The rest of the group and I had been walking through the sandy dunes of the area right by Sabaku no Yomi. It was just getting hot, and cloudless sky seemed to be moving away from the sun above, the bright circled veiled with a halo of light while shining upon us, glazing the air and tanned sand with a growing heat. It seemed like we were walking through wasteland, everyone around me beginning to sweat, even that little kid, Jeremy.

We paced through the unsteady land slowly, trying to prevent the sand from getting in our feet, and being cooked by the sun intensely. It's strange, I thought. Only a few couple of miles ago when we began walking was the place all snowy and cold. Now we're trapped in a desert wasteland, with no air to breath except the shaking, frightened heat. This world really needs a reality check, I thought.

I looked up at the sun, my three "strands" of hair blocking some of the sunbeams and providing shade for one of my eyes, my brown, mysterious stare glimmering in the light. The sun must be lonely, I figured, looking at its high position in the sky. Loneliness. Is that something I would have to experience again? I thought, looking to the other two Minors surrounding me, and then the small kid who was dragging his feet in the back with a nervous, uneasy expression.

As the reality of being a Minor seeped into my head, I began thinking of the other seven ones we haven't found yet. Would they be like me, with minds not expecting what has happened to them at all? Would they be as mad and furious deep inside as I am? Or will they become my enemy? People who don't understand me at all? Only one way to find out, I told myself.

I felt like sighing. Why did I always think like that? I wondered. Always trying to get the future figured out, so I wouldn't have to be scared anymore? Why? I knew the answer, but I guess I didn't want it to be real. I didn't want the pain inside to be true and be locked in myself forever, like it's going to be with me forever. But I can't seem to imagine that ever happening. It'll never go away, and there's nothing I can do about it. But still, being human, I can't help but not want to remember it. But I did. I still remember all of it, so vividly like a dream, like a figment of my imagination. Except it wasn't just in my head. It was reality.

It's funny. When it all began, I thought it would turn out fine. I thought the growing problem would just go away, like everyone else had their lives. But I guess my life was just different. I wondered why for so long, but I could never find the answer. My problems just got worse and worse, in a way that was totally unexpected.

As we walked through what seemed to be the endless dunes of brown and tan sands, our faces spilled by the blazing sunlight and our bodies hot with the shaking air, I felt myself being sucked back into my memories. Deep back into my memories, a decade ago. When I was eight years old…

"Mother, where is my life going?" I asked her, turning to the tall woman from my place on the wooden kitchen table chair. It was a sunny day in the village, and light poured in from the glass windows by the sink, where my mom worked so hard cleaning dishes and bowls with those bright, latex gloves she wore. From my point of view, she was wearing a maid's outfit, her hands gloved yellow and her hair held back. She was really working hard, as always.

"Your life? Why, you don't have to know that just yet. You have many years ahead of you, and still plenty of time to find out," she told me without turning back to me, her voice kind and soft. The small wooden kitchen was filled with the scrubbing noise of my mother's sponge rubbing against the hard surface of all kinds of plates and forks. Once in a while, she would put down a utensil or plate on the table by the sink, the hard material clinking against the dry surface, all wet and shiny in the kitchen light.

"Yes, I know, but I want to find out now. I have to find out, or I'll be confused forever," I told her in my high, friendly voice. I looked up to her with my big, bold eyes, my hand on the wooden chair's back support. Her arms continued to shrug and move in hard work as she thought carefully for an answer.

"My, my!" a voice came in the kitchen. I turned around with my cheerful, friendly eyes to find my father standing at the kitchen's entrance, his back supporting the wooden door behind him, preventing it from closing. He had a long, intoxicated smirk with his old, deceiving eyes as he carried a sake bottle in his hand, and his wasted robe-like clothes all clean and spiffed up. "Since when should you care about your future? You're still young, you can waste your life for now for all I care," he said, entering the room and sitting at the table on the opposite side from me.

He pushed back the chair with a screech, set the orange sake bottle on the table and sat his lazy self down. His words hurt me so much. Did he really mean what he said? Did he really not care about me at all? Hints, and small hints at that began to show in my eyes. He didn't notice them, being the sloth that he was, but just looked at my mother in a perverted way, his fake wise eyes peering towards her with a wide grin about his cheeks.

For someone who looks so much like me, he sure doesn't act like me, I thought. He had the same brown hair and eyes, except his strands of hair were in front of him, the large, thick hair pieces covering his face sometimes while mine were all the way to my right, and sometimes didn't cover my face at all. His face was long and old while mine was young and circular, all cheeky and new. He was half drunk, I could tell. The look in his eyes weren't right.

