SAORI:
"What do you mean by "gone"!?" I knew I sounded a bit harsher than I should have but I was past the point where I could control myself. Ikki looked up at me from where he sat, his eyes were shadowed and I could feel his pain through the empathic link I shared with my warriors; he sighed and bit his lip. Seiya sat down beside him and Shiryu put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Ikki refused none of these demonstrations of care as he normally would have, but instead leaned slightly against Seiya. Shiryu gave me a scolding look. I fought for calmness to return to me.
"Please Ikki, try to think if he said something that might help us find him." The Phoenix seemed to have been stripped of all his pride.
"He was already gone when I went into the room." Shiryu squeezed his shoulder.
The plot was thickening, and the solutions to the puzzle grew harder to find. My human side abhorred that but the divine side of my being loved complicated puzzles.
"Should we consider Shun a potential enemy then?" I hated having to ask that question, but it was necessary nevertheless; if Shun was out to find the God that had possessed him not so long ago and wreaked havoc into our lives it was not entirely impossible for us to have to put him into our enemy lists. Ikki nodded slightly, acknowledging the truth and depth of our situation, but hating it just the same. Having been forced to go into hell to save me had left severe psychological wounds in my saints, not to mention that not one of them was able to burn his
cosmo to a descent level without passing out from either pain or tiredness. The mere thought of having to face Hades again made me shudder despite the warmth of the room.
If only Shun had told us what was going on....

Shiryu’s deep voice broke my concentration:
"If he claims he is going to look for Hades then the possibility of repossession is discarded for it means that whatever Shun is doing, he is doing it by his own free will." I started. He was right, was Shun some kind of masochist then?
"My brother hates fights! He loathes them! You aren’t sugesting he’d willingly associate with a God whose main task is to kill?" Ikki had a point there too. This was getting stranger by the minute.
"What if the Hades we fought and the one Shun wants to find are different?" We all looked at Seiya as if he was crazy.
"What do you mean?" I demanded.
"Saga claimed to be Ares, but we know quite well that he was not, so..."
"So what you are saying..." Ventured Shiryu. "...Is that Shun is looking for somebody who claims to be Hades, but is not?"
"No, what I am saying is that there is the possibility that the being we fought wasn’t Hades, and that Shun is out to find the real one."
His rationale was quite interesting, it was strange for him to come up with something like that when he was usually blind to nuances of any kind.
"Speaking of which; Seiya, what do you know?"
He transfered his brown gaze onto me and smiled sadly. "Not much, I remember feeling as if I had betrayed the most important thing in the world, but now that I’m here what had seemed so clear to me in hell is blurry. I don’t know... I think it has something to do with our past lives."
We all considered this for a while. Past lives? I had many but I wasn’t so sure about them.
"A past cycle?" I offered helpfully.
"No, before any cycles"
Before all cycles? Stranger and stranger by the minute. Ikki got up and faced us.
"I suggest we all go to sleep and talk about this when we are rested and calmer."
I nodded and sent them all to their respective rooms.

I then proceded to follow Ikki into his own small quarters.
"I won’t stop you, but I wanted to ask you to keep in touch if you find anything."
He chuckled softly. "So you knew I was leaving?"
"It was obvious." I said smiling.
He let out a mirthless laugh and nodded. "Fine, if it will make you feel better" He was toughing it out as usual, I prayed Shun’s sudden change wouldn’t drive him away forever; none of us were very close to him due to his sarcastic know-it-all attitude, but we did care for him.
I touched his shoulder, my face becoming concerned.
"I know we don’t get along very well, but I care for you Ikki. Be careful."
Having said this I turned round and left him alone, knowing he would rather cry in private than with me watching.

The next morning he was gone. Seiya and Shiryu didn’t ask any questions as to his whereabouts and I offered no explanations. All we had left to do was keep on trying to get answers out of Hyoga.

Before he left.
 

HILDA:
I sighed and gace Freya a dispairing look. She returned it and smiled without humour, the situation was growing weirder every second. I had had enough with the appearance of dragons in Asgard which was followed by an amount of spiritual activity never imagined before. Oh! And how could I forget the little dragons, they seemed to show up wherever I looked.
Then again, none of that could be compared to the surprise that awaited me this morning.
"Should we warn Athena?" Asked Freya in a hushed whisper, afraid the question would alter our... Visitors.
I nodded my head numbly, as if her knowing what was wrong would change the situation! But she may be able to offer protection...
No, not with her present problems. Besides the only one who would have been comfortable with our artic climate was Hyoga and he had clearly stated he wanted nothing with me or Freya. My sister had come back from Greece on the border of a nervous breakdown, I wasn’t to keen on the idea of putting her into that state again. Ikki was far too violent for me to bear his prescence, even if it was for my own safety; Shiryu would be a good backup, but I suspected that for that precise reason she would rather he stayed with her; Shun was; or used to be, a friendly person, too friendly to be a good bodyguard and finally Seiya, he was too weak and confused to be of asistance, Saori had sent me a message saying he was awake, but not very well yet.
So it was just Freya and me... Why was I afraid anyway? I shouldn’t be afraid, but feel safer! It was just that the whole situation was like something out of a storybook.
"Yes, tell her. She might not be able to help but it’s better to keep her informed." Freya bowed softly and left to send the message, probably via E-mail. Computers weren’t exactly what one would expect to find at Asgard, but they were useful so we kept a few around anyway.
"Come in." I told the assembled warriors and led them inside. I was Odin’s priestess, I ought to be able to handle this alone!
"Lady...." The voice I had known all my life and thought lost forever pierced my ears.
"Later, Sigfried... We will talk in private, I promise, but for now just answer my questions."
I figured that the only way to find out if these persons were truly my God warriors was by subjecting them to a very detailed questioning, and if they proved to be authentic... Well, if that happened there was a lot to update them to so I had better be quick.
 

MILO:
The streets of Greece were crowded with tourists and inmigrants, all of them laughing and talking like the carefree children they were at heart. They were oblivious to the fact that this country was quite possibly one of the most dangerous places to be at right now and that they were walking right past a serious killer. After all, warrior or not, I had killed so many people it was hard to keep count of them, a few more or less wouldn’t clean or dirty the slate for me anymore than it already was.
Shaka walked beside me wearing a pair of pitch-black sunglasses, if he thought that was the best way to hide the fact that he kept his eyes closed he had been wrong. True, he didn’t look blind, but the glasses contrasted awfully with his old-fashioned cream-coloured loose pants and shirt. In the end he was still the focus of atention. As to me, I wore a pair of faded jeans and a red blouse unbuttoned at the front, my hair fell loosely behind me, ocationally lifted off my shoulders by some light breeze. There wasn’t a single woman that didn’t turn round to look at me in awe. They obvoiusly thought I was stunning... I enjoyed the praise but now was not the time to indulge in such banal activities as flirting so I ignored their admiring stares.
"We should have dressed differently." Said Shaka in his customary lifeless tone. I shook my head and laughed at his comment. A small frown appeared on his brow, he did not like being the object of amusement of any kind.
"You and your glassess would stand out anywhere!" I said still laughing heartily. The barest suggestion of a sly smile tugged at Shaka’s lips.
"I meant you, Milo. You dress too seductively to pass unnoticed." I stopped walking and faced him fearlessly. After all, none of us had regained our cosmo yet.
"What is so seductive about jeans and a red blouse?" I demanded, a daring smile on my face. Shaka raised an eyebrow.
"You mean those skin-tight jeans and the blouse you wear open to share your pectorals with the world?" He asked with a hint of sarcasm in his voice. I blushed and looked at myself in one of the store windows. I never actually thought of what I weared, I just grabbed the thing closest to me and put it on, yet now that Shaka mentioned it I realized that I indeed never wore anything that wasn’t sexy. It just came out natural to me.
"I like my clothes." I added defensively. Shaka had a tendency to be too frank and ended up getting on my nerves. But that was because I was a bit of a cynic sometimes. I hated lies, but couldn’t bring myself to speak honestly with my companions. I wasn’t used to being friendly, my job had been to kill skillfully and spy on people, public relations weren’t my strong point.
Shaka sighed and smiled in a friendly way. "It’s not the clothes but who wears them." He murmured. I stayed in silence for a while, wondering if I was supposed to answer to that. I let my sly smile slide into place and begun walking again.
"Come on." I said in a purring and very seductive tone. "We have to buy the food before everybody starves to death."
Shaka followed me ignoring my goading response to his friendly comment. But he didn’t speak to me again that day. I wished I had chosen my words better, or had kept my mouth shut. I sort of liked Shaka and his calm ways, I just didn’t know how to be with him. Or anybody for that matter.

Public relations were definitively not one of my strong points.
 

JOHDAS:
Greece was indeed larger than I had expected, full of strange ruins and old monuments to long forgotten heroes; a country that depended on its past. After all, weren’t the old temples and archaic buildings what made this country a major tourist site? Iylden loved archeology so even though this trip was beginning to look like a waste of time he was enjoying himself; and to think he had been the one to oppose this voyage more strongly! Sadly, Aeyr, who had been slightly more supportive; hadn’t stopped sulking since we arrived. I hadn’t had a single dream in all the time we had spent here so it seemed like we had better give up and go back home.

"Let’s go and eat something, I’m half starved!" Complained Aeyr who was by now quite fed up with walking aimlessly through the streets. Iylden nodded absently looking at the scenery. We hadn’t gone near the sanctuary for we had found out that it was closely guarded by soldiers. (We had given up after having been barely able to escape the spears and arrows thrown at us when we approached) That had been our only clue and there was no way to use it. We had searched some hospitals but not being family of anybody there we had been promptly dispatched by the security guards; finally we had tried with the police but they had refused to give any information to us since we were inmigrants and did not have a citizenship. Our money was running out so we had decided not to eat too much and have a late afternoon tea instead of dinner.
It was no wonder Aeyr was hungry.
"We had lunch only an hour ago." I answered calmly, feeling my stomach protest the denial of food.
"You mean that little egg acompanied by three lettuce leafs?" Aeyr had a tendency to be ironic in the wrong moments.
"It was two scrambled eggs in your case Aeyr." Put in Iylden a bit angrily. "Or do I have to remind you you ate mine too?"
Aeyr fell silent and looked away. I shook my head and sighed. Close to us a blond haired man was arguing with a rather sexily dressed person. Their brawl didn’t last long and they walked away together in silence, leaving us behind.
"We need the money to keep moving Aeyr." I whispered hoping not to upset him any further. He whirled and glared at me, fury shone in his eyes.
"What do we need the money for if you know that it’s impossible to find Lim!! It was nothing but a dream Johdas, We have always been close so why couldn’t we have a shared dream once! Lim doesn’t exist! It was all inside our heads and I only accepted to help you to come here because I thought it would make you see what a fool you are making of yourself!!"
I winced and stepped away from him. "So you pretended to understand me and followed me just because you felt sorry for me? You never truly believed the dreams could be real?" I leaned on a light post and looked up at the sky. Iylden said nothing to stop the discussion. I turned my head towards him and asked what he hadn’t dared to say aloud.
"Do you believe in the dreams Iylden?" He stared at me, then at Aeyr and finally fixed his honey-coloured gaze onto his shoes.
"No..." But I could hear the indecision in his voice. Aeyr gave me a look of triumph and said:
"Now that that’s been settled I propose that we go home and forget this nonesense." He face was hard as stone but I could see pain in his eyes. He DID believe in the dreams but he was denying them! I had always felt so close to them but now I couldn’t tell what was wrong, why lie to me?
"Alright" I said in a defeated tone of voice. "Let’s go and eat something and then try to find a cheap way to get home."

