The Whisper of the Nightingale

Chapter 12: Hope?

Consumed by her boundless killing intent, Raven stood, shaking, inside the gradually crumbling cave. The emotions were just too strong, too raw; had she been in a more lucid state she would have felt her control slipping. As it was, she didn't. She didn't even notice the huge crack making it's way over to the newly constructed tomb of I'iwi, located in the other end of the cave.

But in all this chaos, a wondrous thing happened; a twentieth spirit connection was reformed.

"....aven! Raven, stop! Snap out of it, or you'll kill yourself!"

Raven froze. The solidified strands of killing intent vanished in that same heartbeat.

"*sigh*...finally she stopped. I thought she'd lost it for good this time...."

Raven looked down at her hand; disbelief filled her face. She didn't dare hope...

"...seriously, this little sister of mine, how many secrets has she been keeping?"

Raven gasped and collapsed down on the broken ground beneath her.

"...Brother? Is... is that you?" Her voice was fragile, as if on the verge of braking. Tentatively she started to expand her spirit essence to let it examine the deep purple ring on her finger.

"You can hear me!?" the voice in her head suddenly grew happy. "Finally! Oh, Little Sister, having to observe you in silence this past week..."

As Raven's spirit essence tried to enter the cold ring, it was blocked - just as it had been when she tried right after she received it. Nonetheless, she could now clearly feel a presence within; it was none other than Hoatzin, her brother.

In that instant, disbelief and jubilant joy mixed within Raven in an odd merger.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten the voice of your own brother?"

He even teased her!

"But..! But how?" Raven couldn't help but be guarded; if this was her mind was playing tricks with her, she felt she wouldn't be able to take it. To think that her brother now existed within the ring on her finger was just a bit too far fetched.

"Remember how I helped you put on this ring and started bleeding afterwards? Well, some of my blood must have gotten on the ring, because the moment I felt my consciousness slip away from me back at the mansion, this ring tugged at my soul, pulling me within it."

"This..." Raven was flabbergasted. She had never even heard of such a thing!

"Quite fortunate, right? To think that something so small would help save me..." her brother's voice grew solemn; "if only our parents would have been so lucky..."

Raven's red eyes flashed. Her killing intent surged once more, but this time around she was prepared for it; with little effort, she rained it in.

"Woaw, Little Sister, easy there. I'm upset too but, your reaction is quite frightening... Tell me, what was in I'iwi's memories that angers you to this extent?"

From within the ring, Hoatzin could hear and see everything going on outside it. Naturally, he had heard the conversations between the two women; he knew that the glass orb held information about his parents deaths, and the demise of his body, but he couldn't read Raven's mind. She would have to speak out loud to tell him what she learnt.

Of course, there were other questions he wanted to ask, such as: how come Raven is already a spiritualist, and one at a higher level than him at that; or, how could she, a four-year-old girl, possess killing intent so strong that it manifested in the physical world? As far as he knew, killing intent was linked to how many people a person had killed in their lifetime as well as their spirit connections - the more people you killed, the stronger the killing intent grew; the more connections you had, the better you would be able to manifest it. What he had learnt of Raven the last couple of days indicated that her spirit connections alone would not generate such levels of manifestation.