DISCLAIMER.
Ain't mine, never was. Me no own. Does not belong to me. All that crap.

AUTHOR'S NOTES.
Well it seems that quite a few of you have followed the example of ImCrazyAndProudOfIt, and may need to lay off of the sugar. I applaud you, ImCrazyAndProudOfIt. And congrats Ninqe; I believe your last one was the longest review I have ever received. :clap clap:

Okay people, since review replies have been banned from being inside the stories, which I find to be unfounded and unnecessary, but whatever, here's what we'll do. For now on, if you'd like me to reply to your reviews, say so somewhere in the review, and I'll use that nifty reply thing that is now in incoming reviews. Okay? Okay.

Dusk Dancing

Seto and Kisara

Seto and Kisara were masters. For you, dear reader, to finish this chapter, this must be understood. If this is not understood, you will not fare well by way of understanding the utter importance of what passes between them within these next few passages. Seto and Kisara were masters.

As master and mistress of their craft, they had journeyed for an unknown measure of time through the great icy cascades of the Greathen o Hanara's water. It had led them down to the lake's black bottom.

Kisara was exhausted. They finally touched bottom in their temperature-, pressure-, and water-resistant spell-bubble. She sighed and crumpled, in desperate need of rest. Seto tugged at her hand insistently. "We must continue." As he saw that she looked about to fall asleep, he sighed himself, and proceeded to lift and carry her. He wandered in search for hours. In search of clues, in search of light, in search of answers.

A long while later, he stopped, and gasped. Disbelief reigned over his every emotion. Had he really found it? He stepped back, and it was confirmed. He had. He woke Kisara.

"Mmh. . . what is it?" Her skylike eyes became focused, then worried. Her voice was sharp as she spoke to him. "I was asleep? Has anything happened? Oh, I'm sorry!"

He hushed her. "Just look."

She did, and she gasped. Before them was a gigantic magical circle, outlined by mystic runes that seemed to hum, filled in by a pattern of triangles overlaid to form an equilateral star.

The beautiful eyes Seto loved so much displayed pure fear and reverence. "Is it. . . ?"

"A Spellbinding Circle. The most powerful one I've ever seen."

She saw the hard determination in his eyes, and it frightened her. "You're not. . . !"

"WE are. He turned to her. We are going to use it. We will save our Prince and our best dancer. We will not fail them."

She was frightened as she gazed upon him. His hardened stance, his distantly fiery eyes, his able hands – poised in preparation for the very trickiest of magical work – she feared them all. For in the past they had, without fail, meant that the man she loved was soon to put himself in danger. The idea of losing him was one she found herself over and over again unable to bear.

He knew it; he saw it in her eyes. He mentally assessed their situation, and in a rush it came to him that he had to say to her the things he had long been wondering how to word.

"Kisara."

"Seto?"

"No matter what happens here, everything will change for our kingdom because of the results of this. Success on our part would simply be not to have died in our efforts, frankly. Victory would be to retrieve Atemu and Anzu's bodies, heroics to bring them back among the living. I intend upon achieving heroics, Kisara. Also, though. . . it could kill us. Our shielding spell could be destroyed. We could be thrown into a different universe. With the Circle of Spellbinding so large, it is impossible to predict the results of using it. Our lives. . . they could far too easily be extinguished."

She blinked furiously, refusing the tears that demanded entrance to the world outside of her body, to the world that to her existed purely of Seto. She cast her eyes downward, afraid to look at him.

"Please, hear me out!" He struggled to grab her arm, trying to make contact with her eyes. "Because of this, you must know–" Finally he managed to take hold of her chin, forcing her to look at him. "–you must know that I wish. . . that I wish for you to be my wife." From a pocket hidden deeply within his robes he took out a pair of earrings. Shaped like large teardrops, they reflected every burst of energy emitted by the great circle before. She gasped as he knelt. "Would you do me that honor?"

For a long moment she said nothing, simply drank in the image of him kneeling before her. It seemed to him that at one second she was staring at him, and the next she had somehow appeared upon him, embracing him with a strength he hadn't known his delicate love possessed. He took her embrace as an affirmative response, and gently hooked the beautiful jewelery pieces through the holes in her ears.

"So. . . this circle. . . we're going to bind their bodies?"

He shook his head, eyes blazing. "Oh, no. We're going to bind the gods."

And here I shall treat you all to a wonderfully evil cliffie. Now isn't that nice of me? If you want your review replied to, simply say so, as we're no longer allowed to reply to reviews within our chapters. Peace out dudes and dudettes!
-Lilacs