As we walked towards a restaurant I glanced at my watch and realized it wasn’t working. I stopped a girl and asked her to tell me what time it was.
"5:30" She said.
As she spoke I was suddently siezed by a wave of deja vú. The emotion was so strong that I followed her with my eyes as she walked away, wondering who she was as her long lilac hair floated in the breeze behind her, farther and farther away; until she was just a small pinpoint in the sea of people who walked the steets of Greece every day.
 

SAORI:
I walked back towards the hospital sighing. I didn’t know why but lately I felt as if I didn’t care about what happened to Shun or Hyoga, it was strange....
A young man stopped me and asked me what time it was, I glanced at my wristwatch and told him it was five thirty. He was a rather tall youth of seventeen or something, handsome yet unsettling. His vermilion gaze fixed on me curiously, as if trying to remember something. I would have thought him very attractive if his skin had been darker, but he was whiter than snow and that, coupled with the ebony hair and the blood-coloured eyes gave him a sense of unreality.
I felt a wave of deja-vú roll through me...
I sighed for the umpteenth time that day and turned to walk away feeling his eyes boring holes into my back; I had the odd feeling that this was not the first time I had met this person... And that it wouldn’t be the last.
The wind tossed my hair making it swirl around me, normally I would have laughed and tried to smooth it down, but I felt so cold inside...
I had kissed Seiya, only now I didn’t feel anything for him.... Or anybody. It was as if something had frozen my emotions. The worst part was that I truly didn’t care.
I felt devoid of all emotions and dreams, as if something cold and heartless were trying to break through me to the surface.
Something that was me, yet not me.
An old part of myself, one that I wanted to forget....
 

KANON:
I had been living with Julian and Sorrento for a few days already and I felt comfortable with them around. I had never felt like that with anybody... I had been given a spacious room decorated with ivory-coloured curtains and walls, the soft carpet and delicately woven beadspread were a shade of a deep rich blue; the bedposts and bedsidetable were made of dark smoothly carved wood and all the other bits and pieces of furniture in the room were cream-coloured and very cozy. It had dawned on me the day Julian led me into this room that I had never been surrounded by such luxury before, still it was not gaudy, just classy. I had expected to be given the room and treatment of a servant, which was what I deserved after having used them in such a cruel way, but they had put me in a room fit for a king and had treated me like a long lost friend.
Ever since I could remember I had never been treated with such kindness; everybody liked Saga, even after he tried to kill Athena they forgave him, I did the same mistake and recieved no such deference, not even after I admited repentance and Athena herself asked me to join her against Hades, but I had known they would do that anyway, it was a small price to pay in order to save my brother. Milo had acknowledged me as a true Gold saint but not before testing me harshly, and I knew that even then he distrusted me. The bronze saints had tried to be cheerful about my presence during the last battle but they obviuosly thought that if given a chance I would join Hades. I had never known the meaning of the word frienship; when I was a boy I had loved Saga dearly, but our parents coddled him and ignored me so I grew jealous; Our master had always considered Saga to be superior and he had forbidden me to contend for the Gemini Gold cloth. After that I dedicated myself to making Saga’s life impossible, he had never been brotherly to me so I did not think he deserved my care anymore; but the truth was that deep down he still was the person I loved the most... I had become evil for him.
It was said that when a pair of twins were born under gemini one of them would be evil and the other good; in the end the evil one would be condemned. I had known all my life that Saga had evil within him, so I tried to lure it out when we were younger with the hope that he might be able to controll it. When we arrived at the Sanctuary I saw the evil side of my brother itching to get out so I began to perform evil deeds myself so that nobody would notice him. The day we were supposed to contend for the gold cloth my master locked me up saying it would be a terrible thing if I ever gained power and position in the Sanctuary, Saga became the Gemini gold saint. I was furious so I goaded him all the time, it was only when he locked me up in the cave at Sunion Cape that I realized that his darker side was about to take controll. I tried to get out to stop him, but it was useless....
So when I found the trident I had an idea; I found a way to save my brother. By becoming even more monster-like than him it would be upon me that the title of "evil twin" would fall, and he would be forgiven... In time.
The day I woke up alive a few weeks ago I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go to Athena and face a lifetime of  being constantly reminded of my sins so I had decided to try and be useful to the person I had hurt the most. Julian had only been a baby the day I had involved him in the meaningless battle that took place under the sea, I owed him a lifetime of service.  I had gone up to his house and asked to see him, I did not say who I was. He came out of his room in the second floor a mere five minutes later dressed in a loose blouse and shorts. He froze when he saw me and stood there, staring at me in wonder.
Then he had dashed down the staircase and hugged me.
No hatred, no resentment, no hostility; he had cried as he held me and only the support of his arms kept me from falling down. After that he had pulled away and smiled at me, his eyes shining. I had met Sorrento a bit later; he had been slightly more hostile but my encounter with Julian had left me too dazed to be unfriendly to him so he had asumed I would be polite and treated me like a welcome guest. Now that I had been with them for a few days I simply couldn’t not be nice to them, they had shown me love and frienship and above all, forgiveness.

As I lay on the soft bed thinking of all this I realized I was smiling, not one of my usual joyless parodies of the true thing, but a full fledged smile of happiness. I felt like everything up to now had been a bad dream and now I was finally awake. I had also been told by Sorrento that he and Julian were bound by something that had happened to them in a past life.
I wondered if I was somehow involved in that too...
I shook my head to clear my thoughts and slipped into the warm satiny sheets of my bed.

My bed.

Whatever happend in the future I would help Julian and Sorrento. For the first time in my life I felt loved and I felt that I belonged somewhere. How could I have learned to love them in such little time? I did not know and cared even less, all that mattered was the fact of feeling the way I did about them.
I had once owned a god but it had not given me even half the pleasure of owning a bed in the house I resided in now. Only here, in the darkness of a room I could call mine, barely meters away from him who I had lead to be possessed by a sea god did I finally understand what had moved Athena’s Bronze saints to go on fighting no matter what. For the first time in my life...

I had friends.
 

DOHKO:
"Maybe we should put an anouncement in a magazine or newspaper somewhere..." Aphrodite stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me in utter surprise. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she thought I had gone insane.
"Are you out of your mind?!" She wailed miserably. "What kind of idea is that one?!"
"I know it sounds crazy but it may be a good idea. Think about it, if any of the others read the article they would contact us so it would help us find them sooner." I tried to sound calm and reassuring. Not that it was hard anyway, I had spent most of my life meditating and waiting patiently for the day of Hades’s rebirth to come; tranquility was something that I had mastered to perfection in order to be able to bear the long wait.
"I can just see it..." She grumbled irritably. "Hello there! We are the resurrected saints of Athena who are searching for the other born-again warriors and who are also -telling by some weird dreams we’ve been having-  reincarnations of a group of defenders from a mythological era. Please call us if you have any information!"
She then proceded to look at me in what I had come to interpret as her you-can’t-be-serious expresion; if it could be called that, given that she looked more like cute fairy than an annoyed person and now that she had dropped the guy-act and had taken a fancy to wearing long lace gowns and rose-embroidered skirts her femininity had been suddenly restored.
"Do you have any better ideas?" I gave her a pointed look. Aphrodite stared at me blankly and then smiled impishly.
"No." She said still smiling and coyly fingering the ribbon at the back of her dress. She was quite appealing I realized, and now that we knew she was not a man her constant flirting had become amusing and not embarrasing as it had been for all male warriors in the past.
Just then Deathmask came into the small, crowded hotel room we shared. It had been hard enough to find a cheap place to stay, not ot mention one big enough for all of us to fit in. In the end we had settled for a low-class cheap lodge, it wasn’t what I expected but the small odd jobs we had been able to get didn’t give us enough money to pay for clothes, food, hygiene implements (like deodorant, toothpaste and such-like), our travelling expenses and a decent place to stay. I was used to living like a monk but the deprivation of luxury was really putting Aphrodite in a bad mood. (We had of course decided not to point out the fact that if she had bought less fancy clothes we would have had more money from the start.)
Deathmask seemed not to care about anything as long as he had a roof to sleep under and food for when he got hungry. He didn’t take meals with us and spent most of the day wandering around the city. It would have made me feel better to know that he spent that time looking for the others, but I doubted it. Now he calmly stepped into the room and headed directly to the kitchen area. Aldebarán came in shortly after, he had to bend down to keep himself from crashing against the door’s roof. Aphrodite giggled at this, still toying with the lace on her dress.
"Your cooking sucks, Aldebarán" Declared Deathmask in a matter-of-factly tone of voice. He was right anyway, Aldebarán’s culinary abilities were indeed very limited, Still it was not proper for Deathmask to say this since he was never around when the cooking was being done.
Aphrodite sighed and got up from the cushion on which she had been sitting. "I’ll make you something ‘mask." She said softly.
Deathmask turned on her all of a sudden. "My name is Deathmask, flower-girl, don’t ever forget that!" He stressed the word "ever" by dropping his voice to a menacing hiss and narrowing his already-slitted eyes.
Aphrodite said nothing but walked past him and began fixing him a salad sandwich.
Aldebarán looked at me and shrugged, he was right, the only way to bear Dearthmask’s temper was to ignore it.
I got up and walked towards the door, maybe today we would find a clue to lead us on...
 

SEIYA:
Ikki had been gone for a few days now, presumably gone to find Shun. Saori spent most of her time with me, but in a very distant way...
I had woken up the first time to find her kissing me and I had asumed that it meant that she had accepted my confession of love, but after that she had drifted away, tending to me but rarely acting in a caring way. There was no intimacy between us anymore, as if she wanted to block me out. It hurt. My body was covered with wounds but none gave me so much pain as Saori’s coldness; the worst part was that I didn’t know why she had begun acting like that in the first place.
She had kissed me first!
What had I done?
It had been her move and she treated me like I had been the one to blow it up. I had never been good at understanding people’s characters and reactions, that part was left to Shiryu and Hyoga; but I had been so sure about Saori’s feelings for me...
I closed my eyes and buried my head in the starched pillows of the hospital bed. Tears stung my eyes and I wiped them away with my pyjama’s sleeve. This was not the right time to be crying. I had to sort out what I knew before my friends finally decided to begin asking me any questions and found me as confused as they were.
The truth was that while I had been in hell it had all seemed clear to me; now that I was back on Earth the memories were muddled up and blurry, and whenever I tried to call them up they faded even more.
I hated it when my brain played tricks on me.
Thinking about that wasn’t much help either so I decided to get up and find Shiryu. I hadn’t been told where he slept so I guessed he had moved into another floor for privacy. He did tend to seek out quiet spots to sit and meditate in. I wasn’t very much into the oneness stuff he pursued but, heck! He was my best friend and I respected him. The only thing I disliked about our frienship was that he always helped me but I rarely knew how to solve his problems when he had any, so... I felt a bit like I was leeching on him. He had assured me that was not the case, but I hoped someday I would be of asistance to him.
The elevator was small and uncomfortably white, too sterile to be of my taste, or anybody’s for that matter.
The next floor was oddly quiet, there was a stillness in the air that chilled me and the light was too bright...
The shadows were too dark...
I walked feeling uncertain, this was not the kind of scenery I invisioned Shiryu meditating in, but I could feel a prescence... Somebody was here.
I stopped in front of a door that was surrounded by the gold-cloth boxes. I could feel the clothes energy coming from inside them. What on earth were they doing here?
I walked through the protective arch they had formed and reached for the door handle.
Who slept in this room? I grasped the handle, my hand trembling slightly.

Saori?

I began to turn the handle slowly, trying to make the least amount of noise.

