I changed up the order of the chapters because I think this works better and probably makes more sense!

The night air was cool against Chihiro's skin.

She was sitting up on a wooden ledge jutting out from a tall, old-fashioned building, legs dangling off the side of the planks and arms crossed gently on a wooden bar. In front and above her, the night stars twinkled and stretched for miles into the distance; below her bare feet rippled a sparkling sea, its navy blue waters matching the silky darkness of the sky.

Chihiro felt at peace, sitting here in the night. In the distance - it seemed to be far away yet, at the same time, very close - she could see the lights of a small village. She did not know where it was, and yet it seemed familiar to her.

A shadow passed over her legs and she looked up, blinking. In the moonlight, she could see there was something in the sky, something long and thin weaving through the stars. When it passed in front of the moon, Chihiro gasped.

It was a dragon.

The dragon spotted her at the same time that she saw him, and for a moment, he didn't move and she couldn't breathe. Chihiro's heart beat faster. She felt strangely out of breath, and her cheeks were flushed with excitement for something that she wasn't sure about herself.

Suddenly, the silver dragon dove down. She should have felt fear at the great, large animal hurtling toward her, but instead she felt incandescently happy. She jumped to her feet and held her arms out, as if to embrace him. Her lips began to form a name, and her every nerve hummed with the thought of the name, the wind rustling her hair and the green on the dragon, the bright eyes sparkling in the night -

"Chihiro!"

Suddenly, everything, the village in the distance, the wood she was sitting on, the stars, and then the dragon, shimmered and shattered into a thousand pieces, a million shards of a world that never existed.

Seventeen-year-old Chihiro Ogino woke up with a start.

She surged up and off her pillows, blankets folding onto her lap as she breathed heavily and closed her eyes to stop the dizziness attacking her brain.

She had been dreaming again, really dreaming. It had been one of those dreams that seemed so real that, as she sat on her bed, the blue walls of her room swimming into focus, Chihiro wondered whether it could have actually just been fake. Everything had felt so real, so touchable. But… she couldn't quite remember what her dream had even been about. All she knew was that there had been stars, something beautiful and strong whirling in the sky - she racked her brain, trying to remember -

"Chihiro!"

Chihiro started as the door to her room opened, revealing her mother in an apron and with a disapproving look on her face. "You're going to be late," clucked Yuuka Ogino to her daughter. "And you've had already enough tardies to school. Hurry!"

She opened the door and left, leaving Chihiro to throw off her blankets and hastily put on her slippers. As Chihiro checked the clock, confirming that she would indeed be late to school if she didn't hurry up, her mind subconsciously drifted back to the dream she had had last night. Not that she remembered much from it, but she knew that it had been a great dream.

If only she could remember what it had been about.

Chihiro threw on her school uniform and shoved her books into her back. Standing in front of the mirror, she brushed her long brown hair and hissed at its refusal to stay straight. Reaching over to rummage through her hair clips and bands, Chihiro frowned until her fingers landed on her favorite band; a simple purple one that she had from when she was a kid.

After tying up her hair, Chihiro grabbed her bag and rushed out of the room. But even as she cursed herself for waking up so late, the serenity of the dream poked at her from the back of her mind. It seemed to be making fun at her for not remembering what had happened or why she knew that the dream had felt so right.

She was late to homeroom by two minutes. The homeroom teacher, Mr. Hayashi, was already taking role call by the time Chihiro slammed into the classroom, panting from her run from the bicycle racks to the room.

"Tardy again, Ogino?" Hayashi smiled as she apologized. "Two minutes is an improvement from five, so I'll let you go for today."

Chihiro grinned at him. "Thanks, Mr. Hayashi."

She made her way through the rows of seats until she reached the one beside her friend, Kagura, who immediately leaned over to whisper eagerly, "Did you hear? There's going to be a new student at our school soon. He's in our grade."

Chihiro pulled out her pencil case and asked curiously, "Are you sure? There's only a few months left of school before summer. And we'll be graduating by then."

