• The Reason
    Prologue: Dein

    "Run!" He could still hear his mother's commands, the ghost of her hands shoving his sister, a mere babe of one year, into his arms before they urgently pushed him forward. "Don't stop! Don't look back! Just run! Both of you!" How long ago had that been? A few hours? One? No more than a few minutes? He didn't know. The instict to survive and follow what she said kept him from noticing. All he knew was his sister was still clutched against his chest and the land blurred around them as he ran as fast as his barely teenaged legs could carry them.

    He was also vaguely aware that his other sister, this one only younger than him by a scant year, followed quickly behind him. He was sure that in her arms was their final sibling, a brother that was a full decade younger than him (only two older than the sister he carried). Both children (Only two children? Had he already given up on calling himself and his slightly younger sister children?) were eerily quiet as they were carried. It was as if, despite their age, they knew the gravity of the situation. That they knew that they had to keep as quiet as possible or risk their lives. In the back of his mind, he recalled the lessons his father had began giving him when his mother became pregnant with his brother. All demon children, up until the age of four years, are focused solely on survival. Instinct is what drives them. If his instinct at thirteen years of age is what was driving him now, he could only imagine what that meant for the two he and his sister carried.

    His father had made sure to teach him all that he could because of the sometimes chaotic and often violent world that they lived in. He had been taught about everything from lesser demons that populated their world outside the safety of the Hunter patrols to the way different territories were run and came to be to how demon offspring, like he and his siblings, were raised and meant to be cared for. His slightly younger sister would get the same lessons he had when she had become old enough to understand and their mother had become pregnant with their youngest sibling. Her lessons had served as refreshers for him. As he looked back on those times, he began to long for them. Back then, war and the threat of death had never been on their doorstep. They had only been something his father had warned him about and nightmares that his mother dispelled with gentle words in the night.

    His inner musings had lulled him into a sense of safety, making him forget just what was going on then. He stumbled forward when what felt like a boulder fell into the bottom of his stomach, just barely managing to keep himself from falling to the ground. A sharp intake of breath from his sister behind him signaled that she too felt the sudden hole in their hearts and minds rip open. The connection to their sire had snapped. Their father was dead. However, they kept running, their mother's voice suddenly ringing throughout their minds. She urged them to keep running, begged them to, no matter what happened.

    But despite her pleas, they still came to a stop side by side only a few moments later. It wasn't because they were tired, or anything else of the like. It was well within their power to run much farther and longer than this. What made them stop was the feeling of another hole tearing open and her cries going silent. Ice seemed to fall around them as his sapphire blue eyes met the onyx black of his sister's. Silence stretched between the two as they searched for something, anything, to say to each other. It wasn't until the two children (he and the other oldest couldn't be children anymore) began to cry that they continued on and he finally had something to say.

    "We're going to need to remember all of Vzeir's lessons now, Kage." His voice didn't waver. His sister said nothing back. "We're on our own now."

    Tensui