Shiryu?

The door creaked softly as I opened it, the artificial light from the hall lamps bathing the cold darkness I saw within.
"Shiryu...?" I asked barely whispering. Something stirred inside the room. My heart skipped a beat.

I knew this aura...

It was darker, sadder and incredibly stronger than I remembered it, but I knew it alright.
The figure rose from the bed and walked towards the door, I stood where I was, frozen with fear. The person stopped in front of me, his glazed blue eyes boring into mine, turning my blood to ice and numbing my body.
"Hyoga?" I mumbled too dazed to think of anything better to ask.
Hyoga fixed his tormented gaze unto mine.
I felt his pain, his loneliness, his loss...

Tears fell down my cheeks as I felt all the memories coming back to me in a rush, like they had done in hell.
"Forgive me, Nikolai... Forgive me." I sobbed quietly. He only stared at me with that ezxpression of pain and hollowness written across his features.
He touched my upper arm and smiled. I could only gaze back, uncomprehending.

"I forgive you... Seiya."

I fell to my knees and he kneeled beside me, pressing both hands against my shoulders. Relief washed into me and I laughed softly. Hyoga smiled again and whispered in my ear:
"Tell them, so they understand why we do what we do, why we did what we did; so you will someday understand what it is that we search for... Tell then what you remember." I nodded stupidly.
He then got up and walked to the window. I had brief glimpse of his white wings stretching like twin arcs of silver into the starless night, and then he was gone... and I was left alone in the room.

*It has begun, sing with us! It has begun!*

The gold clothes chanted in their strange echoing voices... For the second time.
Outside the wind howled almost as if it were trying to harmonize with the clothes’s song, the moon’s light was so bright I couldn’t see the constellations. Other than that there was no other sound in the streets, nothing stirred in the large trees in front of the window; life had stopped for a few brief minutes, the creatures of Earth froze in place and silently stared at the disapearing silver glow in the sky.
I got up and walked to the window, the wind ruffling my spiky hair and making me shiver.
"He is gone, isn’t he?" A voice behind me made me start. Shiryu joined me in the balcony and leaned forward on the railing, his eyes scanning the dark-blue depths of the sky above us.
"Yes..." Shiryu took hold of my arms and forced me to face him, I had never seen such confusion in his eyes and I wished more than ever that I had the power to help him as he did with me. His very presence here calmed me, but did my company soothe him? He needed answers and all I had been able to give up to now were questions.
But I remembered now, I knew what it was that had moved Shun to become so vicious and had driven Hyoga into himself. The only problem was that in telling him I might do more harm than good...
"Will we ever see him again?" He asked me softly, his blue-grey eyes reflecting the dim light of the rising moon.
"Yes... When he finds a way to end this once and for all..." Confusion washed over his fine features, he searched my face for any clues, any answers.
"And what is that?" He whispered.
I looked up at him, tears falling down my cheeks. He took a step back and let his hands fall to his sides, not in defeat but as a gesture of utter puzzlement. We stayed like that until a movement in the trees made us turn; a small green dragon chirruped and fixed his beady yellow stare on us.
"Love." I said, and having done so great swarms of mini-dragons rose from the trees and hospital roof, their many-coloured hides shimering in the moonlight like little jems until they had flown to high up to be seen.
 

CAMUS:
Frost stung my cheeks and the violent winds tossed my cloak in all directions, I tried to keep it closed around my body but one of the buttons had fallen off so it fell loosely no matter what I did. I could barely see a meter beyond my nose, the storm was too strong for anybody to be travelling in the middle of it, but I was a child of the ice-lands; I was used to such low temperatures and these winds were but a mere breeze compared to the cold hurricanes I could summon.
When I regained my cosmo of course.
Wether from long absence of use or due to the resurrection side-effects I had not been able to use my energy or establish any mental or empathy link with anybody. I knew they were alive so that outruled the possibility of not sensing them because they were dead. They probably hadn’t regained their cosmos either so I would have to find them by searching in the old-fashioned way: Asking in every town if they had seen anybody that fit with their descriptions, of course that meant I had to leave Rusia...
I had remained here hoping to find any information on the woman that had helped me who, I strongly suspected, was the deceased queen’s spirit.
And Hyoga’s mother.
If Hyoga was Nikolai...
I let out a heavy sigh, in all my time here I had found no helpful clues on Nikolai’s whereabouts, or anybodies if it came to that. I didn’t want to go to Greece because that meant having to rejoin Athena’s forces and it would interfere with my present mission, also I wasn’t sure what her position towards all these changes would turn out ot be... It had not been favorable for Earth the last time.
Ice crystals rained down on me. The diamond dust had been named after storms like this one, when the snow fell not in slow soft white flakes but in sharp shards of ice that buried into your skin and tore down houses. Nevertheless it did not harm me since the cloak I wore was made of heavy polar bear fur that was made to bear such onslaughts easily.
The memories of what had happened in my past life weren’t very clear yet, but I suspected that it was my own mind’s doing: the brain suppresses all that scares or hurts it. And the memories were painfull, even the ones that brought images of Nikolai and me playing and talking like friends hurt, because deep down the knowledge of what I had done never left me...

I had been chosen to be Nikolai’s best friend and tutor; among my kind that was an incredible honor. I had been brought to the castle when I was six, the day Nikolai was born. He was a small blond baby with lovely blue eyes and a pair of tiny wing-sprouts covered with a soft grey fluff, the dazzling white feathers would come during adolescence. I grew up beside him until I turned nine and was sent off to train and become a warrior so that someday I would make a true warrior out of the young prince whose tutelage had been entrusted to me. When I returned, five years later and a full gold saint, the small baby was a young boy with feather-covered wings and an intelligent look in his wide ice-blue eyes.
He remebered me and treated me as if I had never left, whenever he had a problem he came to me.
When his training began a second bodyguard was brought: Akaren.
Akaren was a secretive and observant person who belonged to an Elf race that was more similar to a feline than to a human, in personality. He had the typical egotistical self-adoring atitude of all elfs, but he was also very dominant, sleek in his way of acting and performing, posesive to a point it was dangerous and always knew what people were thinking and how they felt about him. In the beginning I had feared that he was not right for Nokolai, that he would hurt him and wasn’t trustworthy; I was wrong.
Akaren took a liking to the young Ice-angel immediately and set himself the task of gaining my young pupil’s trust. I have to admit I was jealous of him at first but as time whent by I grew to like the self-centred elf we had been plonked with too. I taught Nikolai the arts of fighting, told him about his responsabilities and tutored him on the ways of the other planets, their people and the customs they had; Akaren taught him all about literature, history, music, miscellaneous arts and flirting. Nevertheless the misteriuos elf was also a strong fighter so he practiced in mockfights with Nikolai too.
Years whent by peacefully like that, the three of us growing and becoming closer each day; the other two princes bonded with their bodyguards too as well as they did with Nikolai, after all, they were soul brothers. Lim had three Gods to protect and tutor him, he lived with them in the underworld which was in those times a beatifull, yet darker, version of Gaia; D’jyanne was taken care of by a God and two mortals, like myself, and lived in the exotic underseas kingdom. All of us together we would have been worlds next generation of rulers, but things went wrong with Nikolai’s divine protector.
Athena had her own vision of what Gaia should be and she did not consider it right for the world to be controlled by mortals. She did not see that for there to be a balance all worlds had to be ruled by their own sacred races. All planets had one or two, sometimes even three, indigenous life-forms that were that world’s trademark race, not to mention the strongest too. These were called "Sacred Races" and were the chosen ones to rule and protect their planets. Gods were destined to help them, for being inmortal they did not understand the ways of life and death and thus a mortal creature’s way of being. The sacred races were the closest to godliness mortals could come to, but they were spiritually stronger than most deities anyway.
Athena did not consider this to be the right path and often argued about it with the ruling Queen Crysta: Nikolai’s mother. Crysta did not take Athena’s side so the Goddess decided not to asume her role as third bodyguard to the young prince. This caused quite an uproar in the kingdom and in our other colonies in different planets.
The Shidralians, another sacred race from another planet had always backed us up and been our strongest allies, but now that trouble grew inside our lands they grew restless and feared we might not be able to help if something came up... And of course something did come up.
For a long time it had been rumored that Shidral’s sacred race could grant inmortality, it was discovered at some point around then that by drinkind a shidler’s blood your life-span grew bigger. The shidlers were a sort of dragonish race that could shapeshift to a human appearance and tended to prefer it; they were also the strongest creatures known and the warriors in their planet were the most powerful existent. Athena decided to take over Earth by putting it at war with Shidral and then defeating them herself thus killing both the shidlers, a race too strong to be safe to keep around, and the Ice-angels, Dark-angels and Sea-myrths, her own world’s sacred races. To do this she made a pact with the strongest Death-God that existed: Davos.
Together they planned to begin a mass assasination of shidlers that would lead to a black market sale of their blood.
They would make it look like it had been planned and performed by the Gaians.
It was only a year or so before this that Nikolai fell in love with Karenhath, the beautiful shidralian princess who came on a diplomatic trip to Gaia one summer. He told Akaren and me about this love and we both thought it to be a small whim that would pass.
It did not.
As we began to understand how serious he was about his love, without any warning, the shidralians declared war to Gaia. Nobody had been aware of Athena’s plans and of the attempt at xenocide that had been done against the shidlers; nobody suspected that while our sneaky Goddess had kept on quietly insisting on being granted full power over our planet she had been weaving an elaborate trap. Before we knew what was going on we were at war with our once-friends and Nikolai was suddently faced with two choices:

Love or duty.

He chose both.
The events that followed were both terrifying and unavoidable, the more I remembered them the more I hurt within, because I knew that if I had stopped, and listened to Nokolai, and just once tried to believe him...

I could have stopped the death of Gaia.
I would have saved Nikolai’s true love.

I could have saved Nikolai....

But I did not, and now I had a new chance, and Lady Crysta had had to run away from the land of the dead to prove it to me. And if Hyoga was Nikolai then I had to find him and repeat this whole story.
Only this time, when the time came, I would make the right choice.
 

SHUN:
The moon had just risen and the clouds were dissipating, soon the stars would become visible...
There was a slight breeze that carried a scent of flowers and damp earth. The pale light iluminated the streets and reflected itself off the widows of every house and store in the city, it was not bright enough to render me visible yet it wasn’t dim enough to be easily ignored either. Moonlight had inspired great poets and compositors to write long melancholic sonnets or gentle lulling concerts. The soft pearly light had since times forgotten been asociated with age and mystery, the vagueness of its shine could not be mimicked and the sensation of nostalgia and awe that looking at a full moon produced was often described in songs, but the true feeling had never been trully expressed and that was the mystery.
I found myself thinking of my Niisan all of a sudden. Would he miss me? He had -after understanding I did not want his kindness- begun treating me like he did with everybody else: like I didn’t mean anything to him. Somewhere deep inside it had hurt, but I felt safer beside the cold demon I had helped create by letting him take my place than beside the false "friendly brother". It didn’t mean that Ikki wasn’t usually kind to me, he just tended to be rougher and less emotional so I had gotten the feeling he was acting like that because he was afraid of me.

Afraid of me....

