When I regain my consciousness I notice the child who I saw moments before I passed out, sitting by a fire with her back towards me. I stand up with a slight struggle and start to venture towards the child. Suddenly her head perks up and she turns to face me with absolute mortification on her face as if she has seen a ghost.
She draws her small hand up to cover her mouth and she screams out of absolute fear and then faints. Both confused and curious about her strange reaction I head over to her and I check to see if she is ok.
Positive that she is still alive, I prop her up from her deathly limp form to a more comfortable upright one. Then I proceed to rip a strip of cloth from my shirt and soak it in water, and I gingerly place it on the girl's forehead.
Upon placing the soaked cloth on her head, her unrest reveals itself as evident and she starts to mutter a bit of jibberish about the dead coming back to life, and how the gates of death have been unlocked. Convinced she was on the verge of insanity I decide to lie down and rest hoping that upon waking she will be sane once more.
After I wake up I look over at the child and notice that she is still unconscious. I get up and walk over to the resting girl and I gently shake her, trying to wake her up. After about twenty seconds of gentle shaking, her eyes shoot open. She stares into my eyes with evident fear, and her breathing grows heavier and heavier.
Desperate to calm her I hug her close trying to get her to relax. Ever so slowly her breathing slows and her body grows more tranquil. She pulls herself from my grasp and stands up, and within seconds her once fearful expression changes to one of determination.
"Who are you," I ask sensing that this is the aptest time to inquire about her, "Why did you act like I should have been dead earlier?" I stare at her with ever-growing curiosity.
"I am called Aki," She speaks with evident caution, "I just mistaken you for someone else." Her frail voice is filled with lies, like a glass of clear water, turning green from poison. Oblivious to the fact that her lies are evident, she continues to spread the deception like a spider weaving a web at the base of a gutter drain, only to have it washed away at the next rain.
"You are hiding something," I point out to her halting her lies, "No need to lie to me, I can read your expression like a book." And I cross my arms and await her to admit the truth, but instead, the air shimmers, and the forest changes like a curtain uncovering a window after ten years, revealing the outside world, and then she is gone.
I look around me only to discover that I am not in the forest anymore, but an ancient castle that appears to have been destroyed for hundreds of years. Suddenly it strikes me, I am standing in the very courtyard of the ancient kingdom of Mythriel.
According to the stories I have heard, Mythriel was destroyed by a vile demon three hundred years ago. All that is left standing is a few ruined arches and part of the castle's keep. Behind me, I hear a silent and ghostly faint whisper.
"K-Kiera... Kieraieda Dierisyrea...." It whispers the name flows through the wind, "K-Kieraieda has... r-returned..." Curious about who this Kiera-whatever person is, I start looking for the origin of the sound. I turn around and walk three steps in front of me when I feel an excruciating pain overwhelm my conscious.
Too stubborn to pass out again I grasp my head and hopelessly attempt to force the pain out. After about seven minutes the pain resides and I see myself, not in a ruined kingdom, but a luxurious castle hall. Completely confused by what is going on I venture down the hall.
Suddenly the room changes before my eyes and I am back in the ruins, and with the change follows another extreme pain again, this time not only did pain overwhelm me but so did a lot of flashes of memories that appeared so fast it was impossible to recollect any of it, suddenly one odd image flashes in my eyes and lingers for a few seconds, an image of a man with silken black hair and both a blood red and silver eye. In his hand was a sword made of the finest and darkest steel. His robes behold an eerie sense to them, covered in ancient runes.
For some reason, he turns to face me and says one word, a word with so much malice, and malevolence, it makes my skin crawl. "Die..."
Suddenly the pain dissipates, and I find myself lying on the ground. I feel a pain residing in my chest, like a memory that cannot be forgotten.
I spread my arms out to my sides, and I feel some cold metal object. I look to my side and see a sword, the same sword which was in the hands of the dark man in the vision.
"How did this get here," I ask myself out loud, I look up and see a body hanging down from a ruined pillar and I scream. It was the body of a young girl, about the age of six, with a wound in her chest and she looks like me.
Scared out of my wits I pick up the dark sword and turn to leave. Suddenly I hear another whisper the same whisper from before.
"Kieraieda... p-please don't leave me... again," The airy voice whispers. It came from the hanging corpse, I turn to see a dark-ish mist enveloping the corpse and a deathly figure seems to emerge from the body. And within seconds the world darkens, and something inside me unravels, as I fall into an endless illusion of nothingness.