a place he didn't recognize at all.

Touching it with what he imagined to be fingers, it felt solid, a wall of some kind… An edge, he realized a moment later. The edge of his mind and – he squinted through the barrier that really offered no blockage at all and saw the beginning of another mind on the other side. Instantly, he knew it must be that of the other presence. Who else's could it be? Without stopping to question the wisdom – or even the sanity – of what he was doing, he pushed at the edges of the barrier, searching for a way in.

The other remained unaware of what he was doing until Ryou found a small chink in the wall and began working at it, making it larger, big enough to slip through to the other side. Then suddenly the other was there, somehow gripping Ryou tightly, holding him away from the barrier and its tiny breach. Stay out of there, he said, mental voice harsh.

Ryou twisted a little in that grip. "Let me go, I can help."

Help? The other seemed surprised, derisive.

"While you look through my memories, I can look through yours." It was a plan that appeared as of out of nowhere. Ryou had put no thought into it, but what else could he have intended by breaching the barrier? He became dimly aware of his mouth, miles away, shaping the words and forcing them out. But the other paid attention only to his thoughts, listening closely to the shape of them. "Two can work faster than one."

Neither the other nor Ryou had a physical presence, so Ryou felt more than saw the head tilt as the other considered. He wished there were faces to see, expressions to read as he waited.

Without warning Ryou was dropped, and fell through a barrier that no longer existed to plunge into a roiling sea of foreign memories. If he'd thought that having someone else rooting around in his mind was disorienting, being the one in someone else's was a hundred times worse. There was nothing familiar, nothing recognizable around him to hold onto as the life and experiences of another raged all around him, trying to impress an alien personality into him.

Desperately he clutched at the identity that was only 'Ryou', holding tightly to his own core as the storm of otherness threatened to whip it all away.

Just as his grip on his identity began to slip, the storm eased, then ceased. A perfect bubble of calm had formed around him, allowing him to breathe. He looked around, but couldn't find why the pressure had suddenly dropped away from him. He gave a mental shrug, deciding it wasn't important.

Carefully, Ryou stretched out into the other's mind, proceeding only as he became sure that the bubble or whatever it was would follow him. He started the slow search through strange memories for anything that felt familiar, that might match one of his own memories. It wasn't until Ryou began sifting through them that it occurred to him just how foreign the other was. These recollections were all bright, hard-edged things, like diamonds left in the sun. It felt like they could cut and burn at the same time when he held them. Ryou, now that he was offered a contrast, realized that his own memories were much gentler, like paper worn to a feathery softness. Memories with the weight, clarity and harshness of cut gems were strange. Nearly as strange as what the memories consisted of.

Ryou understood now why the other had such trouble finding a memory that would be similar to one of his own. They were from wildly different places. Different landscapes, cultures, circumstances, experiences, even the languages weren't the same. Ryou knew not a word as they were spoken in those memories, but he could understand the meaning of them, as one can in a dream. If he'd hoped to garner some deeper understanding of the other mind, however, he was disappointed. No matter how many memories he peered into, he never seemed to know any more than before.

He wasn't as methodical as the other, he knew. There were just so many to go through, their organization so obtuse and complex. How was he supposed to find anything?

Ryou wondered how the other was progressing, unconsciously reaching out to him, and was abruptly aware of him, though they remained separated. He was still searching, his frustration mounting under continued failure. In that frustration, Ryou felt an echo of what it had been before, that attacking thing in his mind.

Watching him, Ryou felt himself come more awake, his body, long forgotten, sending him the twin discomforts of aches and cold. He felt a need rise up urgently, the need to question what was happening to him, to wonder if helping whatever had invaded his mind was the wisest course… when he noticed something.

Both of them, Ryou and the other, were only looking at the events contained within each memory. But they were so far apart in so many basic ways that no matter how similar a pair of events may begin, they would quickly diverge. That was where they were both failing.

But memories were more than bare events. The essence of memory was in the experience: the thoughts, sensations and emotions that went with them.

Ryou dove into the remembrances, now not only seeing them, but listening, tasting, smelling and feeling them as well. Swimming through a sea of crystalline recollection, Ryou lived a life not his own.

A long time passed before he found what he was looking for, and the memory that came under his fingers was an old one. If the other's most recent memories were like diamonds, all sharp edges and reflections, then this one was a diamond worn to a smooth, dull marble with time. Unlike its fellows, it was easy to hold. Ryou knew it was what he had been searching for as soon as he touched it. It was just a moment contained in that memory, but for that moment, everything aligned perfectly. There was an ache in his chest that went so deep even his shoulders felt it, there was a taste like salt, but bitter as well, and a scent that was vaguely metallic. There was a feeling of weakness in that memory, weakness and then exasperation and frustration brought on by that weakness, and anger against everything that existed, including himself. The tenor of everything was just so that as Ryou held the memory, it might as well have been himself living within it.

