Eight: Ready? Start Again.

"What…what is it?"

"I don't know…"

"Is it a girl?"

"With silver hair?"

"You never know. We have a lot of strange things going on out here…"

"Yeah, like those owls flying by in the day…"

"Can you reach it?"

"Why?"

"I'm curious, that's why."

Two men pulled a silver-haired girl from the icy river, unsure of where she had come from or why.

With no further questions asked, they decided to take her to the village. What they would do then was undecided - they would let Aya tell her story.

Four years later

Gazing up at the sunny sky, Ai seemed to remember something. It wasn't much, but it was something. A flicker, like a candle, then quickly lost in the shadows of her mind.

Memory lost, she woke up in the village of Tatiato and was welcomed, though it took quite a while for her to learn the language. She was an able-bodied person who seemed quite adept at any type of work and never seemed to complain. She was given the name Ai because that's the only part of her name that she could remember.

"Mother, what's that castle?" she asked her foster mother, pointing to the castle on the other side of the lake.

"None of us know for sure. That's where all the owls come from." She never gave a straight answer. But Ai was determined to find out its secret some day, no matter what it took.

One of her foster-sisters, Lis, had called her over to the forest where they were picking the plants that were used as spices for foods. Picking up a basket, she hurried over and plucked several sprigs of what the village called rosemary and put it in her basket. Surveying the trees, she saw a strange plant.

It was growing at eye-level and was a dark green. Ai tugged on it and it did not move. Instead, a person emerged from behind the tree. He had dark green hair and had a strange tattoo on his leg that looked surprisingly like Ai's. Her eyes widened and she dropped the basked, its contents spilling on the ground. Memories came flooding back in flashes, initiated by the purple cat-like eyes staring at her from under that stream of emerald black she used to play with, sitting by the river, talking, right up until her arrival to Hogwarts.

"Envy?" she whispered, hand reaching out to the homunculus.

Envy smiled. "Miss me, Treachery?"

owari