66 — THE HOURS OF SAORI
The beating of a heart.
Your heart.
The afternoon sunlight blends with the shapes in the air. Your vision starts to blur. Your hearing slowly diminishes, but can still hear a name in the air.
Saori. Saori.
A voice calling you.
Saori.
Your eyes look for the owner of that voice, but they can no longer discern among the many figures that now surround you. One of them seemed to glow.
A searing pain in the chest, however, erased your mind at last.
Darkness and silence are replaced by giggles and jokes. Your eyes seemed to work again and then you could see some unfamiliar but happy faces. Women who play with the little feet and crooked hair of a baby girl. One of them slowly rocks the crib as she joins her beautiful voice in a fun singing that is pleasing to her young ears.
Her eyes closed again, because she felt so comfortable that she could sleep rocked by those four mothers of hers. Their voices drifted away until it became muffled music.
Sunk between dream and reality, her ears heard screams in the distance that could have been the harbinger of a childhood nightmare. But the screams ceased and the dream was interrupted by a silhouete that invaded her rest. Her little eyes opened and saw a man in dark robes, with a curious golden helmet on his head. The tip of a blade looked like a fun mobile to play with.
Only when the man's murderous action brought the dagger down with force into the cradle that she wanted to cry, as if she could sense his malevolent intention. She was saved by a young man who has broken into the room and stopped the blade with his bare hands.
He stopped the man in black.
And in his arms she was taken from that threat into the night.
A hot-blooded young man with a warm, comforting, and courageous cosmo whose heart faltered when he had to face another young warrior before him. She saw how the hot-blooded man nailed that young Saint to the ground using a Golden Arrow.
The Golden Arrow that now hurt your chest.
You looked into the light of that golden arrow on the ground and see the face of another boy, also badly wounded, but just as brave.
"Go, Seiya, I'm waiting for you."
The boy left. The brave young man too. Your eyes stayed there, nailed to that Golden Arrow until the arrow buried itself in the stone floor, disappearing and taking all the Sanctuary around with it.
From the top of the mountain she was on, she could see far below a desolate region lit by wisps that sprang from cracks in the rocks. A gray sky metamorphosing the distant reddish lights. Her very weak body descended a crooked path to take her place in an endless line that pulled her terribly.
Someone lined up behind her.
Someone she should recognize if she still had any ability to think.
She marched.
That was the Threshold of the Underworld, the path that led to Hades.
But there was someone in the distance who seemed to recognize her in that endless line of souls.
A very dirty girl with her hair in two little buns on the sides of her head. She was trying at all costs to remove her from the queue, as well as the person next to her, her two dear friends. She pulled their bodies, but as soon as they left the queue, the two returned to the line, impelled to be part of that funeral march.
But the girl was insistent and pushed them down the bank, and before they could even get up to climb the little steep cliff to return to the queue, the little girl hugged them both to the ground and wouldn't let them move.
"You'll stay here with me!"
It was Xiaoling.
She called those souls by their names. Saori. Alice.
She screamed, repeating herself to exhaustion, saying that they would stay there, that she would never let them go.
And her prayers seemed to have been answered, for before her shone a golden light that took the form of the Athena's Staff. And her half-dead eyes finally lifted, recognizing that glow and its strength; her rickety arms moved toward the staff and, like a magnet, it stuck in her hand.
"Saori!" she finally heard her friend Xiaoling's voice.
Her eyes were still very far gone, but the sounds the little girl spoke finally made some sense. Xiaoling hugged her tightly, keeping Alice pinned on the other side so she wouldn't disappear from there.
"Hyoga!"
She recognized then another voice calling in the distance. Xiaoling also listened and the girl got up to walk, leaning on her staff, towards that voice calling.
"Take care of her." she asked Xiaoling.
And she left. She crossed the endless line and found Shiryu running towards the line.
"Don't go there, Shiryu."
They chatted briefly, before she sent her back to her body using a shadow from her Goddess Cosmo. Upon touching Shiryu's Cosmo, however, she felt a delicious smell of muffins frying in that hellhole, but then she saw Shiryu's body lying in a hospital bed in the middle of that valley of death.
She approached her bed and touched her hand; Shiryu was blindfolded, for she had lost her eyes in battle, or rather, had sacrificed them to bring her friends back.
A sacrifice.
The hospital bed was swallowed up by the threshold valley and she was left alone, with the wailing voices of souls marching in the distance.
The girl realized that she would need to revisit her heart.
She returned to Xiaoling's side, who was still hugging Alice with all her strength so that she wouldn't go back to the line of souls. With the golden staff in her right hand, she took Alice by the left hand and the friend immediately stopped insisting to return to the queue at all costs.