Kagura shrugged, eyes sparkling. "I just heard it from Mizu."

"Oh, okay." If Mizu, the principal's son, said so, then it had to be true. But Chihiro was much less interested than Kagura, and the rest of the homeroom students, was in the new student. Her mind was still occupied by the memory of her dream that moment - rather, the memory of having the dream.

Last night was not the first time that she had had a perfectly wonderful dream, then forgotten about it. Chihiro couldn't count the times that this had happened, that she had woken up in the morning feeling more at peace than she could describe, and then spending the rest of the day in frustration because she could not figure out why. What made it worse was that recently, these types of dreams were getting more and more frequent - which meant that Chihiro herself was getting more and more frustrated during the days.

All she wanted to know was what she was dreaming about. Was that too much to ask from herself?

"Chihiro. Are you even listening to me?" Kagura demanded.

Chihiro jolted. "What?"

"Tch." Kagura leaned back in her seat and shook her head. "You get distracted so easily. What happened? You have this faraway look in your eye." Her friend suddenly perked up. "Is it a boy?"

Silver. For a moment, Chihiro saw silver, a bright flash in her eyes before it went away. She blinked, as if it would resurface if she opened and closed her eyes, but all she received was an expectant look from Kagura. Something silver… What was that about?

Shaking her head, Chihiro remembered to reply to Kagura. "Of course not. I'm just tired."

"Really." Kagura did not sound convinced. "Well, alright. But are you sure you're okay? You're sketching creepy things again."

Sometime in her thinking, Chihiro must have picked up a pencil, because when she looked down at her desk where Kagura was gesturing toward, she saw that she had been idly doodling something on her notebook. It looked like… three stone heads stacked on top of one another.

Chihiro squinted at them and frowned. She hadn't exactly been planning to decorate her notebook with yet another odd doodle, but the heads didn't look so bad. Her fingers traced the other drawings on the notebook cover: a small frog, a spiky-looking ball with eyes, and a curved bridge. Though they were all of random subjects, Chihiro liked the look of all of them together. They seemed to fit nicely on the same page, like pieces of a puzzle that hadn't been assembled yet.

"I'm fine," she said. "And you don't like the heads?"

Kagura raised an eyebrow. "Other than the fact that they are completely creepy?" She ducked out of the way as Chihiro made to playfully slap her arm. "By the way, are you free later this evening? Rin wants to see a movie."

"Maybe," said Chihiro. "My parents are going away tonight and for the weekend. Some business trip they have."

"Well, text me later. We haven't done anything together for forever."

Chihiro hummed in agreement. Her eyes slowly drifted back down to her notebook, and she frowned as she stared at the penciled bridge. It looked ordinary, like any other curved bridge ever created in the world, except that there was an ethereal elegance to it, with its soft slope and the warm light that seemed to make it glow. She wondered when she had even drawn it.

Sighing, Chihiro tore her eyes away from her drawing and pulled out her unfinished math homework. At least, she thought, she wasn't going to forget to do that.

It turned out that the students at Nakamura High did not need to wait long to find out who the promised new student was; he appeared at lunch time, schedule in hand and the center of attention, when everyone noticed him.

And everybody - girls especially - noticed him.

Chihiro, who had been working in the library all throughout lunch and missed the entire spectacle, was told that the boy was unnaturally, beautifully handsome, in not the rugged way but the elegant one. He wasn't outright and spoke with deliberation, yet he apparently had immediately been welcomed by several groups first attracted by his looks, then intrigued by his personality. His name was Sota Miyagi.

Rin and Kagura filled Chihiro in on the tiny details in science class. "He said that he was from the north," said Rin excitedly. "But he had this accent, and it didn't sound like anything I've heard before."

"Why isn't he in our class?" Chihiro asked, craning her head to look at the students in the room. No handsome Sota Miyagi was present. "Aren't all of us seniors in here?"

Kagura shrugged. "He might have some scheduling differences."

Chihiro groaned. Since this was their last class for today, it seemed unlikely that she would be able to see the new student until next Monday. She had to admit, her interest in him piqued the more that he was spoken about.