My brother was very rarely afraid of anything, but he had feared me when I became Hades. Little did they know that that had only been a demon sent by Davos to wreck things up and make sure that all warriors died; the real Hades was still hidden.
And I would find him.
Lim’s memories were muddling up my present life, I was aware that the Dark-angel prince and I were the same person, but our realities had been  so different! Lim had been raised as a prince beside three gods and had developed a strong bond with his two soul-brothers. Shun had been orphaned and then brought up knowing only fights. It was natural that I would try to find solace in the shadow of my protective brother. I had never liked fights, neither had Lim.
Now my brother feared me because I had become what I should have been from the beggining. I also knew that my enygmatic message would leave him even more confused, but I didn’t have the time to explain what was going on to any of them so they would have to wait until I had sorted myself out and had found my feet again. Davos was near... I could feel it. I at once hated and loved my brother, he would never understand me, not until he regained his own memories... But even though he was an insensitive, spiteful bastard I cared for him, and I knew that no matter what became of me he would love me still.

Nikolai would leave soon... He had a special person to search for too.

I hoped Seiya and Shiryu would be alright, I didn’t want to see them involved in this but if they too were reincarnations of warriors from the old Gaia times then it would be unavoidable. Strange... I had hated them so much when I was at the hospital yet now I felt lost without them. I had to find a way to control Lim’s feelings and my present ones, having both was too complicated.
I touched my forhead and sighed quietly, soon the black pentagram would appear tatooed on my forhead, just like Hyoga’s inverted triangle; it was my family-mark and it proved that I was Lim.
I wondered what would my reaction to Thanatos and Hypnos be like, they had opposed Hades when he had decided to help me protect Nikolai and his love for Karenhath, because of this Hades had not been there when I had needed him the most and Karenhath had died in the hands of Nyall. Yet hadn’t the dark elf  been in love with her too? I couldn’t understand what had driven Nyall to kill the woman he supposedly loved. Of what I could remember I seemed to recall that he and Karenhath had been trained together by the same sensei and they had been best-friends during their childhood. Later on Nyall had declared himself to Karenhath but she was already to much in love with Nikolai to accept and return his feelings. Had he killed her to keep her from giving herself to another man then?
I shook my head and laughed, that was a strange way to love!
Then there was D’jyanne, he had been in love with the goddess Athena and when he discovered that she was sided with Davos to take over Earth he was shattered. The choice had been hard but he had finally stayed by Nikolai’s and my side. We were soul brothers; born at the same hour in three different dates it had been our destiny to rule together. One of us would asume the role of king but the other two would have always been there to help him. That was how Gaia’s sacred races worked, each member of a race had two soul brothers that belonged to the other two races and they would spend most of their lives together, this was called Gaia’s triangle of destiny; for destiny chose your soul-brothers for you.
My thoughts wandered back to Hades, he had always been there, right beside me. I had loved him like a brother and had respected him like one would do with a kind parent. He had been my sensei together with Shaka...
I smiled as I realized that he was somebody who had retained his past life’s name.
Shaka...
How would it be when I met him again? I had loved him too, he had not been one of my appointed bodyguards but he had stayed beside me after I had finished my training nevertheless. It was very obvious to me that somehow Hyoga -during his awakening- had accessed the hidden powers granted only to the Gaian King and had revived all the deceased warriors. The fact that Hyoga would be the king did not bother me, it had been that way in our past life so I had correctly asumed it would be that way in this one.
Nikolai would search for Terran first, that much I knew, but after that I didn’t know where he would go so it would be up to destiny to help us find each other again.
Hopefully one of us will have found D’jyanne by then.
Ikki... Big brother; I don’t hate you nor am I angry, let the past stay that way: gone. The next time I see you I will explain why I did all this, but right now I am too confused to be of any help and I have things to do...
People to find...
Things to remember...
So I can save Gaia this time...
 

NYALL:
Belial yawned and streched in his bed, then he got up and looked at me curiously.
"Why are you staring at me when I sleep?" He asked in a very unceremonious way.
I shrugged and turned around accomodating myself in the hammock we had set hanging from the low roof. He didn’t settle with that for an answer.
"Are you hot for me or something?" He asked mockingly, it took all my will power not to get up and kill him right there and then.
"Since you are Earthian I was wondering why you have sided with Davos." I spoke nonchalantly but I knew that the evil glint in my eyes was quite visible. The closest to a frown the two spots on his forhead could produce stole across his features; he did not like talking about his motivations.
"Why, if you love Karenhath, are you out to kill the person she loves the most; knowing it will give her pain to loose him again?" He asked me in a quiet tone of voice, the deep purple of his eyes becoming dark with emotion.
I remained silent for a while wondering if this was another of his jokes. For the first time in my life I saw him as what he should have been, a honest being. Saddly Davos had twisted him quite thoroughly, or did he twist himself? And if so, for what reasons?
"I am doing it because it is best for her." I said finally fixing my metal gaze unto his brilliant purple one.

He nodded and got out of bed saying loudly:
"We’d better get ready, you specially... Today we face Nikolai."
 

AEYR:
I got up and stretched my cramped muscles wearily. Today we were returning to our home. It had been hard to convince Johdas to forget Lim but we had managed. The dreams had gotten worse since we arrived at Greece and Iylden and I had been feeding Johdas a drug to keep him from having them at all.
The revelation of his true identity had stunned me and my twin and had convinced us we could not let him become aware of it.
He was Hades.
And I was Thanatos.
The memories of our past were upsetting enough as dreams, we had no interest in reliving them.

What about Lim?

The urge to find him had become close to unbearable! Since we had come here and our dreams had become clearer Iylden and I had regained our forgotten fondness towards our young protégé. It was like knowing that you had a lost brother and refusing to search for him. But he would have to understand, I no longer needed the dreams to call up my memories of the past, I knew what I had done even when I was awake and the guilt was driving me crazy. It was even worse because we had to lie to Johdas and make him believe we thought this was all nonsense, and in doing that we were hurting him. But, wouldn’t it hurt him more to remember the truth?
We had turned our backs to Lim and had refused to help him protect our future king.. And we had done it out of fear! Being gods we had taken inmortality for granted and suddently Davos had shown up.
He was the ultimate Death-god, he was the one who granted the true death to those who were thought to be inmortal!
But that didn’t matter, the fact was that we had abandoned the person we were supposed to protect and had given our best friend a lot of pain by doing so. Hades had tried talking Hypnos and me into helping Lim but we had refused and it had been while doing this that Karenhath was killed thus putting us at war with the shidralians for good. We had betrayed Lim, Hades, Nikolai and ultimately our whole planet.
How could we let Johdas remember all of this?!
We had to return, leave Greece right away and never let Johdas pursue this any further or it would be the end of us.
Tears fell down my cheeks at the thought of never finding Lim, never being able to apologize or atone for what we did...
We couldn’t ensure his happiness, but we could try giving it to Johdas.
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and clean away the tear marks from my cheeks. After that I walked to the kitchen to get some breakfast. The small apartment room was completely silent so I guessed Johdas and my twin were still sleeping. I smiled at that, Iylden had always liked to sleep in so it was rather fitting that he had turned out to be Hypnos, the sleep god. My smile faded as I remembered what our true identities represented. We were supposed to be in charge of the underworld, but we were running away from all responsabilities and all duties. I felt like a coward and had the distinct feeling that that adjective was quite close to the truth of my behaviour. I reached the kitchen door and pushed it open, expecting to find the room empty... It wasn’t.

Iylden was sitting on the table, tears running down his cheeks and his chest heaving with sobs. I ran up to him and hugged, he put his arms around me tightly. I stroked his golden hair soothingly as I whispered:
"What’s wrong brother? What’s wrong?"
He buried his face in my neck and let out a small sob, I tightened my arms around him trying to offer some comfort.
"Don’t worry" I said close to tears myself. "Once we leave it will all be over, I will never let him remember anything, I will pro.."
He put a finger on my mouth and looked up at me, his honey-coloured eyes almost completely red with crying.
"It’s not that Aeyr, It’s not that..." A small whimper forced him to stop talking.
"Then what is wrong with you?" He looked at me as if in utter defeat and suddently I became aware of something out of place; something that was missing.

Where is Johdas?
He had to be sleeping in his room, he had to!

"Iylden" I breathed deeply trying to stay calm. "Where is Johdas?" Iylden bowed his head and said nothing.
"Iylden...?" I whispered trembling.
"He’s gone Aeyr. He left a note saying he was leaving... But he didn’t say where to."
I let go of my twin brother and fell to my knees.
Gone.
Johdas was gone.
He had gone to find Lim... and the return of his memories would be inevitable now. He would hate us!
I begun to cry softly as the truth sank in.
It was over.
"We have to find him." Iylden said to me as he sat down on the cold tiles beside me.
"To stop him?" I asked weakly. He shook his head.
"To help him."
 