Xiaoling looked into her eyes and found them still sunken and sad, but with a shadow of their tenderness on account of that golden staff. Wherever they went, Xiaoling knew she would go looking for something deep within herself.
And, hand in hand with Alice, the lost girl walked towards the farthest hills of that endless line. Stepping into a wall of light where she disappeared from that Threshold.
Her small eyes looked out over a courtyard full of children running around, one running after the other, others jumping with each other, many others just sitting watching them play. All the kids ignoring her.
All because a few days earlier she had forced a boy to be her horsey on a run across the yard. The poor boy got hurt and the children decided to ghost her. She then sat down alone, far from them, to eat the fruits from her lunch box. Next to her sat Alice, who was a year older than she was.
"Do you want to play?" she asked, but little Saori said no.
It was the first time they spoke.
There was a second, a third one, and then she finally agreed to play something. They ran across the yard, hid from each other, exchanged snacks, laughed together. She finally had a friend.
One day, little Saori, smaller than Alice, insisted that she could carry her on her back like a horsey. Alice accepted in a square farther away from the other children and climbed on her friend to play; the little one trotted a few meters happily, but stumbled and dropped her friend, scraping her knee on the ground.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." lamented the little girl when she saw Alice's knee bleeding slightly.
"'It was nothing, Saori."
She lied because her knee hurt. There were tears on Saori's little face, because again someone had been hurt because of her, but as soon as she hugged Alice, she saw a subtle glow appear in her hands that she knew what it was; she placed her little hands on her friend's scraped knee and they both watched in amazement as the blood stopped and the wound closed. They looked at each other.
"Don't tell anyone." she asked.
And every day now they played together, trading cakes and little stories, they never played horsey anymore, nor did Saori need to close any other wound.
They came to cry many times together still, like once when Saori was older than then. She came from outside and went straight to her room to cry; Alice appeared soon after and hugged her curled up on the bed.
"I don't know what to do, Mii. What do I do?"
"It's going to be all right, Saori."
"I don't know how to be a Goddess, what am I supposed to do? Do you know what a Goddess is?"
Alice didn't know, so all she could do was to give her friend a hug.
Earlier that day, old Kido had taken the two of them to the mountain hideaway to visit what he called an old friend of his. The two climbed long stairs and met a very strange woman, who invited them into a dark cave where Saori had to enter without her grandfather, but with Alice always beside her, hand in hand.
The strange woman was called Mayura, and as soon as the two little girls entered the grotto, she got up from the chair she was sitting in and guided the girls a little deeper into that place. The dark room was lit only by torches on the walls and the two reached a small altar lit by a tiny fire around a statue roughly cut out of the stone. The size of one of the dolls they had. Beside the crude statue was a very beautiful Golden Urn.
"This is the Goddess Athena, little Saori." said the woman's voice. "Many, many years ago, long before you were born, it is said that there was a very strong woman. Which people liked a lot, as she was very smart and protected heroes and artists. She was considered a Goddess as she had something very special within her."
"What did she have?"
"She had what we call a Cosmos."
"What is the cosmo?" Alice asked in turn.
"The cosmos is an energy that each of us has within ourselves. But not everyone can manifest that energy."
The little girl remembered how she could close her wounds and looked at her little hands.
"Your grandfather told me that something very special happened to you." Mayura spoke, and a confusion invaded her mind when she learned that old Kido knew about her brilliance. "You can tell me, don't be afraid."
"Sometimes my hands glow." began her child's voice. "And then the pain goes away much quicker."
"That is the Cosmo, young dove."
Alice looked at the little girl in wonder. Mayura then knelt down in front of that little girl and removed the blindfolds so that she could see her better. Maybe trust her more.
"You are a very special girl. And the Goddess Athena was also an amazing woman and a very powerful warrior, she won battles and protected people. You have that glow because you are her." she said, pointing to the small stone statue. "You are Athena, little Saori."
The idea was totally far from her little mind.
"I don't remember any of this."
"It's not in your memories, they're very old stories."
"I don't want to be like her." she protested, and Mayura smiled.
"You can be whoever you want to be, but you must remember that inside of you has something very special. You must remember that you are the Goddess Athena."
The little girl looked at that stone doll in the form of a woman wearing a helmet and, inside her young mind, she didn't know exactly what she was supposed to do. Deep in her heart, she would like her wounds to be closed with bandages and burning oils like the rest of the children. Mayura saw fear in her little eyes.
"Don't be afraid, you won't be alone."
The little girl looked to her side and found Alice smiling at her, just as confused. And they held hands. And they left that grotto together into the future.
