Yugi stared at Atem, and Atem stared at his book. Iris had given the two of them free access to her library so that they could research their way into the Void. She must have been confident that they would fail.
Little did Iris realize that Atem was spending only about half of his time in the library looking up Voids. The other half was spent memorizing every text on human transmutation that Iris possessed. Yugi was infinitely grateful for Atem's determination, but he was also sad that he couldn't help with either of their problems. Yugi, though he had grown up surrounded by it, knew nothing about magic.
Atem sighed and snapped his book shut. Nothing useful in that volume, it seemed. He stood up and got another gigantic tome from the bookshelves and then plopped back into his seat with a growing air of hopelessness surrounding him.
Yugi got bored, so he decided to look up sirens to see what his race was all about. He searched under "S" until he found an old, thick book on the subject that had a worn cover and a broken spine. He returned to his seat and skimmed the pages.
It was just as Atem had said: Humans hated sirens, and for good reason. Female sirens would perch on rocks in the middle of the sea and call to sailors as they crossed the ocean. Male sirens would lurk at the edge of the shore and sing alluringly to any women who happened to be alone on the beach.
Once the human was in the water, the siren would hold them as if comforting them, and then the siren would descend under the water until the human willingly drowned. Then the entire school of sirens would feast on the corpse while it still had warmth.
Yugi shuddered as he read the passage. He wouldn't want to do anything like that to anyone. He skipped over the rest and finally came to siren anatomy.
Siren's tails were about twice as long as their torso and they were slender and tapered, ending in a flared, transparent fin. They usually had a silver or white color, but that color changed with the siren's mood. They had fangs and finger webbing and enormous pupils—all of this Yugi already knew. Was there anything in this book that was useful?
The song of the siren had a number of different effects. It could give a human a euphoric, sleepy feeling, a strong lust, or a great pain in the ears. It was also used to call sirens together to feed after a kill. Yugi had realized that his song was dangerous when he had started to hum while walking to school and had nearly knocked the passersby unconscious.
As far as the lust was concerned, Yugi had, despite all his innocence, actually considered using it on Tea, his source of unrequited love. His moral compass had steered him away from this possibility, thankfully.
But really, his voice was useless to him. He wasn't going to be lulling anyone to sleep or luring them to their watery death. He wasn't going to burst their eardrums. He was still just Yugi, but with a few worthless new abilities and gills that only served to annoy him.
Yugi wondered at first if he would become like the sirens of the sea—nothing but a monster. He worried nonstop for weeks on end, barely sleeping or eating for fear that he would one day be the cause of the death of one of his friends. But after two full moons had gone by, he stopped fretting and just started trying to ignore the fact that he was a siren.
But thanks to his monthly visits to the sea, ignorance wasn't going to be possible. On the third full moon, Yugi did nothing but heave sobs of self-pity all night long, although he couldn't cry true tears in that form. He hated his tail, he hated his fins, he hated his fangs, and he hated his gills most of all, the things that stayed with him every moment of every day, plaguing him and reminding him that he would never again be a normal boy.
The pressure of keeping the secret from his friends did not help. As summer rolled by, he had to refuse every time they invited him down to the beach. He couldn't sing along with Tea as she listened to her MP3 player. He lied every time full moon came along so that he could escape to the water without suspicion.
But now that Atem knew, things had improved. Yugi wouldn't have to lie to him or hide from him or pretend to be happy when he was ready to burst into tears. Atem accepted Yugi completely and even tried to find a way to return him to a human form. It took a strong and special person to do something like that for a monster.
Atem closed his new book and held his head. The search obviously wasn't going well. What would Grandpa and the others think if they never came back? When would Iris take Yugi away to finish what she started? Atem got up and set this book back on the shelf and willed himself to think of the consequences of his failure as he selected a new one.
"You all right?" Yugi asked. He put the book on sirens away; he had learned everything that he really wanted to know.
"I'm fine, Yugi," Atem answered. "But my search has led nowhere so far. It seems that none of these so-called renowned magicians know anything more about Voids than we do."
"You said that you pass through a Void when you go from realm to another, right?" Yugi asked. He had an idea, but he didn't know if it would make any sense at all. "Well, if you could… stop the spell right before you got to the other realm, you'd be in a Void, wouldn't you? And then when you wanted to leave, you would just complete the spell that you started in the first place."