He didn't know the name of the other, somehow that and many details discovered in the gem-recollections slipped through his fingers as soon as he found them, but he still called into the void for him. A moment later and he was no longer alone.

Being apart from the other presence, he had forgotten how daunting he was. How his personality radiated and burned, so when it was focused on you, you felt the heat of it. "Here," Ryou said, holding out the memory uncertainly.

The other took it, studied it, and seemed to scoff when he recognized what it was. This? This is a dead memory. You have experienced nothing like this in your life. It is worthless.

Ryou shook his head, or tried to. He thought he could feel his body attempt to respond and ignored it. "No," he replied. "Not what's going on, the emotion."

The other remained silent, leaving Ryou to just feel the skepticism.

If Ryou had felt like he was in a dream, he would have known how ridiculous the idea of taking the hand of someone who was bodiless and having them feel something that wasn't there really was. But it was a dream, as much a dream as he had ever had, which was probably the only reason it worked. He took the hand of the other and guided it to a specific place within the memory.

"Here," he said. "This is where we are alike."

It was true that the events of the memory were as far outside young Ryou's experience as it was possible to be. But what was important were the emotions underlying it.

Isolation. Resentment. Loneliness.

Whatever disparate causes they may have stemmed from, the responses that resulted were the same for both of them.

This will do, the other said at last, satisfied.

Ryou smiled, pleased to have done well, and nearly missed when his internal world began reordering itself.

The other took the memory from Ryou, then he pulled a much softer looking memory, one of Ryou's, out of the nothingness around them. He knew that it must be the one that matched the other's precisely. One in each hand, he brought the two together, closer and closer until they began to overlap, one a hard, bright marble, the other a soft, iridescent bubble. They overlapped, merged, and finally fused together to make one.

That one merged memory set off a chain reaction through both minds. Other memories of theirs, memories that had been too different to blend before, came together. The barrier between their minds crumbled and disintegrated, and Ryou found himself in the center of a sudden, silent storm as everything reoriented itself. He watched it all, wondering just how stupid he had been to help this happen.

Most disorientating, though, he could feel his mind rearranging itself, making room for another and stretching to hold more. His perceptions wavered and swam, blurred and doubled, then cleared, and slowly began to settle.

Finally – finally! – Ryou felt himself slipping down into welcome unconsciousness. Far away, he thought he could hear the other speak, but using Ryou's voice.

"Goodnight, Ryou Bakura."

…

The night is a black cloak thrown over the world, muffling it in darkness. The cold wind that blows across the land holds the bitter bite of winter, but the scent it carries with it is not the scent of snow or ice, it is the scent of sand and rock. All around is a great, yawning sensation of complete openness, a landscape unbroken by forest or mountain. It is a vastness matched only by the skies overhead that stretch into infinity, dusted with fiery stars.

In the distance, the perfect blackness of the night is broken by flickering lights moving quickly. Their reflections reveal an unexpected rise in the landscape, cut into with small homes, their empty windows staring sightless eyes into the hills. On approaching closer, the poor conditions of the tiny village are obvious. There are no shutters and no doors to keep out the animals. What pottery that exists is plain, poorly made and in many cases cracked. The little cloth to be seen is threadbare, dull colored, none of it large enough to be used for even simple sunshades during the day, when here, on the very edge of the desert, awnings are a necessity.

A dog barks sharply as men turn a corner of a hut, the light of the torches they carry spills up the walls, transforming the dull adobe to rich pottery, the bronze of their arm bands, at their belts and their naked blades to glittering gold. There are nearly a dozen of them, and as they pass the door of the pottery hut, half stop at the door while the rest continue on. Those who stayed behind slip into the hut one by one.

From inside, there are screams. Moments pass like minutes, then the men in their armor reappear, now burdened with three struggling forms. All are long-haired, dirty, the few scraps of clothing covering their bodies are worn and tattered. Their feet are bare and their hands are empty, and behind the wild locks of hair, all black as the night around them, their eyes are wide and terrified. Two women and one man, all are borne away by the men with weapons, two of them for each of the poorly dressed villagers.