"Master Mayura! Master Mayura!" screamed her desperate voice again, much older from then. "What does dying means? What happens to people who die?"
Mayura took off her blindfolds again and, seeing her swollen eyes, she replied simply.
"Those who die don't ever come back to say 'good morning' to us anymore."
"Old Kido is dead." she said, falling at her feet very sad.
"Are you going to miss his 'good morning'?" asked Mayura.
"Very much."
"So in that case he'll never leave you, because he'll be inside you. In your memories."
"Can everyone die?"
"Yes."
"Can I die?" the little girl already understood she was a Goddess.
"Yes."
That night she cried again in Alice's arms on a day of grief at the Foundation over old Kido's passing. Her friend tried to comfort her as best she could.
"I'm sorry, Saori. I know old Kido was very important to you."
"He was, but that's not why I'm crying."
"So what's hurting you so much?"
Her eyes were still young, she got up and brought from the desk she shared with Alice a folder with a picture of a child and a subscribed name under the image: IKKI.
"Many children haven't come back. We lost contact with so many of them. And now I keep thinking that maybe they're all dead."
There weren't enough words for that pain, so Alice did what she did best: she hugged her friend and shared her pain.
"These are not your mistakes."
The two friends often fled from the orphanage to stay inside that dark cave in Mayura's refuge, beside that stone doll. Even when she was much older and aware of her mission, they went on to cry there and that girl from the briefcase appeared behind her while they were mourning.
"Get out of here and go make your own mistakes." said Ikki. "Stop crying and try feeling some rage for once. It will do you some good. Maybe you stop crying over someone else's mistakes and start making your own shit."
And then she left, leaving the two of them alone in the grotto; Saori let out an amused laugh through her tears.
"What is it?" Alice asked, not understanding what she was laughing at.
"What a way she has with people, right?" she commented, ironically.
Alice also burst out laughing. The two looked at each other with swollen eyes and began to laugh at each other, lit by the small fireplace in the grotto. Her eyes were lost for a moment in that fire of a fireplace that grew much bigger than it was. Shun appeared with two mugs of hot chocolate offering them.
It was one of those cold nights when they waited for the others to return from their travels. Inside of her, she couldn't understand the sweetness of that boy who had lost his parents and who recently also had to bury his own sister, but he carried on to remain positive and with a smile on his face. The chocolate was delicious.
"Aren't you angry at the things that happened to you?" she asked him, really curious.
He thought deeply, took a sip of his own chocolate and remembered his sister.
"No," he replied confidently. "Of course it has been difficult since our parents died, but on the other hand I was very lucky to have Ikki on my side. I was very happy to have had her as my sister. If sometimes it feels like my fate was terrible, sometimes I think about how lucky I was to have her around."
And now she was no more, the girl felt a pain in her chest.
"If I could choose and if that were possible, I would always choose to be reborn beside her. No matter how bad our fates were. If I'm by Ikki's side, I know I'll be fine." he said.
"Oh Shun," I'm sorry.
"Don't be, Saori." Shun comforted, but at that moment she could see that he was carrying a White Rose on his chest beside his heart, which curiously hadn't been there a second ago. "I still feel her with me. I know her Cosmo will always be with me."
It was the deep love Shun had for his sister. Even far away, in worlds apart, he still held his ground. The lost girl also knew the feeling when she saw a car leaving with a part of her heart away from there; even Alice, who was much more restrained, that day was also very sad. Those three were inseparable at school.
The bedroom door opened and Kyoko threw herself between the two with a smile from ear to ear, still in her sports uniform.
"Oh, what is it now, Kyoko?" Alice asked.
"I'm in love."
"Another one?"
"Oh, Saori, don't talk like that. Now it's real."
Alice was smiling, but Kyoko handed a note to Saori, who was making ringing bells at her study desk, one of her favorite pastimes.
"See what he sent me."
"A letter?" Alice perked up, leaning back in her chair so she could read the lines together. The two of them read the letter aloud together, making flourishes with their voices and smiling at the end.
"Oh, he's perfect." Kyoko melted.
"Rigel is a strange name." Alice commented.
"I like it." Kyoko took the letter from the two and pointed to Alice. "By the way, I heard that a friend of his is keeping an eye on you."
"Hmmm." mocked Saori. "Do you also have a letter?"
"My heart is taken." said Alice right away.
"Um, who's the lucky one?" Kyoko stood up.
"Miss Saori, of course."
They all laughed out loud.
"Shut up Mii, I hate you." she complained, embarrassed.
Kyoko then laughed; what they remembered most about her friend was how good her laugh was. First they all laughed at something, and then they laughed at Kyoko laughing. They were inseparable and studied together throughout high school.