"Stop it. Don't tell Walter-chan that. He just wants to know if he's going to become something, that's all," my mother told her husband, knowing that his look was on her. She continued scrubbing the dishes a little tenser now. I could hear it in the constant scrubbing. Right away, her words wiped the evil, lustful grin on his face and turned it into a serious, mean one.

"Shut up! Don't you think I know how my child thinks?!" he outburst suddenly, screaming through the room, the sound of his voice echoing off the walls. He made me jump in my seat a little, and I soon realized I was scared of him.

The sudden yelling must've scared my mother, too, since she had dropped the plate she was washing into the sink as it crashed and broke into tiny and large shards over all over the sink's bottom. She stopped scrubbing, and didn't care to clean it up. She didn't turn around, either, to face the horrible behavior her husband was showing her.

"How can you know your child at all, if you use that language around that house?" was all she said in her quiet, less kind voice. She gripped the corners of the sink with her thin, gloved hands. "If you talk to us like that, how will we ever know that you love us like you said you would?" she told him, her voice almost cracking.

I watched a horrible look grow on my father's face and felt bad for my mother, who had to deal with the monster my father had become. My father scoffed and got up angrily, the chair screeching as it moved across the floor backward. He left the sake bottle on the table and began walking towards the exit of the kitchen, making heavy steps as if about to knock something down and mumbled something under his breath as he pushed back the door and exited. Where he planned on going, we didn't know. But one side of our minds was glad that he had left.

I looked to my mother to see her reaction. He had crushed her faith in their love, I saw. She began sniffing, and took off her yellow gloves. I felt like asking her where she was about to go, but I could tell she didn't want to be bothered. She put away the yellow latex gloves, leaving the chore of washing dishes unfinished, revealing her slender, healthy hands and wiped them on a cloth towel on the table by the sink. Then, she took the cloth and patted her eyes with it, sniffing once or twice in the process. And after, she left the room, using an exit different from which my father had used, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

I felt a wave of guilt. Had I really caused all of that just now? It was my fault, wasn't it? I thought more questions in my mind as I heard steady footsteps go up the stairs. The soft, almost silent footsteps that belonged to my mother, leaving the kitchen room soundless with no more scrubbing to be heard, and no more argument to experience.

Why must you be so hard on mother, father? I thought, wishing it would all stop. Why are you like this? You used to be so loving, so caring for all of us. But recently, you have changed. You would always come home drunk, and come home to abuse mother, sometimes even me. I still had that scar on my arm from that broken sake bottle you hit me with. I bet you don't even care anymore. I felt like I was about to cry as I remembered all the times he had come with gifts and smiles, hugging me, his only child and his glad wife. I remembered when I was five and he helped me learn my school work, being that the beginning was so hard for me. Without your advice, I wouldn't know what I would do. But its okay, I was sure that he would find his way back to normal. He had to. Otherwise… I don't know.

I didn't feel comfortable sitting at the scene of a bad memory, so I decided to go outside. Little did I know that that the argument would be the best thing that happened to me today. I walked out of the house, and set myself down on the three stone steps, looking around the outside of the village of Mirusan. Outside, I saw these two kids playing football, throwing the ball back and forth. I remember my dad and me playing football. We had so much fun, it seemed endless. I would never play with anyone else other than my father. I guess it was because I was just too shy to ask anyone else. But now, he seems like he doesn't want anything to do with me anymore.

I got tired of watching the two kids my age having fun and looked up to find the sun shining brightly in my eyes, its beams reaching the village barely through the cloudy skies above it, the white puffs' shape very much like a doughnut, the sun being the doughnut hole.

"Hey, could you go away? We don't really like people watching us play," said one of the kids as he caught the ball in his hands, the ball raggedy and narrow at its sides, the skin of it in good condition.

I looked up to find him staring right at me with a mean, bullying look. I immediately became scared and said nothing back, but got up and walked past my house, going away as they suggested.

I walked away from them and towards the thick forest that surrounded the village. I kept walking past the brown barks and green trees that were still covered with the morning dew, the leaves glimmering in the dim sunlight. I continued my pace until I found the three-man statue shrine of the village, standing there tall and unharmed in a large circle of grass where the trees were not dominant. I looked to see the middle man of the sculpture staring right at me in the eye, as if beckoning me to do something I didn't know how to do.

The three-man shrine stood for the three warriors that were recorded in history that saved anyone they knew. My village, Mirusan, which means "To Watch Three," believes in the story and probably takes more out of it that any other village or town.