By the end of the day, her interest in Miyagi was high at high competition with the still-present thoughts about her dream that morning in her mind. Science had been all lectures, which meant that Chihiro had had plenty of time to ponder over both. It came to the point where, when the bell rang, Chihiro shot out of her seat and practically ran from the classroom, hoping that fresh air and movement might distract her from her musings.

She was one of the first to reach the bicycle racks, and kneeled down to undo the lock. Her breathing was fast and she felt strangely relieved when the lock unfastened and she pulled her bike off the rack, prepared to go home.

And that was when Chihiro noticed the boy.

She knew without a doubt that this was Sota, partly because Rin and Kagura had been meticulously thorough in their physical description of him, and partly because he had the air of someone who had been thrust into a new environment.

But Chihiro did not understand was why he was standing in front of her. At first she thought he might be waiting for her to move, so he could grab his own bike, but when his dark brown eyes met hers, she had the instinctual feeling that he'd been waiting for her.

"Hi," she offered slowly, shifting her hold on her bicycle. "You're the new student, aren't you?"

The boy nodded. "I am Sota."

Rin was right, Chihiro thought. He had a certain accent which she couldn't place, but definitely wasn't overly familiar or common. "I'm Chihiro," she said, holding out a hand.

Sota seemed to hesitate for a moment, his brown eyes flicking from her hand to her face before he cautiously put out his own hand. Her fingers grasped it, and she was surprised to feel the tough calluses on his palm that contradicted his otherwise elegant features. She noticed that he smelled like fresh, like summer leaves.

"How was your first day here?" she asked awkwardly.

The boy's eyes seemed to search every inch of her face, and Chihiro's heart fluttered. "More satisfying than I could have hoped."

She smiled. "That's good."

For a moment, neither said anything. Chihiro noticed a few students staring their way; Rin and Kagura were watching her with open jaws, but Sota didn't seem to notice. He just ran a hand through his dark brown hair and said slowly, "Goodbye, then. I will see you."

"Yes, of course. See you on Monday!" Smiling, Chihiro swung a leg over her bicycle and waved. As she fastened her helmet on, she thought she could still feel Sota's eyes on her. For some reason, she couldn't forget the feeling of his hand in hers, the firm grip his long fingers had had, the coolness of his skin.

She thought of these things on the whole ride home. For the first time that day, the dream from last night seemed nothing more than that - a dream, compared to the novelty and reality of Sota Miyagi.

She was soon to find out how very wrong she was.

Sota Miyagi watched Chihiro Ogino as she sped away, brown hair swishing as she rode on her human-made contraption. In the nearby distance, some stink-smelling humans were talking to him, but his focus remained on the human girl on her cycle.

He hadn't been there, five years ago, when a human had infiltrated the bathhouse and created all kinds of chaos there, but he had heard enough stories so that he might as well have been there after all. It was strange, he thought, that this ordinary human could be the same little girl of the stories, the same girl that Lady Zeniba often spoke about with fondness.

He lifted a hand to cover his face, half because the smell of humans was making him woozy and also because of the sun. The sun in the human world stung brighter than the one in the spirit world, and he could feel himself weakening where he stood. If he didn't get back to the forest soon, he knew that he would start shaking like a leaf.

As he strode off the human school's yard, Sota's mind remained fixated on Chihiro Ogino. Lady Zeniba had told him that there might be something off about Chihiro - five years was a long time - but she had been certain, at least, that the human would be able to sense his spirit. She had lived among spirits for a couple of days, after all.

But Chihiro hadn't seemed to be able to discern he was a spirit any more than the rest of the humans. In fact, she hadn't seemed to feel anything at all, not even when he met bare contact with her. And she had reeked of human. Pure human.

Sota shook his head. The Lady had only requested one job of him, and he would complete it regardless of Chihiro Ogino's smell or lacking sense of spirits.

Tomorrow, he would fetch Chihiro Ogino.

Look forward to the spirit world in the next chapter ;)