OMG! Reviews! I got reviews! And good ones too! HOORAY!

Thanks to everyone who reviewed the prologue, you've all made my day.

Next up, Disclaimer: Holy Sprok still does not own Baten Kaitos, or anything related to it. Get it? Got it? Good.

So, on with the first 'real' chapter. Which I have gone and named after a song I like. XD

Chapter I: Consider Me Gone

He limped down the hallway faster than was comfortable or even safe. His breath came in ragged and shallow, coming out through his mouth as frozen white mist. Eventually he had to lean against the wall of the corridor to catch his breath, whatever that was worth. He looked back over his shoulder, heart thumping, but there was no one there. He shivered from more than cold, at anytime they could come around the corner and come tokill him. He did not know what they had done to the others, where they where, even if they were alive or not. He gritted his teeth against the sharp pain in his left leg. This was all his fault. That bastard betrayed them all. What was worse, they all should have seen it coming. He slumped to the ground when neither his injured leg nor his other leg would support his weight. He crumpled in a miserable heap of pain and anger. He knew that he should have done something, anything. But what could he have done? He had been taken by surprise just like everyone else, and he had not been in the best of positions to help anyone else when they came. He still could not shake the feeling that he should have done something. He made a noise like a sob, knowing his weakness and his helplessness, and hated himself for it.

He twisted around when he heard footsteps in the otherwise silent, and icy corridor. His heart beat against his chest in fear, like a living thing trying to break free from its prison of flesh. He knew that he was totally unarmed and injured. Not only that but exhausted as well. If he tried to run, either his limp or his fatigue would get him caught, then gods know what would happen to him next. He knew that he could do nothing for the others if he was caught… or killed. He scrambled to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. He did not know who was coming. It could be a guard, or someone who would otherwise be an ally, but he doubted that. So many potential allies had already been caught or killed. It could be one of them, which would guarantee a quick death.

Or it could be him.

His blood practically boiled with hate at the thought of that man. He silently damned that man to the deepest circle of Hell. He started to try to run away from teh sound of the footsteps, but his injured left leg slowed him down significantly. He could feel the warm blood running down his leg from a long gash from just above his ankle, up his calf, to his knee, up to about midway up his thigh. He knew that he would not be able to stay conscious for very long if he did not stop the bleeding soon. He had already lost a lot of blood, and knew very well that if he kept pushing himself, he would pass out from blood loss. He heard the footsteps behind him speed up, a sharp rhythmic noise above his own out of beat step. He started running a little faster, totally disregarding the pain in his leg. He ran gasping for breath, and bit his lip against the pain, almost makingthat bleed too. He staggered on, even after the other footsteps long since receded. Eventually, he stopped when his injured leg gave way under him, and he fell into a crumpled heap on the floor of ice. He looked behind him over his shoulder, and saw no one, and nothing behind him.

He sighed with relief, and let his head fall to the ground. He felt the weight of the past few hours sink in even deeper, and his losses stood out in grotesque detail, as did all of the things he felt that he should have done to stop it. At least, it felt like hours, but it could not have started more than twenty minutes ago. Everything was falling apart, and everything had been coming back together so well. The world was finally healing after so many hurts. It had only been about two months since the continents fell, but still it was progress. Then this had to happen, and shatter it all. He thought about the others, and the hardships they had shared. He should have done something, anything. Anything other than just leave them. But what could he have done? Tears began to well in his eyes, and despite himself, he started crying into the cold floor, hoping that maybe there was still some small chance that the others were fine, that they were still alive…

"How's it feel to be among the betrayed, Raven?" said a harsh, male voice behind him. It was cold as the ice and snow his land was famous for. There was a sharpness as well, as of think glass shattering. He knew that voice, and his pain and grief was insrantly replaced by a cold anger. He twisted around still on the floor and glared at the speaker with blue eyes that held nothing but hate for the man standing there.

"YOU!" he shouted, voice holding the same hate as his eyes. The other man smiled. The injured one tried to get up, but before he was even off the floor he felt hands grip him and pick him up roughly as if he was nothing more than a rag doll. He struggled against the hold, but blood loss had drained him of his strength. He did not know who it was, or what it was, that was picking him up, for that other man was still standing in front of him, grinning wickedly…

"…And now with the best fuel economy in its class!" went the alarm clock. The lump on the bed groaned in dismay at the sound. A hand poked out from under the sheets and started groping for the alarm clock. When the hand found the alarm clock, it whacked the little device hard until it stopped trying to sell the lump a car. When the alarm clock fell silent, the hand retreated back under the sheets. The lump lay like that for a minute, completely still as if dead, until it sat up. The sheets fell away revealing the lump to really be a girl in her late teens. She yawned and stretched her arms above her head, trying to rid the sleep from her body. She swung her legs out of her bed and walked over to the window on the other side of the room. "Mornings suck," she muttered as she walked over. "Monday morning's suck even more," she muttered as she drew the curtains back. It was still dark out, so it was nigh impossible to see beyond the stunted dogwood outside her window. She looked back at her digital alarm clock. The harsh red lights proclaimed the time to be 6:02 AM. She looked back out the window, thinking how nice it would be to wake up when it did not look like the middle of the night.