SHIRYU:
The Sanctuary looked lovelier than I remembered it, or was it just that I had never payed much atention to it? The olive trees rustled in the wind making a soft whispering sound; the marble and stone temples shone white under the brilliant sunlight and the grass was greener than before. During our battles we had run through it, its beauty had been unimportant then; later on, when we came to visit the gold saints, it had been them whom we noticed so the landscape remained ignored. Or at least I ignored it. Shun spent liked to spend long hours sitting near the cliff-tops watching the spectacular monuments from a distance and Hyoga had always enjoyed the long walk up the stairs when he visited Milo, he could have used the secret passage ways to get there faster and to avoid the long stair-way, but he preferred to do it the hard way so he could see the temples and enjoy their stylish architecture.
Why was I thinking about this anyway?
Was it because the sanctuary felt empty? There were no gold saints....
I sighed as I realized how much I missed my sensei and his enigmatic teachings. The fights had ended and Athena’s great fortress was nearly empty, no silver saints, no gold saints. Ikki hadn’t given any signs of life yet but that was normal, it didn’t worry me. The problem was that neither Shun nor Hyoga had shown up, not that we expected them to do so either... But still we had hoped that they would keep in touch. To me Seiya had always been the most important, but now I realized that I had cared a lot about the others as well; more that I thought indeed.
Shun had tended to avoid me a bit, but that was my fault, I was to condescending with him; still he never got angry at me and whenever I looked at him he always smiled at me, he always had a kind word to say, but it wasn’t the fact that he said them that made him special, it was that I knew that he meant then too. The young boy had always tried to be nice to me even when I thought him to be nothing but a baby. I had never said it aloud but I had often felt Shun was a nuisance because he always needed to be saved from his enemies and because he behaved in a childish way; little did I know how mature he really was. During the battle in Hell he had been prepared to give it all up in order to save those who he loved, myself included. Only then did I realize how I had underestimated Shun’s maturity and how I had considered his refusal to fight as an act of weakness when the true strength lay in defeating an enemy by making it your friend.
"Little Shun, only now do I see how much you meant to me and how important you were to our team, you were our heart and kindness, and we miss you..."
If only we had been able to find out what had happened the day Hades was defeated, what had come over him and Hyoga...
Hyoga. I missed him too...
Seiya was my best friend but when I had needed to talk about something serious I had always gone to Hyoga. He was perhaps not as intelligent as me but he nevertheless thought fast and had a strong intellect, witty mind and interesting comments and ideas. He had always cared for all of us and under the apparently icy and disdainful attitude I knew he also hated fights. He had always felt very strongly for his enemies, never hating them but wishing there was a different way to win. Having been forced to kill Camus had made him bitter, he had been his sensei and meant  even more to him than that I realized. Hyoga saw Camus as an older brother. He had asumed the role of protector with Shun and Ikki had never payed much attention to watching over the Cygnus saint; if there was anybody who could have filled the big brother part in his life it was me, but I had dedicated myself solely to Seiya and had neglected my other brothers in that sense. To Seiya I was kind and understanding, to them I had been cold and sometimes even slightly uncaring. How I regretted it!
I would have given anything to have them back right there, in front of me so I could hug them and tell them how sorry I was. But they were gone and I knew not where to.
Was it because of them that I now saw the Sanctuary as a beautiful place? Since now there was nobody to admire the scenery I was filling their role?
Or did I just want to get my mind of all this?
The misterious silver-eyed warrior had not shown up again and I feared this. It meant he was not after Saori but after Shun and Hyoga. I only I knew where they were....
I continued to climb the long stairs until I reached the Aquarius temple. I hadn’t found Seiya in the Sagitarius one so I had expected him to be in the Athena’s temple, with Saori. I was surprised to find him on the out side of the temple in which Hyoga had fought Camus.
Hyoga came here often, it was a sort of special place to him. I had never trully known Camus but I admired his determination to protect his pupil, and having failed in that, to teach him all he knew and make sure he prevailed even if it cost him his own life. We had fought him three years ago already, I had been nineteen and very inexperienced, but Hyoga.. He had been only fifteen...
Seiya straightened as he felt me come closer and let out a little moan as his not yet healed cosmo sense detected me. Strangely I had had less problems in regaining my cosmo than him, but the pain had been there anyway, like a vicious hammering in my skull whenever I tried to access my power.
"It will fade as you continue to practice." I said referring to the headache he had gained in the brief usage of his cosmo.
"I hope it does or I will be in a very bad mood." He answered weakly clutching his head and moaning again. I bent down in front of him and began to slowly massage his temples. He leaned into my hands and let out a small sigh.
The view from where we sat was amazing, I could see all the temples below clearly.
"Why are you here Seiya?" I asked in a worried tone of voice. He looked up at me, I could see sadness and helplessness in the depths of his coffee-brown eyes, he felt hopeless.
"I remembered seeing Camus here..." He said smiling sadly. "When we fought the gold saints. After we left Hyoga fighting Milo I looked up and saw him from the distance. He was standing on this rock, watching his pupil fight on and on and I wondered what he felt right then. When I asked Hyoga about Camus he said the his master tended to favor Isaac and treated him like he did not have what it took to be a warrior. Isaac had died and Camus had been forced to concentrate on what he had left so he had made Hyoga the Cygnus saint, but during that battle Camus behaved like he trully did care. Why be so cruel to Hyoga then? Why make him fell unwanted?"
I smiled and closed my eyes tryimg to imagine what the Aquarius gold saint had felt on that day, having to watch his disciple fight against beings who were reputed to be so much stronger, how he had tried to save Hyoga from all of this and he had refused to stay put and had pursued the fight with us. The pain and dispair Camus must have felt!
"He didn’t preferr Isaac, Seiya." Seiya blinked in confusion. "From the begginig Camus must have known that Hyoga had great potential to become a warrior and treated him like that to push him and force him to give his best. The coldness was born out of care, Camus knew that the only way for Hyoga to survive the training was by making him forget his earlier traumas. If he hadn’t cared then he wouldn’t have made the effort and would have treated Hyoga the same way he did with Isaac. Camus saw no potential in Isaac."
Seiya shook his head.
"No, Shiryu. Isaac had potential, Hyoga said that since he begun training Isaac he’d always been stronger than him."
"The power Isaac possessed must have been great if Hyoga said that but you are wrong. Think of the silver saints, they were initially stronger but had no potential to increase their power, they were stranded. Isaac was like this, the power he had did not grow, the proof of this is that Hyoga defeated him. But Camus knew this and that was why he was cold to Hyoga even when he must have cared a lot about him."
Seiya got up and looked at me strangely. I knew at once what was wrong, it often bothered him that I thought so much faster and found answers much  more easily than he did. It made him feel useless. It also irked him that I could read him so well and made him wonder why I stayed by him when I could predict his every move.
I had never found a way to convince him that his block-headedness didn’t worry me, that I loved him for what he was...
"I’ll go and check on Saori-sama." He whispered and before I could stop him he was gone. Shun could have soothed him now, and i would have gone to talk to Hyoga and ask him to speak to Seiya, but they were gone.
As I got up I risked a last glance at the scenery below and marvelled at the beauty of the Sanctuary we had fought in. A small dragon flew by chirruping happily, down below a unicorn munched on one of the trees.
Were the planet’s changes what made the sanctuary seem so beautiful now, or was it just that I had finally awakened from a long cold dream?
I hugged myself and hoped Hyoga and Shun were safe, wherever they were; and that they would return soon for I missed them....
I missed them a lot.
 

SEIYA:
I got up and ran up the stairway before Shiryu could say anything to stop me. This was just too much....
I had tried telling them what I remembered but Saori had told me not to. At first I had thought she did it because she thought it hurt me to do so, the truth was that it did, but that didn’t mean I had the right to remain silent! When I had pressed on the matter she had forbidden me to speak of that, at the risk of being destituted from my position. She had threatened to throw me out of the bronze-team if I pursued this matter!
I let out a small sob and stopped running. Images of our kiss danced in my mind every time I closed my eyes, the memory of her lips on mine had kept me going and had helped me pull through after my awakening, when I realized that I could not help either Hyoga with his misterious burden or Shiryu with all his question... it was her face and loving memory of the sweet fleeting gift she had given me what helped me go on.
Now that was gone too, my only love...
Saori had stopped behaving like her usual self and had called off the searches for Hyoga and Shun, she had then proceeded to forbid any research on that matter and had finally made sure I said nothing of what I knew; in doing that she put me in a position in which even though I could technically help Shiryu I was forced not to. And the worst part was how he had reacted.
Rage and resentment would have been more bearable than the quiet , friendly acceptance he gave, but that was after all, Shiryu’s style. He had hugged me and told me he didn’t care and that he understood why I did it. I knew that Shiryu didn’t love Shunrei so he spoke of love being more important even though to him it meant nothing, he did it because he believed in me and our frienship. He knew how much Saori meant to me and that I would rather die than to disobey her. Now I longed for death to free me from all this. If only I was as smart and intuitive as Shiryu!
I was now confronted with a choice, one that I would have rathered not make, but it was unavoidable.
I could continue to support Athena knowing, from what I rememberd, that she was returning to her past life’s self, and would probably ally herself with Davos to destroy Nikolai and any proof that Gaia ever existed; or I could speak up and leave my cloth behind, become a rebell warrior fighting for earth. When we fought the false Poseidon and the Hades impersonator we didn’t do it to grant Athena full control over our planet but to save it and its people from destruction, that was the ideal the Saori I had fallen head-over-feet for had followed.
I sat down on the steps that lead to the Pope’s room and let myself cry freely. The sun dipped over the rim of the Earth. I knew now why I had felt the urge to stand upon that rock on the Aquarius temple and watch the Sanctuary and its people, I knew now why I had felt this heavy sadness since I woke up today; I had known all along what my choice would be.
There was only one way to be true to the woman I loved:

I had to betray her.
 

HYOGA:
The world below me was dimly lit be the electric street lamps and house-lights; the people walked on it calmly, unaware of the threat that was soon to come. I hugged myself and let out a trembling sigh. I had to find Terran and Akaren. I was willing to forgive them as long as it meant I could have them by my side again, smiling and full of laughter as I remembered them.
My thoughts wandered back to Camus, I understood now why he had always coddled Isaac, he had wanted to push me so I grew stronger. How I missed him! He hadn’t been what I had expected at first, a cold and cruel sensei that would care only about us doing well and not about us like persons; but he had been friendly and understanding with Isaac... And me too.... Sometimes.
At first his outward unfriendliness to me made me feel rejected and useless, but I determined myself to prove him wrong and to show that I could survive the training; that had been his purpose, a psychological ploy to test me to find out if I was trully worthy of his efforts. As time whent by I began to fight not only for my mother but to make Camus proud of me, yet no matter what I did he always seemed to prefer Isaac, who at that time was considerably stronger than me. Looking back I could now understand the strange sad looks he used to give me when he thought I wasn’t looking and give meaning to those times, late at night when he would creep into my room and tuck the sheets around me; he had always cared, but he had believed that the only way to make me strong enough was by forcing me to carve my own path and not making it himself, like he did with Isaac, who had never possessed enough power to go beyond the basic techniques.
I could still remember the times when I had fallen ill due to wound fever...  He had stayed by my bed and taken care of me like a big brother watching over a younger sibling. I could have considerd Camus to be my spiritual father, but he had been only fourteen when he began training me, so he was too young to fit into a father figure and I had grown to consider him the brother I never had. I still had the distorted, fever-blurred memories of Camus holding my hand and telling me I was going to be fine, I could still remember his soothing presence all through my illnesses, offering me water when I was thirsty and cleaning the sweat away from my forhead. What had always confused me was that when I got better he would always resumed his icy behaviour towards me.
Now I could see why he did all that. Yes, there were advantages to being an Ice-angel, I could understand people better now.
Camus... You are indeed my Terran, all I can hope for is that I find you soon and that you care for me still.
 And that you help me find Karenhath and understand that without her I am nothing.
I loved her.
I love her now.
And I will love her forever.

I spread my wings and flew higher up into the moonlit night. At some point I would have to teleport to begin my search, but it still hurt me to use my cosmo so I had decided to fly or walk for as long as I could. The moon shone off  my feathers catching their iridescent gleam.
Soon it would start again, the war would repeat itself.
This time though, I would be stronger and Gaia’s team would fight together as a whole.
It didn’t matter that Seiya had been stopped by Athena, that much I had predicted.
What was destined to happen could not be stopped by a small Goddess like her.

It has begun. Sing with me.

*We sing with you; we rejoice; we shall soon be awakened!*

Yes, I would have to awaken the Gold cloths soon and when I did Athena would have to make her final choice too.
As I glided a bit lower I was assaulted by the feeling of a presence, a hostile presence approaching me; not just one... Two strong beings were following me.

:Gotcha!: Said a daunting voice in my mind just as a ray of red light zipped only inches away from my left wing. I swooped lower just in time to avoid a second, and much deadlier blow but a green streak of power forced me to stop and fly higher again. I cursed softly and tried to see where my enemy was. I found, much to my dismay, that the two auras were surrounding me; I had one on each side!
I tried to loose them by flying higher but the continued to flank me, did they have wings too? The moon was bright but even though I felt they were near me I could not see them. One of the auras was familiar... Nyall!
I flew straight up into the air and the abruptly turned and, folding my wings close to my back, I shot downwards; only Nyall was able to follow me, the other one probably didn’t have wings but used some form of levitation so I could loose him by doing some aerial pirouettes. Nyall would be a problem though, his wings were artificially implanted by Davos, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to use them.
Suddently the air in front of me flowed like water and ripples appeared in it, from this distortion Nyall materialized in front of me smiling cruelly. I stopped in midair and faced him fearlessly, the other fighter descended and poised himself for battle beside Nyall; at least now I could see them both. The moon shone on their faces highlighting Nyall’s steel glare and his companion’s deep purple eyes. I studied him curiously, he had short-cropped burgundy hair, fair skin and... Two green spots on his forhead.

A Jamilon!?