In every corner of the village set in the hills that image repeats itself. Numbers differ, sometimes more resistance is given the invaders, but the result is always the same: the ill-prepared villagers are overpowered and taken away, all in the same direction, leading away from the village and deeper into the hills. In most cases, it's better when no resistance is offered at all.

At the edge of the village, set further away from the hills and where the huts nearly stand on their own, the night is deeper. The invaders are not so thick here, their torches do not penetrate as far. Those that do come to this corner seem small, isolated, not so brash as their fellows.

A small group of three passes by an especially tiny hut, laughing amongst themselves. They are at ease, enjoying themselves and unconcerned. One pauses, hangs back as the others continue. He peers into a gap between the huts, and calls out to his comrades, who continue on without him. He's found someone hiding there, and starts squeezing himself into the narrow passage to get them out.

The shadows… thicken… so all light, even his torch is extinguished. There is silence, all sounds, even the screams in the distance receding to leave unnatural quiet. Then there is the softest of sounds, like a lonely sigh in an empty temple. The shadows pull away, letting flickering light and terrible shrieks seep back into the world.

The light of the torch once again illuminate the hut and the narrow gap, but the man who had held it is gone.

Consumed by the night.

A tiny form appears, coming slowly into the glow of the fallen torch. It is a child, no more than five, possibly younger, clothed in rags and wide eyes darting in fear. He is small, this child, and thin. While not starving, the angles of his bones are easily seen at his elbows, his knees and ankles. The expression of terror he wears is genuine, but while the shadows press close at every side, he steps around the abandoned torch, disdaining its light. He is the child of a poor village that rarely could afford to burn precious oil to chase away the dark; he's familiar with the night, does not fear Nuit's embrace. As he steps around the guttering flame, the light touches him, briefly reveals him. His hair is white as bleached bone, his eyes a startling violet in a face tanned by Ra's touch. Wet tracks sprang from the corners of those oddly colored orbs and etched pathways down his dusty cheeks.

The child has no need to fear the night, but the screams of his neighbors and family that grow steadily fainter, the soldiers with their flashing blades and cruel smiles, those ought to give him pause. And yet, rather than fleeing, he turns his feet toward the receding sounds. Rather than following the irrigation canals that fed the village's sparse fields of wheat and barley back to the Nile, and thence to some town to seek succor and safety, the child follows the pleas of his fellows, flitting amongst the deepest shadows.

The way is hard and long, the path taken by the soldiers and their struggling captives a winding one amid the high hills. At times the way narrows to a mere goat track between walls of stone, and this is when the child's fear soars to its height, for there is nowhere to hide, and the sounds of the struggling villagers – those who are still capable of any struggle – bounce up and down the narrow gorge like the distorted cries of hungry ghosts. Still, the boy continues on, even after the bare soles of his feet, toughened as they were from having never worn sandals to protect them, began to bleed, cut on sharp stones that litter the way.

Finally, as the child's steps are becoming as much stumble as travel and he believes he will never reach the end, never catch up with his family and friends that are being stolen away from him, the way opens suddenly to a basin in the hills. The child has never seen this place before, but does not stop to wonder at it. Ahead he can see the licking fire of torches and the long, dancing shadows of the soldiers their light casts. They are all approaching a shadow, which the child knows immediately is a structure by it precise lines and symmetrical design, sheltered like a precious egg in its nest of rock. The figures bearing torches, and in most cases complacent forms, entered the structure and quickly disappeared. They turned no corners and were not cut off by doors, it was as though the very ground rose up and swallowed them whole.

The child, exhausted beyond thought, his throat aching with thirst and his feet cut and bleeding into the gravel, follows those disappearing lights.

He is still careful, keeping to the deepest shadows and shunning any light that could reveal him, but there are no guards left to watch the door. With the entire population of the nearest village in their control, what would they be guarding against?

Nearly the entire population. The child slips in easily, a silver edged shadow himself in the moonlight.

In the dark and with eyes only for where he sets his feet, all the child sees is that the building is old. Very old, for the pillars standing beside the doors are worn smooth, devoid of any designs or writings, and the builders of something this precisely balanced would never leave it so plain. All fine decoration left out to the wind has long since eroded. It doesn't occur to the child how old it must be, how little wind and abrasive sand it would be exposed to in the basin. Within there are stairs leading down. The child creeps down them stealthily, his ears filling with strange sounds, his nostrils with smells that are both familiar and foreign and make his stomach churn.

Deeper and deeper he goes, never coming within sight of a soldier. An oppressive, humid heat builds as the stairs lead him further below ground. It reminds the child of the times when his mother would make stew to eat, the steam that would wash over his face when he leaned over the pot to inhale the mouthwatering fumes. It's like that, but holds none of the comfort of his mother's cooking. It only fills him with vague, growing dread. What could they be doing, what did it all mean?