After staring out the window for a minute, she walked over to the closet to her right. After grabbing some clothes for the day, she walked out of her room, down the tiny hall, to a door that lead to the bathroom. The door was closed. She groaned. It was probably her brother doing whatever it was he did in there that would take up to fifteen minutes at a time. And indeed, five minutes later, a boy of about sixteen walked out of the bathroom with wet hair from the shower he had just taken. He was an impressive six foot two, with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. To his sister's everlasting annoyance, he was wearing a bright yellow shirt with bright blue jeans, a combination that gave her a headache whenever she looked at it. "Morning Allyr," he said, nodding to his sister. She made a sound like a grunt, and he, wisely, kept his distance. He knew Monday mornings were not the best of times for his sister. She walked into the bathroom, and closed the door quickly behind her. She made the change from pajamas to day clothes slowly, dreading the day to come. When she was done, she looked in the mirror, at the woman staring back at her.

She was eighteen, soon to turn nineteen. Her long dark brown hair hung loosely around her shoulders, reaching down almost to the small of her back. Her skin was pale, from all the time she spent indoors rather than outside. She was tall for a woman, coming to about level with many of the men in her life, including her peers. Her build was not exactly athletic, but wasn't overweight either, average really. She had her arms hanging loosely at her sides. Her shirt had red sleeves with a blue body, a pattern of gold overlapping squares on the blue part. She wore a long, and rather battle-worn pair of jeans. She wore no make-up, had no earrings. Apart from her height, she could easily vanish into a crowd, over looked by the masses. Her name was Allyr Mayers. She was nothing more, and nothing less.

Allyrwalked out of the bathroom, looking as tired as when she had gotten up. She walked into the room that served as both kitchen and dinning room. This was her mother's 'temple' where food of all kinds was prepared and consumed. She saw her brother viciously attacking a bowl of cereal at the table for four at the right hand side of the room. Deciding that cereal was a good idea, she helped herself to the box left at the table. After a very uneventful meal, she walked out of the house, grabbing the car keys on the couch before leaving the building. She turned around and looked at the little one-story shack that was her home fondly. Turning back to the green car in the driveway, she unlocked it, swung herself in, and prepared for anotherlong day at school. School was one of three things in this world that she hated above all others. (The other two items being homework and eggplants.) Though of course, she had to go unless she wanted to work in a factory for minimum wage for the rest of her life. As Allyr put her backpack on the passenger seat, she let her thoughts wander to when life seemed to be worth more.

Over two years ago, she had fallen into a coma at age sixteen when a drunk driver had struck her car during a celebratory drive with her father after she had gotten her driving permit. Though, the coma was probably the most exciting and eventful part of her life, for she had traveled to another world entirely. There, she had met a young man named Kalas, and she had ended up as his Guardian Spirit. They then went and well… saved the world. She had hated leaving, but then, she had never been fond of good byes in any way, shape or form. After that, she had returned to her own world, and a very uneventful life. Life was worth more when I didn't have it. She thought as she started up the engine. Sure, it had been fun. Though the implications were not the least bit fun. Because she had missed two years of school education, she had to start from where she left off, as a sophomore.

She groaned to herself at the thought of being the only eighteen year old in the sophomore class, before driving out of her driveway, and heading off to that terrible torture called the school system.

