Some days, you feel like you just waked from a dream. A strange, marvellous dream. You feel different, as if you just came back from an initiatory rite that transformed your soul deep within. Then, you question what you just experienced, you want to turn back and see. To know if it's still here, if it's real, if the trace left on your memory isn't just a flickering illusion.
That day, reaching the end of my journey, I didn't turn back. I didn't need to. I had newly built up self-confidence, and a burning faith in my memories. I had grown, in three days. The small girl, overprotected by her parents, got a grip on her fears and used this acquired assertiveness to save her family.
My name is Ogino Chihiro, I am human, young member of the Japanese society. I fairly enjoy my daily life, in a simple and ordinary fashion. However, sometimes, I still find myself dreaming about there, about then ; thinking about this peculiar elsewhere that I came across, but that gets blurrier each time I recall it at the back of my eyelids.
I still believe in the baths, in the gods and spirits, but the images keep vanishing, one after another... I do remember, I do, but it's getting away, slowly, quietly, and maybe someday, I just won't remember anymore...
I think that, sometimes, I would like to go back, to return brightness to the faded colours of those old sketches. I t is but a short-lived wish, that I never take seriously. There is an frontier between here and there. I could search for an entry eternally and never find it, or maybe find it, but it would stay closed. Also, I have my life here, among humans, amongst 'my people'.
You can't live in two different worlds, and my choice has been made a long time ago.
' Now go, and don't look back'
The balance of the Realms is thus made. This boarder is a string wrapped over the ages that shows no weakness, cannot suffer any strain.
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"What's your reason?" I asked, gulping down the lump forming in my throat at meeting his dark brown gaze, mentally cursing those eyes that were the bane of my existence.
The ever elusive man named Chishiya Shuntaro, who blurred the line of ally and enemy for me, turned to face me completely, amusement and curiosity barely changing his neutral expression that conveyed his question to me without speaking the words.
"For living. Everyone in this world has it. They wouldn't still be here fighting in these games if they didn't..."
Chishiya took a few steps forward, eventually coming to stand in front of me, but I dared not step back. He intimidated me for far too long for me to want to run away again. Here and now, I wasn't moving until I knew why he still stood before me. For a man as cold, calculating, and callous as him, he, too, had a reason why he was still drawing breath, and it equally intrigued yet terrified me to know why.
His eyes flickered from mine to give my entire being the overlook, making me feel smaller than I already was, with the amusement becoming clear in his face as he met my eyes once more, like Chishiya again read through me, which made me feel so exposed.
"What's YOUR reason?"
I was too scared to move once he shot my own question back at me. Nothing else existed once that piercing gaze of his held me captive. He didn't blink, didn't move, staying just as still to keep me there, so I had to swallow it all down, taking a deep breath to fight back against his spell to stay in control and not become another pawn in his game. "I don't need a reason."
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People had reasons to live. She knew that, for experience had taught her, no one was alive without one. She didn't trust anyone who said otherwise, and in a twisted world of survival and betrayal, Hanako Sumeragi was to be tested against her own morals and figure out who was truly on her side and who wanted her dead, all while understanding that not every reason was as black and white.