And that morning, Kyoko looked into her eyes but didn't recognize them. She was grateful for the short stay and said goodbye with her sister, who also looked very sad. That sadness didn't fit her loud laugh. Alice was beside her when they saw the car leave.
Alice was also on the doorstep when she were surprised by a tight and happy hug from Hyoga when she showed him the photo of the girls on another fateful night. It was the dawn when she found out more about him; about how much he missed his mother and mentor, as well as his brother, who had a terrible accident when they were younger.
"Losing Shoko was also sad, but knowing she's fine gives me hope."
There were other kinds of loves. Fraternal love, like the one from Shun to Ikki, the love between friends, and there in front of her, there seemed to be another incarnation of love. One she may not have experienced yet, but one that showed her the strenght of love. Hyoga was crying, but his tears seemed frozen in his face.
Looking at Alice still in the doorway, she noticed how much lighter the room was now, her attention called to the repeated beeps of a hospital wing. When looking again at Hyoga, she found another boy in the bed. Very hurt from his fight with a friend. This one always very hurt. Seiya had his mouth hidden by an oxygen mask, white threads attached to his body, his eyes closed and his hair always disheveled.
"He fought with everything he had." Alice commented beside her.
"He'll do anything to find his sister again."
"I've never seen anyone so stubborn." Alice commented. "He's just like Seika."
"And I'm sure he'll wake up soon."
"He's going to piss you off so much yet, Saori."
"Mii!" she protested before agreeing. "I know he will. I can't wait."
The lost girl got up from where she was sitting and went to the hospital room window; she wanted to close it so the night chill wouldn't freeze the boy, but she saw an ocean of stars below. She looked up and saw the stars shining in the sky as well. She found herself again in Seiya's arms.
"Do you trust me?" he asked, his eyes always so bright.
Of course she trusted. Together they jumped into the sea of stars below.
Her body crossed galaxies and then she felt an enormous force invading her chest as she traveled across the universe. A glimmer of light that blinded her eyes before she reached the ground, again looking up at the stars that sparkled in every direction she could see.
The time has come.
"Where am I?"
"This is the Temple of the Stars."
You looked at your back and found Master Mayura.
"It's time to go back, Athena."
"What are you anyway, Master?" she asked, curious.
"I am a Saintia. An Owl of Athena." she said, smiling.
"A Saintia?"
"Yes. Athena's army is made up of men and women who fight as Saints protected and guided by the stars scattered in the sky." she said, showing all the constellations they could see from that place. "But there has always been a small group of women whose task throughout history was to watch over Athena's heart."
Your chest remembers the bandaged mothers from when you were a baby.
"We care for your heart, but we are also your eyes scattered through the darkness."
Your lips smile.
"Thank you for everything, Master Mayura."
"Now go, dove." she said, inviting her into the Temple.
And the girl entered the Temple alone, for at the back of it there was a locked door. A door you would recognize anywhere in the universe. So many beautiful memories, so many very sad memories, so many details of your life behind that door. And now it was time to go back. Before opening the door, however, you hesitate.
"I still don't know what kind of Goddess I should be."
Yes, you do.
"You can hear me?"
Always.
"So help me."
Follow your heart, Saori. All of those who brighten your memories fought bravely by the strength you inspire on them.
You take a deep breath. You finally get it, don't you?
"I think so."
So now go ahead.
"Who are you?"
I am you.
I am Athena.
On the other side of the door, Saori found what she was sure she would find: her dorm room, the two beds made and Alice sleeping on top of her books on her desk. She smiled and calmly woke her friend up.
"Come on. It's time to go."
ABOUT THE CHAPTER: I always felt that the series missed a great chance to explore, internally, Saori's anguish and pain while she was dying at the foot of the House of Aries with the Golden Arrow. Her Goddess dreams, her sufferings. That's why I decided to create this chapter, even though the events I narrate here are intimately connected with moments that I created within this story, so if you haven't read the fanfic from the beginning, maybe you'll miss a lot of connections. There's the scene of her healing Alice as a child, which is based on the movie Legend of the Sanctuary. I also briefly brought up Kyoko and Rigel's relationship and all of life I always find it a rush when the narrator interacts with the characters. =) I also used the chapter to address two things that I think are important: the way Saori finds out she's Athena (we never see it in the manga and it's a super weird scene in the planetarium on the Anime) and how she starts to deal with the responsibility for the lost children. Other than that, the idea was to make her wander in memories related to the Bronze Knights so that the idea that her heart and her strength was also in them could take root.
NEXT CHAPTER: THE LIGHT OF ATHENA
Saori ascends the Twelve Houses collecting the pain of battle to face the cause of all that destruction.