Atem's eyes glazed over slightly as he processed what Yugi said. "Yugi, you're a genius!" he exclaimed suddenly. "You're exactly right! All of this time it was so obvious, and all of my magical training just got in the way."
Atem bounded off the chair and began scribbling something on a piece of scrap paper. He read it, and then he re-read it. "Alright, this should work," he said finally. "This is an incantation for transport to the Shadow Realm. Without a Millennium object, it's much more complicated, you see. I'll stop it… here." He pointed to a line on the paper. "And then continue it when we're ready to leave."
"Atem," Yugi began, smiling at Atem's sudden enthusiasm. "Do you even know what a Void is like? We could be walking into, you know, nothing. Or we could be walking into something we can't handle. What if something happens before you can finish the incantation?"
Atem sighed, slightly deflated. "What other choice do we have, Yugi?" he asked. He extended his hand, and Yugi took it. Atem began to mutter in a strange language, and then he stopped all at once, seemingly mid-word. Suddenly Yugi thought he had gone blind, because everything turned black in front of his open eyes.
But just seconds later, Yugi reappeared, alone, in the middle of what looked like outer space. But how could he be standing on space? He looked down at his feet. The stars beneath him were shifting, but the stars about him were still. It was nothing more than a reflection of the night sky. Then Yugi realized that he wasn't standing in space—he was standing on the ocean. It was a bit less strange, but strange nonetheless.
Yugi looked around for Atem, but he was nowhere to be found. Had Atem accidentally traveled all the way to the Shadow Realm? Or—and at this, Yugi gulped—had he traveled to a different Void entirely? If that had happened, Yugi would never be able to leave! And it would take Atem ages to find the particular Void that Yugi was in.
And if there was more than one Void, that would make it nearly impossible to locate the Pendulum anyway. Yugi tried to clear his head and think rationally, but panic kept pushing its way back into his consciousness. What was he going to do?
"You don't need him," a voice said in Yugi's mind. It was so quiet, so subtle that it might have been Yugi himself thinking it. "Stay here and be at peace for once in your life. An outcast such as yourself does not belong in the outside world, but you can live happily here with me."
"Who are you?" Yugi asked aloud. His voice sounded painfully loud in the empty and endless expanse.
"I am a friend who wishes the best for you," the voice said. "I know how sad you've been. I know that you've never felt completely and truly happy for a single moment in your life. First you were a slave, and then you were an orphan, and then you were an experiment. What are you now? An evil creature? That's what they think. They will hunt you down or drive you away because they believe that you will hurt them."
"No, they won't," Yugi argued. "Atem's my best friend. He wouldn't hurt me."
"He has hurt you before," the voice replied menacingly. "He knew the Seal was evil, yet he still sacrificed your safety to win. Don't you think that he would do it again now that he has an even stronger motive?"
"H-he accepted me," Yugi stammered desperately. "H-he knows that I'm not a monster."
"He knows as much as you did when you first manifested. You're safe, he thinks… for now. He doesn't know what you're capable of. He doesn't know what you'll become. And who knows? Maybe, one day, you'll slip. Maybe you'll do something as innocent as sing along to a song on the radio, and he'll think that you mean him harm. He will stop trusting you, and all of the confidence that you worked so hard and so long to build will shatter in an instant."
"No, that's not true!" Yugi yelled into thin air. "He… he would understand!"
"You will return to your life and live like a shadow, Yugi," the voice hissed. "Always feeling as though you can't be yourself, you will have to monitor everything you do every second of every day for the rest of your life. You will be a pariah, never knowing true love because you fit in nowhere. If you return to your old life, you will grow to hate yourself and hate the world, and then you will hate the humans you returned for. You cannot deny your true nature, Yugi."
"I… could n-never… hate my friends," Yugi said, fighting sadly for what he hoped to be truth.
"But you have already felt a little of it. This I know. The anger has already started to bloom out of the fear. You know that this is possible. One way or another, your return to earth will end in tragedy."
Yugi fell to his knees, a few tears trickling down his cheek. "But I don't want to be alone," he whispered.
"Stay here with me, and I will love you much more than Atem ever could," the voice said soothingly. "You won't have to worry about what you are or what you do. I will love you no matter what. Sink into the darkness of the ocean, Yugi. Sink deep into the shadow and stay with me forever."
Yugi felt the water under him start to soften. He began to descend into the sea an inch at a time. The voice waited for his response. "O-okay," Yugi answered quietly. And he fell beneath the waves, no stars, no light. There was nothing but darkness.