By three o'clock, Allyr figured that not only did Mondays suck above all other days of the week, but they were also unlucky. She was piled with more homework then bared thinking, scored low on her last, very important, biology test, and had an all around not that great a day. She was in fact, is so much of a huff, that she bypassed her car in the parking lot, and proceeded to walk home. It was only when she was halfway through a park in the middle of the city that she realized what she had done. She groaned to herself. Now she had to go all the way back and recover the car. How the hell could she have had so bad a day that she even forgot to even drive home? Inside the park were areas where the trees were so overgrown it looked more like a forest with an asphalt path down the middle. It was late fall, and many of the trees had shed their leaves like unwanted baggage. The bare branches were still reaching out as if in the act of grabbing the sun from the sky. Allyr had been standing in the middle of such a dense area when she realized her mistake. She turned on her heel on the path to go back, when she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

She turned to look at what she had thought she had seen. There was nothing, save a particularly old and large oak tree. Allyr knew this tree well, because she had passed it so often. That, and someone had gone and carved Jenny + Eric on the trunk. She hoped that, whoever Jenny and Eric were, they were happy. Or at least not at each other's throats. She walked up this tree, keeping her eyes fixed on the bare branches, not taking her eyes off of them. Something moved up in the branches. Now Allyr was sure there was something up there. It was too big to have been a squirrel or a bird. She kept staring, for about a minute. And was eventually rewarded when something seemed to sneak out from behind the trunk where it had been hiding, as if afraid or unsure of Allyr.

She stared blankly at the thing that had crept out from behind the tree trunk. Surely something like this could not exist in her world. Though after a minute of staring, she was sure, that, as it had not vanished, it was real, or she was hallucinating. It was a ring of little blue lights in the shape of feathers. Each light would fade into being as if it had always been there, then fade away as if it had never been. The thing was hard to make out, as the sun's light seemed to dim its own little lights. Allyr stared at this thing a little longer, before she remembered something. When she had been a spirit, (When she had been in the coma) when unbound, she had been in the shape of a ring of cherry blossoms, that would fade in and out just like the feather lights of this thing. This thing was the spirit of someone from another world, who had fallen into a coma.

Or someone who had died.

Allyr could have almost sworn the little spirit was staring down at her, thought it had no eyes or face. She almost jumped when she heard a voice in her head. The voice did not go through her ears and then to her brain as sound does, but seemed to come to her mind directly, "Help me!" shouted the voice, sounding desperate and vaguely familiar to Allyr. The voice itself seemed to echo, though there was nothing for it to cause the echo. It sounded distant as well, as if the speaker were a mile away, "Help me! Help me please!"

She stared at this thing, trying to remember where she had heard the voice before. Why it was asking her to help it? What did it expect her to do? It was a cloudy fall day, the kind with breezes that never seem to die down. One cloud passed in front of the sun, blown by a sudden breeze. For a little while, cloud shadow fell on Allyr, the tree and the spirit. To her surprise, when the shadow fell on the spirit, it seemed to assume a definite form. It had color, but it was also transparent, like colored glass. It was of a young man about her age, crouching on the branch. He had his left hand against the tree trunk for support, while his right hand gripped the branch he was on. His clothing was different from what was normally found in Allyr's world. A cuirass of dark leather protected his chest, along with mottled dark blue and red fabric at his forearms, and additional pieces of leather at his elbows and knees. He had fingerless gloves of the same striped green fabric of the shirtsleeves poking out from beneath the cuirass. His pants were made from some dark blue fur that reached down only to his knees, exposing his claves. He wore sandals of some blue fabric. He also had a tan cape on, the collar of which was high and hid most of his neck. He also wore a strap of the same dark leather as the cuirass across his chest, and a headband of thin rope in this hair. His hair was, to Allyr's surprise, blue. He was looking down at her, with bright blue eyes that were very familiar to her. To her surprise, he looked afraid, as if terrified at the thought of being left totally alone in a strange world who's name was even alien to him.

Allyr stared wide eyes at the young man in the tree, until the cloud passed the sun, and it's harsh yellow rays fell upon them again. With the rays, the image of the young man vanished, and was replaced by the ring of feathers that had been there before. Allyr could only stare at the ring. Surely this spirit could not be…

"Kalas?" she said, tentatively, "Is that you?"

"Help me!" shouted the spirit again, voice still distant and echoing, "Please don't leave me alone!"

"It's alright," said Allyr, walking right up to the tree and putting her hands on the strong trunk, "I'm not going anywhere." Allyr, almost as an instinct, reached her arms out towards the spirit. It seemed to waver for a minute, as if unsure about what to do. "Don't be afraid," Allyr said gently, as if talking to a panicky child who had just woken from a nightmare, "I'm not going anywhere." she repeated.

The spirit seemed to hesitate for a little longer, before floating down in a corkscrew to Allyr. As soon as it reached her, there was a sudden and blinding flash of light. She gasped in surprise at the sudden light and accompanying pain. She felt like a bolt of lighting was running up and down her spine, and through her veins. She keeled over onto the leaf-covered ground, and fell into darkness.

I'll give you all three guesses as to what just happened. ; )

Anyway, please review! Again, good, bad, criticism, flames, anything. 'Till next time then!