Saint Seiya: The Legend of Seiya

66 - The Hours of Saori

The beating of a heart.

Your heart.

The afternoon sunlight blends with the shapes in the air. Your vision starts to blur. Your hearing slowly diminishes, but can still hear a name in the air.

Saori. Saori.

A voice calling you.

Saori.

Your eyes look for the owner of that voice, but they can no longer discern among the many figures that now surround you. One of them seemed to glow.

A searing pain in the chest, however, erased your mind at last.

Darkness and silence are replaced by giggles and jokes. Your eyes seemed to work again and then you could see some unfamiliar but happy faces. Women who play with the little feet and crooked hair of a baby girl. One of them slowly rocks the crib as she joins her beautiful voice in a fun singing that is pleasing to her young ears.

Her eyes closed again, because she felt so comfortable that she could sleep rocked by those four mothers of hers. Their voices drifted away until it became muffled music.

Sunk between dream and reality, her ears heard screams in the distance that could have been the harbinger of a childhood nightmare. But the screams ceased and the dream was interrupted by a silhouete that invaded her rest. Her little eyes opened and saw a man in dark robes, with a curious golden helmet on his head. The tip of a blade looked like a fun mobile to play with.

Only when the man's murderous action brought the dagger down with force into the cradle that she wanted to cry, as if she could sense his malevolent intention. She was saved by a young man who has broken into the room and stopped the blade with his bare hands.

He stopped the man in black.

And in his arms she was taken from that threat into the night.

A hot-blooded young man with a warm, comforting, and courageous cosmo whose heart faltered when he had to face another young warrior before him. She saw how the hot-blooded man nailed that young Saint to the ground using a Golden Arrow.

The Golden Arrow that now hurt your chest.

You looked into the light of that golden arrow on the ground and see the face of another boy, also badly wounded, but just as brave.

"Go, Seiya, I'm waiting for you."

The boy left. The brave young man too. Your eyes stayed there, nailed to that Golden Arrow until the arrow buried itself in the stone floor, disappearing and taking all the Sanctuary around with it.

From the top of the mountain she was on, she could see far below a desolate region lit by wisps that sprang from cracks in the rocks. A gray sky metamorphosing the distant reddish lights. Her very weak body descended a crooked path to take her place in an endless line that pulled her terribly.

Someone lined up behind her.

Someone she should recognize if she still had any ability to think.

She marched.

That was the Threshold of the Underworld, the path that led to Hades.

But there was someone in the distance who seemed to recognize her in that endless line of souls.

A very dirty girl with her hair in two little buns on the sides of her head. She was trying at all costs to remove her from the queue, as well as the person next to her, her two dear friends. She pulled their bodies, but as soon as they left the queue, the two returned to the line, impelled to be part of that funeral march.