The stranger touched his forhead and smiled. A psychic... He couldn’t read my mind fully but he would still know what I was thinking as we fought. Damn!
"I believe you are aquainted with my race, young lord." His voice was soft and mellow which made him sound a bit like Milo, but Milo’s voice was more forcefull and masculine. Besides, I din’t like the way this Jamilon made the title sound like an insult. I wondered if I would have to fight both of them at the same time; I had a vague remembrance of Nyall’s techniques but I wasn’t used to fighting adversaries that used mental powers, that was normally Shiryu’s job. I began a slow descent and they followed, their eyes never leaving mine. I held their gazes in silence trying to block my thoughts away from the Jamilon’s probing mind. He smiled and waved a finger at me as if scolding an unruly child. Nyall smirked and then sighed almost as if in resignation just as we touched the ground.
"Time to die, your majesty." He whispered smiling and raised his hand to deliver his blow. The Jamilon caught him and shook his head; Nyall frowned and growled at him menacingly.
"We have to bring him alive." Said the Jamilon in a stern tone of voice, Nyall said nothing but gave him a killing look. I had to suppress a smile, these two did not get on well and were obviously not very willing to cooperate with each other. It didn’t surprise me, Jamilons were isolated and Nyall had an edge to his personality that was hard to stand. They were probably following orders from Davos or one of his seconds in command so their experience in working as a team was painfully limited.
There was my only advantage.
There seemed to be a brief telepathic exchange between them and then they both faced me; Nyall wasn’t smiling anymore.
"We apologize for the delay, my lord." The jamilon’s voice held no sarcasm this time. "But we will gladly finish our business now if you allow us."
"And what is that, may I ask?" I said with a hint of curiosity seeping into my voice. Normally I would have felt scared but right now I was too amused at seeing Nyall being bossed around by this mysterious character to be bothered to fear them. It was not a recomendable atitude in battle; I knew that, but they were obviously not allowed to kill me so I might as well take advantage of that and try to find out a bit more about my captors-to-be.The Jamilon’s smile widened and he stepped forward.
"We have to take you to our Lord Davos." He answered, the purple orbs of his eyes gleaming in the pearly light.
I took a step back and adopted a battle stance; one that did not require cosmo. It was arrogant of me to presume I could defeat them without using my powers but I had to try since I was not yet physically ready to use them.
Nyall took my battle positioning as a deliberate insult, little did he realize that my pose was out of self defence, but that was his way of being: he tended to see insults where none had been intended. I crouched lower and struck a defensive pose, readying myself for their attack.
"Before we begin is it posible for you to tell me your name?" I asked the Jamilon in a levelled tone of voice that did not reveal my present emotional state. God! Was I about to fight an Earthian? Jamilons were Gaia-born creatures from before the Great War and they were, suposedly, our allies! Still, if he was on Davos’s side he was an enemy...
"My real name is of no importance to you, my lord." This time he spoke the title up with true respect. What kind of enemy was he? Even though he was going to me capture there was a hint of sadness in his eyes.
"Why not give him your business one then?" Put in Nyall with an evil grin. There was definitively a problem between these two. Was it safe to send two warriors who did not get on to complete an important task? Was this a slip on Davos’s side or had he deliberately planned on them not reaching an agreement? Why do such a thing? I knew that Nyall was very stubborn and would rather die than not complete a mission, he also tended to give into impulses and was known to persevere no matter what... The Jamilon seemed to be rather mild tempered, then again he was also outwardly ironic to Nyall. I pondered that for a moment; maybe they both had strong reasons to be here and Davos had complied, but that would mean he was willing to run the risk of them doing a mistake and revealing important information... But they had been sent to capture me! There had to be a hidden catch somewhere... I did not think that Davos would be careless enough to send an incompatible team to capture me. I was Nikolai! I started as I realized that I had taken the situation as an insult and had slightly lowered my guard. Pride was a dangerous thing to give into at moments like this. Was that the plan? To get me worked up because I hadn’t been deemed a worthy opponent? If it had been Seiya instead of me he would be so mad by now that he would have probably fought them carelessly. Just like Nyall had been angered my  non-cosmo battle-stance I had almost been driven to react in the same way by their apparent incompatibility; but my stance had not been meant to do that, so knowing Davos this pair had an ulterior reason to be here. I tensed slightly as I felt the Jamilon walk closer.
"Shut up Nyall or I will get somebody to fit those tin eyes of yours into a pair of earrings!" Nyall growled, his fangs bared in a very menacing way. I could growl like that two when I reached adulthood... The Jamilon smiled and raised his chin defiantly. I shook my head in wonder, these two couldn’t seriously be my opponents... I gave myself a mental shake, I was dismissing them as unworthy again.
"Are you or are you not going to give my your name Jamilon!" I finally decided to interrupt their fight and get this over and done with. He blinked and turned to look at me in surprise and I saw him shiver. Nyall laughed and tossed his long black mane behind his pointed ears.
"If you are so eager to know I will tell you." He said in a daunting tone that was obviously meant to annoy the Jamilon. It didn’t work though, the earthian remained calmly composed. "Weeeeell, then I will tell him!"
"If he is going to know I might as well tell him myself." He gave me a pained look and spoke up. "Belial. My name is Belial."
"Is it your real name or your pseudonym?" I asked a tad discomforted by the revelation.
"Pseudonym." He replied sighing. I felt my stomach tighten at this, if it was a name he had chosen for himself then that meant he felt it fit him. In this life my mother had pretended to be a Christian in order to seem normal, she had taught me all about most of Earth’s religions and cults but Christian,Greek and Norse were my specialities; if memory served me right Belial was from the Catholic Bible, he was just like Lucifer, an angel fallen from grace that formed an aliance with darker forces. Then again, it was fitting; This creature had turned his back on his planet and sided with our greatest enemy, now he was going to capture a member of his world’s Sacred Races, and not only that but the heir to the throne! And he was doing quite concious of his actions... Why the sad looks then? Did he regret his choice now that he was in front of me?
"Do not trouble yourself with trying to infer my actions, my lord." I gazed right into his eyes and he looked down, his fists tightened. "Just bear in mind that it’s better if you cooperate, we have orders not to kill you but the other than that we can deliver you to your destiny as hurt as we need to." He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, when he opened them again there was no emotion to be seen. I nodded understanding that it was time for them to see if they could finish what they had come to do. I could have run away while they were arguing but that would have been dishonourable and cowardly, and I had no way of telling how much Nyall’s powers had grown and how strong Belial was. I tensed even more as they resumed their respective battle-stances, Nyall’s was new to me, but I hadn’t seen him since our fight in the old Gaia, that had been aeons ago and given that Davos was a death God I doubted that this was his second resurrection. Belial raised his left hand and closed his eyes as he began to chant something under his breath, so he was a Rune-warrior; this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had thought.
 

JOHDAS:
The moon was high and shining, the air was warm with an occasional gust of cold wind every now and then, no sound could be heard other than my footsteps and my ragged breathing. I had been running for the past hour and a half in the city hoping to find the source of a strange energy that I had sensed earlier.
This was the first time in years that I was going anywhere without Iylden or Aeyr and I already felt lonely without them; I had left early in the morning without even leaving a note. I knew what their reactions would be, they would cry.
I hated hurting the people I loved, especially when they were the only people who loved me; but I couldn’t just forget about Lim... He was real and they knew it, whatever reasons they had to deny that did not concern me, all I cared about was finding Lim.
No, that wasn’t true.
I loved my two friends more than anything in the world, but I just couldn’t ignore the call. Even if it meant that I had to leave them for a while...

Hades...

I shook my head violently. That was something I would never accept, I was NOT a death God! Hell, I could hardly kill snails when they ate the plants in my garden! The very idea of me being in charge of the deaths of the world’s entire population was close to hilarious! Me, Johdas, the class genius and socially rejected, overemotional high school student: a death God!? Very improbable.
Yet, if denied that part of the dream it meant that Lim wasn’t calling for me but for the real Hades, so I was searching for no reason since the young prince would not be my responsability.

Hades...

I stopped running and leaned against a tree, gasping for breath and close to tears. I missed them! I hadn’t been away from then for longer than a day, but the idea of not hearing Aeyr’s ironic tones and playfull jokes, not being able to ask Iylden for advice or seeing him quietly reading philosophy books day in, day out...

Hades...

No! I wasn’t looking for Lim because I was Hades, I just felt for him!
But then why do I feel as if he were calling me? I hated the rational part of my mind, it could be so badly timed! That was not what I wanted to hear, namely because I felt it struck quite close to the truth. But I didn’t have to worry; seriously thinking, what were the chances of an introverted school boy being a Greek death God? None!
Why look for him then, if he isn’t calling you?
I really hated the rational side of me.
Why look for him?
Because I care for Lim!
Why?
Because in the dreams I feel that I loved and protected him!
Why?
Shut up, shut up!
Because in the dreams you are somebody else!
SHUT UP!
And who are you in the dreams, pray tell?

I fell to me knees sobbing and hugging myself, this was too much. I couldn’t be Hades, I didn’t want to be Hades!
Then forget Lim and go back, you are not Hades, you have nothing to do with him!
I couldn’t do that! I needed to find Lim, to apologize for what I had done in the dream!
YOU ARE HADES IN THE DREAM! WHY APOLOGIZE FOR SOMETHING YOU DIDN’T DO!
I got up and started running again, hoping to pass out from sheer exhaustion.
Well?
I would look for Lim and tell him Hades was sorry and that he missed him.
How do you know that?
Gods! I needed a psychiatrist! I was becoming a  paranoid! I just felt what Hades had felt, nothing more.
Nothing more.

Hades...

NO! I put my hands to my temples, and shook my head. I was not Hades!
Why was I feeling all this now? I had been fine in all the other days we spent here, why now?
Because you are beggining to feel the weight of the situation.
I took a deep trembling breath and sat down on the cold asphalt, trying to clear my thoughts.
I wasn’t Hades. I... wasn’t ... Hades. I just couldn’t be, Greek gods didnt exist.

:Don’t deny me...:
I stood up and looked around, somebody had spoken to me.
:Don’t deny me!:
"Lim?" I was hearing Lim’s voice in my head! But I wasn’t asleep!
:Don’t deny me!!:
"I am not denying you! I’m looking for you!" I said aloud and wondering if he could hear me.
:You are denying yourself, so you are denying me.:
I blinked twice, denying myself? I knew perfectly well who I was!
:Who are you then?:
He could read my thoughts?
:Very clearly, you think too loud.:
Hear me then, I am Johdas, a normal kid who goes to school and...
:No!:
....Has a message for you from Hades.
:NO!:
Yes, and I am looking for you because I want to apolg... Why should I apologize, it was Hades who should do that, not me!
:And who are you?:
I was tired of answering and re-answering that question.
:Then give me the right answer!:
"I already have!" I wailed into the night. Lim said nothing but I could feel him touching my mind still. I was surprised to find that I could feel him through that link too; he was..sad and lonely, and he needed me.
No, it wasn’t me who he thought of, it was...
:It is you.:
It’s Hades who you want, Lim. Not me.
:You are Hades.:
Dammit! How many times do I have to tell you that you are wrong! I am not- do you hear me?- NOT HADES!!
:I am Shun.:
I was left speechless at the apparent non-sequitur. Shun? Oh, his present-life’s name. What about it?
:And you are Johdas.:
Yes, quite correct.
:But I am also Lim...:
I said nothing, thought nothing. My mind whent blank at that point, all rational thoughts abandoned me and I was left naked before Lim...
:Just like you are Hades.:
...And even though every single cell in my body screamed for me to deny his words I was too tired, so I just nodded and then fainted.
 

MARIN:
I turned to Shaina wishing that she had an answer to all my questions, but her eyes had the same confused look as mine, so I said nothing. Athena gave us a cold look and spoke.
"Is everything clear then?"
We both nodded trembling, Shiryu only watched in silene as she said this. We had been summoned to the Libra temple by Athena’s cosmo, when we arrived she had been talking something over with the Dragon saint. I did not know what it was but I strongly suspected it had something to do with the mission we had just been given.
Every body had noticed the change in Athena’s attitude lately; she had become cold and cruel, totally uncaring.
Now she had gone nuts, I could hardly believe that she had actually aske me and Shaina to do such a thing, and for no apparent reason!
What about Seiya? I had never imagined that he would decide to do what he was about to....
And Saori didn’t even seem to care, was her conversation with Shiryu related to that?
"Yes my lady." I answered after a while, my gaze fixed on the ground. She spun on her heels and walked out of the temple muttering curses under her breath.
Shaina put her hand on my arm and sighed. We were just about to leave when Shiryu spoke to us.
"Marin-san, Shaina-san, come here a minute." We both looked up and wondered what the handsome Dragon was up to. Was he on Athena’s side too?

