Drip, drop. Drip, drop. The sound echoed off the walls, aggressively loud, calling the drowsy girl sitting in the center awake. As soon as she opened her eyes, emotions overwhelmed her, tightening her chest and throwing her into a space she didn't want to be in.

It was her crying that now filled the overly large bathroom that was empty except for her. "Why is this happening to me?" she asked as if someone was sitting right next to her, while her eyes searched the room and found what she was looking for, "Why are you doing this to me?"

Sobbing and sniffling, she glanced down at her pale hands, trying to see something in them that no one saw, including herself. "What am I even here for?" she whispered.

Another quick scan of the room revealed that she had forgotten to close the curtains. She didn't like how the reddened sky reminded her of the sermon about a new dawn that people here loved to praise.

Was there a new dawn? The sun outside her window was setting, and it was setting for her.

She laughed through her tears at the metaphor. Maybe this was her eighth grade syndrome speaking, but she found it hilarious. Her eyes locked on that particular spot again.

Where she could just make out her own pearly eyes in the tall mirror standing there, not quite facing her, she stared motionlessly. A sudden grogginess overcame her again. Right, she had already taken her medicine.

Smiling bitterly, she cast a last glance down at her hands. "What was I ever here for?" she repeated in a slur, tongue heavy, "I tried. I tried so hard, but I just couldn't. I could have started again, right?" But even that was taken away from her in the end.

She didn't want to make another mistake. It was just that she couldn't control her mind. Her body she was able to control, but that was the extent of it. More than that she couldn't do, and it clearly wasn't enough.

'I don't wish to keep trying.' And yet she wished she could have seen her parents one last time, that's how egotistical she was.

She wanted to tell them that she loved them. She wanted to tell them that she was sorry. That she would be a good daughter from now on.

But she couldn't, it was too late. Salty drops trickled down her chin, like the water that constantly dripped from her lavender hair.

Her remorse was taken with her into a darkness colder than the north. Pain, sadness, loneliness, and fear all slipped through her fingers, leaving her mind empty. For the first time in many years, she felt... calm? Not unburdened, but somewhat relieved of some of the weight she had been carrying.

A numb feeling lulled the young girl to sleep, the heavy sound of her own blood coursing through her veins echoing in her ears, like a soundtrack in the background.

Except for a loud rumbling that grew increasingly distant and small.

There was this nostalgic sense of agony, but it was cushioned by a muddy feeling of slowly sinking into the deep. As if #"%§&$ had stepped into a lake made of quicksand.

Shocked as she felt her consciousness fading away, she forced her eyes open. Everything felt too familiar, her heart began to pound and she rose to a sitting position.

Breathing heavily, she couldn't open her mouth. As if it had been sewn shut, she looked around and saw a room that looked familiar to her, too, but what was it?

There were dolls everywhere. On the walls, on the bed, on the desk. She threw her blanket aside, crawled to the edge of the mattress and hopped out of bed, her short legs not yet long enough to reach the floor.

There was a tune in her head. A beautiful melody. Was someone in the house playing the violin? In the middle of the night?

She stood by a room where the light shone through a crack. "You are so good at this, Row. You could be a master one day."

"You're just saying that," a sad voice replied, "I'm still not as good as you."

Her lament was met with a warm chuckle. "You know, I'm older than you, I've had much more time to learn. One day you will..."

The girl peeked through the crack in the door and shrieked. The world shook for a second, as if her life flashed past her, making her dizzy as she fell on her butt.

Confused, she blinked around, some of her hair falling into her face. Lavender waves tickled her nose until she tucked them behind her ear.

Her hands were much bigger now. 'Were they not supposed to be this size?' Of course they were, why would they be any smaller?

She couldn't open her mouth to lick her dry lips. Her throat hurt too, but she couldn't even swallow. All right, she needed to get up on her feet first.

'Huh?' she thought, looking at the thing she was sitting on.

There was no ground. It was just an endless ocean of darkness, lit up by tiny little lights, like fireflies inside of an ocean… or stars in a night sky. And as she looked down, she felt like she was about to drown in it.

As if she was sitting on an abyss, her movements caused water ripples to appear on the surface. Slow and quiet circles that grew around her and lost themselves in the endlessness. Where was she?

A sound reached her ears, like water dripping into a lake periodically, but when ripples from the opposite side began to collide with hers, she turned her head forward.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

What she heard were steps. And from the dark, a figure emerged.

The closer she came, the more she could see. Reddish brown curls that barely reached her shoulders, an old black tanktop, a baggy hooded zipper jacket and a pair of dirty black slacks. She recognized her, but who was the girl? She looked even younger than herself, she imagined.

But how would she know if she couldn't see herself? It was just a simple feeling she had.

The girl with the freckles around her nose looked at her, amusement visible in her brown eyes, as she bent down to extend her hand to the older young girl on the floor. "Do you need help getting up?"

"Thank you," she said, and jolted when she realized she could open her mouth again, before accepting the offer to get up. "Who are you?"

The smile disappeared from the other girl's lips as her friendly face distorted into a grimace of pure venom. "Who I am?" she asked in return, "How dare you ask me who I am? Who are you?"

The scream made her take a step back, then another. "I am..." for a second she thought she had to know, but then she realized she didn't, "I am... I am..."