The story goes like this. Long ago, there were three warriors who worked together and would help the poor and save the helpless. Together, they would help even the strangest person, no matter how they looked, how they were, or how they acted. This was very rare back then, since it was the time before the Council came in, which was called the "Ebony Period" in time. In the Ebony Period, everyone was unruly, and didn't have values or priorities of their own and just didn't have any rules, so they did everything and anything they wanted These three warriors, though, did not follow everyone else's acts. They actually helped.

That was because these three men believed in these three things: Love, Destiny, and Truth. They had confidence, and power, and used it for the better reason. Years later, they created a monument in honor of these three men in a city that also represented their kindness. As a sign of appreciation, mostly everyone in the town had priorities and kindness just like the three warriors. Everyone except my father, that is. And maybe those kids from before. My father was worse, though. He didn't seem to have any priorities or love, destiny, and doesn't treat truth with the respect it should have anymore. He seemed like he didn't even belong in the village.

I watched the late morning clouds open up and let the sunshine widen, beaming down more sunlight down to the forest and the statue. I walked up to the shrine and bowed my head in respect, then sat down in front of it, laying my head against the cold, marble stone. I looked up into the sky, and felt myself drift off carefully to sleep. Father, I thought, feeling my eyes heavy down. Where are you…? I finally closed my eyes, leaving my thought unanswered.

When I woke up from the longest nap in the world, I looked up to the sky to find the crescent moon high in the sky. Being the first thing that I saw, it greeted me with its pale light, spreading it across the sky and wisps of clouds that were left alone in the air. Cold, night air surrounded me as I lifted my head, looking around to make sure everything was in place. I have to get home, I realized. Mother must be worried about me.

I got up quickly, wiping the dust off my pants and began my way home. The branching trees clawed at my face, trying to pull me back, but I didn't obey this time. This time, there was something more important. I ran towards my house, which only took a few minutes, and ran inside, not spotting any sign of the kids playing football from before. I walked inside in a rush, deciding which way to look for her first.

I finally decided the kitchen, and opened the wooden door wide. What I saw disturbed me. I found my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief and wearing her hair down. Her brown hair swung as she moved her head in order to keep patting her eyes with the towel, her stare crying red and her nose sniffing and sad.

"Mother? What happened? Its okay, I'm here," I told her in a concerned, high voice. I ran up to her and put my arms around her, trying to comfort her. Her body felt warm against my arms that had been in the night air for who knows how long.

"No, it's not that," she said, weeping. "I knew you were by the shrine long ago. But… But…" she couldn't finish her thought. She began weeping and crying out again, putting the cloth over her eyes as she whined in grief.

"What? What happened?" I asked her, feeling like I should cry too even though I didn't know what happened.

"Your father…" she said, still unable to get a sentence out. The dim light of the kitchen provided little sight for the scene, the crescent moon with a ghostly shade of black around it visible from the glass window of the kitchen.

"Father? What happened to father? Where is he? What did he do?" I asked, panicking, tears beginning to leak from my eyes.

"The village… they killed him," she said, her voice was cracking loudly as the words came out of her mouth.

Right away she mentioned the word kill; my heart went into a state of horror. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, but instead, I had a cry attack. "What? What do you mean? Why?" I asked her loudly, but not meaning it in a mean why. I shook her body slightly as I spoke to her, drops of tears coming out of my eyes as I did so. The bottoms of my eyes began to get completely devoured in the tearing water.

"He was… hurting people,," she said, sniffing, still unable to get one sentence out at least. "They killed him because he had all ready caused five deaths, and they had to kill him before he did anymore harm. What I don't understand is….is…" she couldn't finish that one either. She began crying again, weeping into her cloth like an animal, soaking it with her everlasting tears.

Probably he was

drunk, I realized. And they killed him? Was he really going on a rampage killing? Where was his heart? Where had it gone to? I didn't say anything back, but just cried in my mother's arms, both of us hugging each other in the darkness. We sobbed and sobbed, but the pain never went away. "It's okay," I told her, not even myself believing the words I spoke, my voice cracking horribly in fear and sorrow. "It's okay."

She tried to speak, but she couldn't. Her facial expression was twisted into one that was completely abnormal, her features showing nothing but a heart broken. She shook her head, unable to get her voice out from her throat, telling me that it wasn't okay. But just as any good person would do so, I continued to tell her that it was okay, trying to get her faith back.

I thought that was the end of that, but no. More horrible things happened. So much more. I mean a father's death I could actually learn to deal with. But as time went on, more bad things happened, and more of my heart got crushed. To lose one parent is enough…

But to lose everything else? That's beyond pain from the deepest wound on your flesh. That's pain from the deepest wound in your heart.