When he finished talking to us we left quite close to tears and headed for Seiya’s cottage.
 

SEIYA:
I looked at my cloth and stroked it’s smooth surface in an almost adoring fashion. The things we had gone through together! And now...
Now I was going to loose it. The cloth hummed softly as if trying to reassure me that everything would be fine. It was a living being and it could sense my sadness, we were too linked to be sepparated... But I had to do it.
Somebody knocked on my door.
"Come in, it’s open." I said trying to sound cheerful.
Shaina came in beside Marin, both of them wearing their masks and looking as imponent as ever, but there was something in their auras that they were trying hard to suppress. I raised my eyebrows questioningly, I’d be damned if I let them know how deppressed and confused I was feeling.
"We came to tell you something, Seiya-kun" Shaina’s voice was as cold, as usuall, her stance perfectly controlled and her aura completely hidden, as usuall. Something was definitively wrong! Whe Shaina came to me she tended to be more open and less "as usuall".
"Hun?" I replied taking great pains to look absolutely curious. I wasn’t very good at acting, I much rathered being straightforward about how I felt, but I couldn’t do that now.
"Leave the sanctuary Seiya." I blinked in surprise. Leave? Yes, of course I was going to do so but I hadn’t expected them to come here and tell me to do so. I looked at my sensei hoping she would explain Shaina’s cryptic remark.
Marin gazed back at me, I wished I could see her expression behind the mask.
"We just recieved secret orders from Athena to go out of the Sanctuary boundaries and kill somebody." Marin’s voice was not as firm as I was acustomed to hearing it.
"Am I supposed to go with you? Did she tell you to give me this message?" They both looked at each other and sighed. It was Shaina who answered.
"She specifically told us not to let you know." I wished that they talked clearly, I had never been good at mind games.
"Why are you telling me then?" Marin swallowed hard and walked up to me, taking my hand in hers. I blushed but stood where I was.
"She has asigned us to go and kill Julian Soro." My mouth dropped open and I felt all the blood leave my face. Kill Julian? Had he done anything to anger her? I knew It hadn’t been Poeidon who had possessed him but a sea demon sent by Davos, she didn’t know this but it had been clear to everybody that his actions had been involuntary, had he been re-possessed?
"Did he do anything to..." Marin shook her head and tears fell down the edges of her mask.
"No..." She said wiping the moisture from he neck. "... He hasn’t done anything." I let out an exasperated sigh.
"That’s not all, Seiya." Shaina came to me and fixed her gaze unto mine. "After that we have to locate Shun and kill him too." My knees turned to water and I fell down.
"Kill.... Kill Shun-chan?" I whispered numbly. They both nodded and knelt beside me.
"Leave the Sanctuary Seiya, and tell Shun that Saori wants him dead."
I suddently grasped Marin’s hand and forced her to look at me. "Are you going to obey her?"
She looked away and pulled herself free.
"Are you going to obey her!" I shouted, too dazed to care about respect and protocol.
"Yes..." I rocked back as if I had been slapped. I swallowed back my own tears and got up, turning my back on them. "Why did you come here to tell me this then?"
They both got up and dusted themselves. "So you could warn him."
"And make me the traitor?"
"Seiya... She knows you are going to leave." I almost fell back when I heard that.
"We came here to tell you this because we knew that you would go to look for Hyoga and Shun, she told us. Go for Shun first." I shuddered and rubbed my arms, trying to get some warmth imto my suddently-frozen body.
"We will be enemies if I do that." Shaina walked up to me and took of her mask. Her eyes were brimming over with unshed tears. She took my face in her hands and kissed me softly, gently. I closed my eyes and kissed her back as tears fell down my cheeks. She pulled away and wiped them away with her thumb, stroking my face and looking at it as if trying to memorize every faction, every detail.
"It won’t be the first time either." She whispered placing her mask over her face again and leaving. Marin watched her depart in silence, then she walked to the door but stopped on the threshhold.
"I will look after Seika. She hasn’t regained her memory fully so she can still stay at Rodorio village. I will guard her for you." And she was gone. I looked at my cloth and once again stroked it’s silky surface. So it had begun after all.
Athena would waste no time before killing the last of Gaia’s Hierarchy. I put the cloth back into its box and walked towards the Libra Temple, the only place where I was sure to find my best friend.

As I approached the spectacular monument I wondered if I was doing the right thing by telling him what I knew. It would put him in the inevitable position of choosing between duty and frienship, and if he chose duty he would be able to reveal all the details Athena was missing. But Shiryu wouldn’t do that would he? He was my best friend, we had given our lifes for each other!
But he had also given his word. He had sworn loyalty to Athena.
So had I, but I didn’t just respect her, I loved her; the Athena we were serving was not the one we had promised to protect nor the one I had given my heart to. Shiryu would understand that...

The temple was dark inside, the moonlight did not reach in as it did in other temples. I found him leaning his forhead on a pillar, tears on his eyes.
"Shiryu!?" I ran up to him but he held out his hand, I halted and stood a few meters away from him. Was this my fault in any way?
"Shiryu, what’s wrong?" I could hear the waver in my voice.
He didn’t look up.
"Shiryu!?" My lower lip trembled as I realized I didn’t need him to tell me what was wrong, I knew.
I sobbed softly and closed my eyes.
He wiped his own tears away and walked to me. He put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed them carefully.
"I’m sorry Seiya..." I nodded in understanding. "What you do now, you do it for love... I don’t love her as you do" I hugged him fiercely and he put his arms around me too.
"Your honor is too important..." I felt him cringe.
"It’s not that... It’s true, I gave her my word, but that’s not the only reason I am staying here for." I pulled away and gazed into the blue-grey eyes I had known so well.
"You are afraid she might hurt Shunrei?" I asked that even though I knew the answer, Shiryu had long ago confessed to me that he felt nothing special towards her, just brotherly affection, but couldn’t bring himself to tell her that. He smiled a bit ironically and shook his head.
"There is something that Marin and Shaina didn’t tell you." I jerked in fear.
"Athena knows they told me!?" He shook his head sadly and patted my shoulder reassuringly.
"No, I told them to do so." I realized I had been holding my breath as he said this, I let it out in relief.
"What didn’t they tell me?" Shiryu took a deep breath to calm himself.
"I have been given orders to kill you tomorrow, first thing in the morning." I took a step back and shook my head in disbelief.
No, this wasn’t true, no... "NO!" I screamed and begun to cry hysterically. Shiryu put his arms around me and rubbed my back, rocking me back and forth.
"Shhhh....Shhhh. It’s alright"
"NO IT IS NOT!!!" I cried clinging to him desperately.
"Seiya listen to me, I told them to tell you because I wanted you to leave. I had hoped you decided not to come here but I suppose deep down I knew you would just the same. I want you to leave Seiya, now." I hugged him closer and shook me head vehemently.
"No."
"Yes, you will leave. You had decided to do so earlier and now you have even more resons to do so."
I wiped my face and spoke through sniffles. "But... I have to.... to tell you...." He shook his head.
"Everything you tell me I will be forced to tell her later." I stared at him and got up. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder but I pushed him away violently. He winced and bit his lower lip.
"Will you at least tell me why you are staying here, if it’s not for your honor or for Shunrei?" Shiryu shook his head and turned away from me.
"No... I can’t Seiya, but I..."
"Goodbye Shiryu." I cut in before he could finish, feeling nauseated and dizzy.
"Seiya I... I’m not your enemy, never shall be." I breathed in slowly and let the air go carefully, to calm myself.
"I don’t know why you are doing this, but you are my friend and I trust you." I felt better after saying that, knowing that Shiryu wouldn’t be my foe. He nodded and bowed his head, I could see tears on his cheeks and understood that this was as hard for him to do as it was for me, I was his best friend too. "Goodbye..." I whispered and began to walk out of the temple. Shiryu didn’t try to stop me, didn’t say another word as I walked out of his life.
The last I saw of him was his tall silhouette outlined by the pale light that had finally managed to seep into the temple.
He was crying.
 

SHIRYU:
I clawed at me chest, hoping that the pain would disappear soon and let me be. Seiya had left.
Seiya had left... I let out a small sob and bit my lip. I had wanted to leave with him but...
I had to protect Athena, now more than ever...
Not because it was my duty, no.
I would protect the evil fiend that had suddently been born out of the gentle Athena for a more important reason.
I would never side with evil out of duty, but there were things that mattered more than duty.
Seiya... I would have wanted to tell him why I was doing this but he wouldn’t have understood; it would have only made him feel more guilty and reluctant to leave. So he had left thinking that duty was more important to me than his frienship, he was so mistaken! I laughed humorlessly and wiped my tears away. I was strong, there was no reason to cry now.
The dull ache in my chest grew stronger. I had never in my life felt like crying as much as I did now, I was alone for the first time in a long while...
Tomorrow morning I would go to his small cabin and find him gone. Saori would deploy the guards but It would be too late; he would be long gone by then, and if she sent me after him I would go... But I didn’t necessarily have to come back victorious did I?
In the end my master’s carefull teachings had been to no avail. I had stayed beside my Goddess, but not for the right reasons. In the end I had chosen friendship over duty.
Seiya... He loved her, no matter what. Even now that she had turned against the Earth she had so adored, he loved her, and I knew that if she had gone to kill him herself, in the moment she ended his life... He would still love her.
So I stayed here to protect her because he loved her, because I knew that he believed there was a way of returning her to her old-self. I stayed here for you Seiya. Somebody had to make sure she didn’t get killed in the process, I had to make sure she survived throughout the battles to come. She would have to live, for him.
Just he had lived all these years for her.
For him.
The next time we met we would be on different sides, but my heart would always be with him and my friends.

Now there was just one final thing to do before I could go to my room.
:Kiki, come here:
 I was slowly regaining my cosmo, but luckily telepathy was not too demanding and it no longer gave me any headaches.
He appeared out of nowhere in the center of the temple. Teleportation was a bit more tough so I still hadn’t been able to regain enough power to do so. But with a little training I would be back to my usual status in a week or so.
"What is it Shiryu?" He asked me cocking his head curiously, I only smiled.
He was taller and leaner now. He had hit puberty and would soon become a very well built teenager. The childish squeakiness was almost gone from his voice and his eyes were narrower, with a more mature look in them than one would expect from a boy his age. But then, most trainees and young warriors had that look: they had all been forced to mature early.
"I seem to remeber you liked a cetain mermaid we met in Atlantis." I spoke lowly but hinting on the importance of my words.
"Tethys?" He asked now truly curious.
I nodded and beckoned him closer. I knew that Kiki wanted to become a warrior, but I also knew that he wanted to be on our side, on earth’s side, more than anything; so he would be more than willing to help me out now. It was unfair to mix him into this, but he was my last resource.
"Yes, her."
"What about her?" He asked a bit unsettled by my misterious attitude.
"I need you to go and tell her something important."
"How am I supposed to find her?"
"I don’t care just find her and tell her that somebody is going to murder Julian."
He blinked twice.
"Huh?"
"Go! Now!" He was out of the temple before I could even say good bye.