The angry girl changed into someone else. Suddenly she was a small child with lavender hair and pearly eyes, looking at her in disgust. "At least I know who I am," she said, her voice changing again, this time into an even younger girl, with the same auburn hair and freckles as the first one.

Her head hurt. She knew, she knew - but what did she really know?

Gasping for air, she looked around, but there was no help in sight. In fact, there was still nothing but darkness and silence. The person in front of her changed again.

Wet as a dog, she stood there, lavender hair, pearly eyes, fiery resentment reflected in them, pain visible on her pale, hollow facade. Her emotions so clear, she might as well have stood naked in front of her.

She screamed at her, words lost in the chaos, but still ripping through her eardrums like glass shattering above her head, showering her with shards. It felt like she was being cut from all sides as she covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.

'Now I know,' she thought.

"…Rowena?"

Her eyes opened with a gasp as she heard that. "Oh my... she woke up!" The astonished voice was barely audible, but close enough for Rowena to pick it up, followed by frantic footsteps.

Her eyes were burning and she blinked, feeling as if she had been dragged by a truck for at least an hour. When she tried to move her fingers, her joints cracked and locked as if they were riddled with arthritis.

It didn't really hurt, so she knew it wasn't. One thing to be relieved about, but her head wanted to obliterate her existence, it seemed.

"Lady Rowena, please don't get up right away." A frizzy blond head moved into her line of sight, coupled with a worried, sad expression, but there was also relief to be seen. " You have been unconscious for three days, you need to take it slow."

'Three days? The hell?' Her mind was wide awake after hearing that, there was no way she slept for that long.

What about her plans? No, what about Eisenwacht? Panic started to creep up on her, she almost had to physically call on herself to calm down.

'They must have settled the situation, right? Colin was there, the book said he was very talented. There's no way he's all talk, is there?'

She tried to breathe in and out slowly and deeply, thinking of everything she could remember before that surprise tidal wave knocked her into oblivion.

'But what even was that?'

She opened her mouth to wet her dry lips, feeling a sense of déjà vu as her jumbled dream was still fresh in her mind. Too fresh. It felt like it was not just a dream this time either.

"Eisen...wacht?" Her cracked voice wouldn't let her speak freely, but she thought she'd gotten her point across.

Scowling, Norina sighed. "This is not the time to be asking about that. No one even knows how you ended up there, my lady," the young maid explained with disappointment in her voice, "Young Master Colin took charge of what happened at the village. If he hadn't, the Grand Duke would have had to come himself."

'Makes sense. Something like that can't be handled by a proxy.' But she felt bad, because she knew why Norina was acting like this.

No one knew she had left her room in the first place, so they must have been at least a little confused when they picked her up in a village outside the capital.

"I will get you something to drink and some soup," she finally said, "I shall help you to sit up as soon as I get back."

Since she couldn't argue with her, she just kept quiet. 'It's not like I could rap her a verse right now anyway.'

Instead, she took the time to inspect her body, trying to push the thoughts of her dream aside and remember the incident that had happened before she was out like a light.

'So... you came up after all, huh?' she thought, reaching out for the only consistency she ever had in her life, while drawing Mana from her surroundings to fill in the most important blanks in her system.

She could still feel the moment someone caught her when she had lost her foothold in that wave.

'...I did.' He hadn't just come up without asking, he had actually come up after she had definitively rejected him.

For a moment she fell silent. Silent in her mind as well. But in the end she sighed - a sound she could make with ease, ironically enough.

'You saved me, didn't you?' She wasn't mad, in fact, she was sad.

It meant she had simply overestimated her abilities again, thinking she would at least get out alive. Pan was usually too pragmatic to come up without being allowed to.

'I don't know,' was his answer, surprising even to himself, 'I couldn't estimate if you were going to be safe, so I decided to step in.'

'Oh.' That was a bit anticlimactic for her. 'Well, you still saved me, so don't sweat it.'

'I won't.'

With that, he vanished from her radio again, leaving her to herself and Norina, who came up with the promised dinner, helping her mistress up and even feeding her, while Rowena merely complied so as not to upset her maid any more.

Fierce waves crashed on the reefs in front of the black-haired man as his annoyed expression told everyone around him that he wasn't in the mood to talk right now. This made another young man chuckle.

"What, didn't manage to kill her off?"

"Shut up!" he barked at the other. Looking at them like that, one might not have understood them as companions, but that was only because they weren't really companions.

They were just "a ragtag group of strangers who happened to be walking in the same direction," as the newcomer liked to put it.

Said newcomer was laughing at him now. "I won't. I had my fun. What now?"

"We have to get rid of the obstacle first!"

"No, we need to watch her first, fool," the only woman at the meeting chimed in, silencing the angry man as she tossed her long hair over her shoulder, "is she truly such a problem? You saw her fight."

"But the Harbinger of Destruction came to save her. He didn't have to, they don't have a covenant. We don't even know when they made contact."

It was the laughing guy, after he finally caught his breath, laying down some painful truth. They hadn't paid attention and now this happened.

"Quiet," a tall man in a black cloak stepped in after hearing their childishness for a while, then he turned around, "what do you make of it?"

"I don't know," said a small figure, cloaked like the other, sitting on a large rock nearby, "but I do know that she is the first of her kind."

The others looked at him a bit funny because he hadn't made himself clear yet. So he shrugged his slender shoulders and looked up as the red of the sunset receded, leaving the starry sky behind.

"She's the only person I have ever seen... change her own fate twice."