Mengxia

Chapter 5 - Castle in the Forest      Folken stayed in that room, in that chair, until the sun began to rise the next morning. He was well aware of the Dragon Slayers watching him from the door, but at the moment, he couldn't spare the concentration it would take to notice them, or to explain what, exactly, he was doing. He was the Strategos of Zaibach; he didn't need to explain anything. And this would take a great deal of explaining, should they confront him. But they didn't stay long, in any case; they grew weary, and bored, and they left.      Hours passed, and he did not find Dilandau. Folken began to seriously wonder if the Dragon S

      Dilandau had a problem.      Dilandau had a large problem.      And the biggest problem with this problem was that he couldn't go to the person he usually went to for help.      The long and short of it? Folken's birthday was tomorrow, and Dilandau had forgotten. Well, he hadn't completely forgotten; he'd remembered that morning, when he tripped and shut his head in his desk drawer. It reminded him of the time that Naria and Eriya had shut his head in the oven door while trying to bake a cake. That had happened on Folken's last birthday, thus the chain of thoughts that had led to his current predicament. He needed a gift, and he n

Chapter 4 - The Way of Things      A chill wind blew through the unknown world as the sun sank and the two figures knelt in the middle of the dead garden.      "What's a Drifter?" Dilandau asked.      "What's a Drifter?" Arias laughed pleasantly. "You don't know? Why, you're one. I'm one."      "But, what is it?" Dilandau pressed, anger seeping into his voice. His hand tightened around the stalk of the dead flower that he had been picking apart, crushing the brittle stem with a weak crunch.      Arias leaned forward and tapped Dilandau's cheek with a dirty finger. "A Drifter is someone with no control over his destiny. We just drift

Chapter 3 - Where Are You, Dragon Soldier?     Kuaru watched in frustration as the pillar of light in the sky dissolved, taking with it the red Alseides. He wondered irritably which one of the Sorcerers had done that. Fate was sometimes unpredictable, but he was certain that Zaibach had complete control over its machines. Well, there would be no chasing after Dilandau now. He could be anywhere, absolutely anywhere, including on the Mystic Moon. He hoped that the light hadn't dropped the young albino into an active volcano, or in the middle of the ocean, or somewhere else fatal.     Unfortunately, they would have to find Dilandau as soon a

Chapter 2 - The Price of a Human Life      Dilandau woke in chains.      That, he soon found as he came to full consciousness, was not his largest problem, but it was, perhaps, his most immediate one. That, and the fact that he was sitting on the floor of an iron-barred prison.      No, it wasn't a prison. It was a cage, because it was outside, in some sort of marketplace. At least, since he could see a merchant selling brightly colored cloth across the street, he assumed that he was in a marketplace. Prisons weren't usually out in the open, in the view of the ordinary citizens. But the cage, too, was not his largest problem.      He

太陽がまた、おまえお照らしだす 責めないで　もう　All your lies 記憶の中で飛び散る　Sunshine Welcome to the Paradise  始めよう         Taiyou ga mata, omae o terashidasu         Semenaide mou All your lies         Kioku no naka de tobi chiru Sunshine       

Chapter 1 - The Lion, the Magician, and the Cage      The black leather of his gloves creaking, he leaned against the cold metal railing and gazed down in satisfaction at the smoldering ruin below him. Smoke still drifted up from the glowing embers of the city-of the entire country-stinging his nostrils. He breathed the smoke in deeply. The fires had burned hot, for the smoke to come this high.  Another would have coughed and turned away from the heat of the fires when they had raged in their full force.  But he-he had walked among them like the god of death himself. The fire was the lifeblood that ran through his veins. As a rose reaches t