The child hears them before he reaches the bottom of the stairs. Voices. Not the voices of his fellow villagers, though they are still there to be heard, occasionally rising into sharp, brief shrieks of terror and agony. Nor the gruff, taunting voices of the soldiers, who seem to have lost their tongues between the village and this underground temple. No, these are low, droning voices, shaping words the child does not know, but which rattle and clang along his nerves. They are so quiet, yet he hears them perfectly, as though they were being whispered right by his ear. The boy shivers, and continues on.

At the bottom of the steps, there is a doorway. Light spills through like a great wave, splashing the wall across from it with glowing radiance. From this doorway also come the sounds that drew the child on, that still draw him on. With as much noise as a cat, the child approaches the doorway and peers around the threshold.

Up until now, the night had held a feeling of unreality, a dreamlike quality dipped in a nightmare that made him believe he would soon wake. Looking beyond the threshold of that accursed room, the last child of the lost village was pushed into the cruelest, most brutal of nightmares, while at the same time coming more awake than he remembered being in his brief life before. This was no dream, there would be no waking.

Larger than any chamber he has seen, the underground temple contains his entire village and their captors with room to spare. There are tall men, swathed from head to toe in fine robes and bedecked with gold and electrum at their throats, wrists and ankles that glint whenever they move. These men are the reciters of strange words, they seem to be leading whatever is happening, standing on raised daises and facing the rest. But what the child sees the most are the great gleaming vats, filled and heated to boiling by fires beneath them. It is the piled tangle of limp, dirty, painfully thin limbs that rest beside them. It is the troughs cut into the stone floor, filling with a darkly shining liquid coming from the piles of bodies, directing it… somewhere. The child's attention skitters around the great room like a beetle in a jar, registering details that don't seem to fit together. The rise and fall of something white and round in one of the vats. A pendent, remarkably still whole, hanging from a lifeless hand, deep in a pile of corpses. Blood spattered on the white kilts of the eerily silent soldiers. The faces of the villagers yet living, some frightened, some crying, and some so blank and empty they might already be dead. The face of one of the robed chanters, hooded and with a neat beard, his eyes so wretched even as his lips shaped the words, his buzzing going on and on...

The child stays, completely frozen, much longer than he ever intends. When the spell finally breaks, he runs, as quickly as ever he can, tearing up the stairs and out into the cool, dry night air. He no longer thinks of stealth, only of escape. Though his limbs shake and his body cries out for sleep and for water, the boy still runs, down the narrow goat trail, through his gutted village, the only home he'd ever known, and into the wilderness. He is not called, nor ever missed. His mind a terrified, confused blank, the boy follows directions that seem to spring up from the darkest corners of his mind, the shadows cloaking him.

One shadow, watching the boy and his reckless escape, pulls away. It wavers, uncertain of itself. A moment ago, there had been no 'self' to contemplate, and it is confused. Slowly, it begins to remember. It is no shadow, but a boy, a boy not of this place or of this time, but he cannot remember how he had gotten here…

Suddenly, he recalls a name, his name. Ryou Bakura.

As soon as he does, the desert, the empty village, the fleeing boy, all melts away and leaves him to dreams that are blissful in their emptiness.

…

A/N2: Everyone make it through the weirdness? Awesome, on to the miscellaneous notes!

Hidden Temple: If I recall correctly, the temple in which the slab that holds the Millennium Items and in which the ritual to create them was held was shown to actually be in Kul Elna somewhere. Somewhere in the back, yes, but still in the town. That's changed a little bit here, and it might be seen later on that I'll be changing the placements of a few other things in Ancient Egypt / Memory World. The reason for this is just to give everything a grander feel to it, and hopefully make it a little more realistic. I mean, in the anime it seems like you could get anywhere in Egypt in a matter of hours, and that's just not very accurate. So we'll just be assuming that the manga and anime were using a little something called 'plot convenience' by squishing everything close together. We're dumping that plot convenience in favor of others, using some poetic license and widening the playing field some in Egypt. Sandbox time!

Story Structure: What we see here with flashbacks into Ancient Egypt, those will be happening frequently, if not every chapter, (I haven't got the outline quite that detailed). So be prepared for plenty of time spent there! I'll be doing my best to keep everything historically accurate – within reason – but if I flub, please feel free to point it out to me along with some source materials so's I can educate myself for the future.

And as always, my lovelies, thank you for reading! Until next time. :3