My duty was to protect the Earth, but I had chosen to protect a friend’s beloved instead. My only hope was that this fight would turn out to be much smaller than the previous ones....
An eagle sized black dragon swooped into the temple trumpeting defiantly; a strange bird chased it out again keening furiously.
.... I doubted it.
 
 

BELIAL:
He had managed to avoid all our attacks up to now without using even a spark of cosmo. I had begun to suspect that he wasn’t doing it out of arrogance but because he was truly unable to access his powers. That gave us a considerable advantage over him. But I still felt uneasy, not because it just seemed too easy but because he was not my enemy, not really; I wanted to take revenge on the human race, not on the Ice-angels, specially not on the last one. But hadn’t I made up my mind on destroying the world humans lived in just like they had destroyed the old continent?
 That meant I was against all Earthian creatures, I was the enemy of my own kind, I was Belial.
Once long ago, when I was just a child, my mother told me about a human religion called Catholicism, in this religion they believed that there was a sacred trinity that formed a god, like a divine gestalt; but what had called my atention was the tale of a group of renegade angels that were banished from heaven and had begun to govern hell. Lucifer had been the de-facto leader, but he had not gone alone, another angel -Belial- had acompanied him. When humans attacked my land and killed my race I swore over the blood of my people to become their avatar.... So I had turned against Earth. I had thought I could do it, but now I wasn’t so sure.
When the young prince had asked my name it had been so hard to refuse, I could still feel the pull of his words on me. He was indeed a member of the Sacred Race, and being such it was close to imposible for an Earth-born creature to harm him, yet I was doing so wasn’t I? But it was hard! The more we fought the more unsure I became, if I helped destroy this Earth I would destroy the Sacred Races... Those creatures were bound to their planets in such a strong way that if all the members of a world’s Sacred Race were to die the world would break down, it would die for it had lost its very essence; the same thing happened the other way around, if a world was destroyed it didn’t matter if the Sacred Races managed to escape the disaster, they would die just the same.
But I had decided to punish the human race, so I had stopped being Gaian from that point on.
The humans deserved this fate, hadn’t they backed Athena up when she claimed that all governmental power should be given to the gods? The legend of the Great War had been told and re-told over the centuries so that Jamilons would never forget the true nature of humans and Gods, but we had just the same. We trusted them and one day they came to our land and killed most of us; only a mere hundred escaped and by now there would be even less. I had been among those hundred, and I had survived the destruction of the Jamilon empire, but I was only a child then and I had no place to go. It was around then that Davos came to me.
"Do you want to take revenge?" He had asked me in that monotone voice that had scared so many and I had said yes. He had taken me to his palace in the land of utmost darkness and had taught me all about fighting techniques and styles. Being a Jamilon my life span was much larger than a common being’s so I had had plenty of time to learn and become strong. Today, more than  hundred years later I was about to iniciate my so desired revenge...
And I had doubts! I had never been in front of any member of our three Sacred Races, much less in front of one that belonged to the royal family, so I had never known how strong the desire to help him would be, it was in my heart and bones...

A beam of  red energy slashed Nikolai’s arm and blood began to pour out of the wound onto the ground. He pressed his hand to the open gash trying to stop the flow. Nyall jumped up and tried to kick him from behind but Nikolai managed to escape be jumping to the side. Nyall’s blow left a hole in the ground only a few meters away from me, he was smiling joyously. He was not allowed to kill the prince, but he would at least enjoy hurting him a bit.
Nyall managed to pin him to the ground and punched him in the stomach, Nikolai pushed him off and rolled to the side gasping for breath, he tried to get up but fell back down again.
I walked towards them concentrating and making a small ball of dark green energy appear in my hand. I had better use cosmo, for Rune-magic had proven useless up to now. That kind of technique called up the power of nature with runes... And nature had not been very willing to hurt her Sacred Race, so I concentrated even more and threw the little marble of power at him.
"Nyall! Teleport away!" I screamed at him at the top of my lungs. They both turned to me and when they saw the diminutive sphere their eyes widened. Nyall winked out of existence miliseconds before the small globe exploded.
The young lord was not so lucky, he was hit by the explosion and was thrown against a building.
"He’s supposed to be captured alive, Belial..." Nyall was smiling neverthelss, Gods! How he hated the prince!
"He is alive, don’t worry." I answered through clenched teeth, this was so hard to do!
"I wasn’t worried."
Nikolai got up shakily and growled softly as a sudden pain in his chest made him buckle. He probably had a few broken ribs by now,and no cosmo to defend himself. I should have been happy, I was winning; but I was hurting inside.
He wasn’t guilty of anything....
But there was nothing I could do,I had made the decision long ago and there was no turning back now.
I took out the power draining net Davos had given me to capture the Ice-angel and slowly advanced.
 

SHAKA:
Milo twitched on his bed and then relaxed.
I sighed and turned around on the sofa, but after a while I resumed watching the scorpio saint. He was a mystery to all of us, his character too unpredictable for one to feel safe around him, his comments too cruel and sadistic or just plain mean, his smile was not a smile but a sly smirk, his laughter was always mirthless, he was always trying to seduce people and was frankly feline in his atitude and sleek smooth movements; but his eyes were so sad it sometimes made me want to cry.
ME! Shaka, cry!
That was something unusual! But it was true, and I wasn’t the only one. Since I hadn’t regained my cosmo I had decided to keep my eyes open for the time being so the hollowness in Milo’s eyes had struck me. His aura was full of self-confidence and seduction, not a hint of sadness or doubt; so why did his eyes shine like that?
His personality was also a mystery, he tended to be ironic and and appealing at the same time, often dropping a cunning remark or two in the worst moments, he liked to catch people unguarded.
But sometimes he acted in an almost friendly way, and I could see a different Milo hiding under the one we all knew. A more vulnerable and friendly Milo, one that seemed to want to be loved and cared for, but his outward bearing contradicted all this. A mystery indeed!
I let out a defeated sigh and closed my eys trying to sleep.
I was beginning to drift away when a scream filled the room. I jerked up and looked around me, everybody had been startled into wakefulness and were surveying the room in a nervous fashion.
All eyes rested on Milo.
He was sitting up breathing shakily and trembling slightly, his forhead glistened with sweat and his eyes were scrunched shut. Saga got up and walked up to him, touching his shoulder worriedly.
"Milo...? What..."
"Hyoga." He gasped. "He is near here. In trouble."
Saga gave me a querying look that clearly meant that I had to come up with something.
I glanced at Milo’s trembling body and sighed.
"Where?" I asked reluctantly.
Milo swallowed convulsively and said "Near the large building complex." He then looked up at me, staring beseechingly into my eyes with his now tormented look. "We... We have to help him."
I had never seen him this desperate or willing to implore, it unsettled me terribly.
"Let’s go then." Shion had gotten up and was putting on his clothes hurriedly. I nodded and begun to get dressed, out of the corner of my eye I saw Saga hug Milo gently and then help him out of bed.
Maybe Saga knew.... No, the dispairing expression on his face outruled that posibility.

We set out guided by Milo who was still very giddy hoping that whatever battle we had to face it did not require us to use our powers. An explosion of green light lighted up the skies in the direction we were going, we begun to run.
Why this dudden urge to protect Hyoga? This feeling that compelled me to go in his aid?
When Milo had woken us up I had been annoyed but now, the closer we got to the fight the more worried I became over the Cygnus saint. Why, if I had barely spoken to him once or twice? Why, if I hadn’t seen him since I had died?
Why, if there was never any special bond between us?
WHY?

When you remember your past, I will be there waiting for you....

I sped forward no longer caring about anything save for the savage pull of loyalty towards Camus’s pupil, wondering why I had just remebered the mysterious angel’s words.
 
 
 

HILDA:
"Freya, what do you think?" My little sister sighed and turned to me.
"It is them. There’s no doubt about it." I nodded and put my arms around her. We had finally come to the conclusion that our God warriors had come back to life, they had been right in every question we asked, even the more intimate ones, it had to be them. I felt tears sting my eyes at the thought of being with Siegfried again.
But what would Freya’s reaction to Hagen be? She was now in love with Hyoga, but Cygnus had refused to see her and now, according to Athena he had disappeared.
Athena...
She had changed so much lately, had become so cold. If I wasn’t absolutely positive it was imposible I would have thought that she was possessed. But her reaction the the resucitation of my defenders had been so indiferent! I had expected her to be happy and glad for me, but she had just icily congratulated me on my good luck and hung up the phone. Was she jealous?
Then she had called to tell me that if Hyoga came here he was to be captured, and if Shun came here we had to kill him.
Kill Shun.
That was NOT the Athena I so respected, but she was my ally and she had always been right in the past so I had better back her up now too.
Or should I turn against her? Everything indicated that she was beginning to turn on her beloved Earth. But that was not possible!
Or was it? I was so confused!

Syd came in beside Bud. They seemed to be so happy together, I wished I could just let them go and live peacefull lives, but I needed them now more than ever.
"We have talked it over my lady.." Syd’s gentle voice echoed off the stone walls. "..And we think that it would be better to stand by and watch Athena closely, if things get worse then we might as well break the alliance."
I smiled and nodded, those were my sentiments exactly. Siegfried came in and stood beside the twins regarding me in an almost adoring way. Strangely I didn’t feel very comfortable. I dismissed the thought and told them to gather the rest of the group, we had lots of talking to do.
Once they had left Freya took my arm and gazed at me solemnly. "Hilda... The angel they spoke of... Do you know anything?"
I shook my head and smiled at her weakly. Whoever had been responsible for my warriors resucitation had to be very powerful... But I hadn’t felt anything out of the ordinary.... Yet they had all spokwen of seeing an angel when they were brought back.
The day they were resurrected was quite close the day Hades was defeated, the amount of power displayed at that point by so many different people made it imposible to identify who had performed the resurrection, so we had no clues at all.
"I don’t know sister, but I hope he is on our side." I added looking pensively out the window.
"Um... Hilda?" I swiveled and frowned at the dubious tone she used and at the confused look in her huge aquamarine eyes.
"Yes....?" I let the sentence trail off, giving her a chance to speak up.
"What side are we on?"
 

NYALL:
Nikolai fell down moaning softly. I smiled, aware of how it lit up my metal-coloured gaze. Those were the eyes that had seen Karenhath give herself to this weakling, to this... Gaian. As far as I knew I was the only organic creature with this eye colour in the universe, and it pleased me no end. Most beings were intimidated by the cold synthetic
look it gave me, and those who were not learned to fear me after I had defeated them; if they survived the confrontation of course. But Karenhath had never feared me, in all the years we spent training together before the Great War, during our first life, she had never been afraid of me; she had been my best friend. Never did I see her flinch when my eyes fixed directly onto hers.... Never.
But she had not cared enough for me, not enough to love me. No... I had her frienship, but she had given her heart and soul to him, to the Gaian prince! So I had tried to kill him, but he defeated me, he was after all, a Sacred Race being.
It would have never worked between them, a relationship between two members of different world’s Sacred Races
would inevitably fail: it meant that one of them had to give up living on it’s planet; they had both been members of their world’s royal family, the very idea of one of them rejecting the throne and condemning itself to deprivation of their planet was preposterous!
Yet wasn’t that what true love was about?
Sacrifice?
But would have love seen them through that? I knew that this was also the reason why Nikolai’s two guardiams had disliked his attachment to my Karenhath, they had feared it would mean he would leave and he had been already chosen to become the Gaian King.
It would have never worked...
So my last chance had been to talk Karenhath out of it, to tell her that I loved her. That I loved her.
But it had made no difference to her, in her heart there was only space for Nikolai.
I had decided to kill her, hoping that she would reincarnate in the future, with me, in a world in which Nikolai didn’t exist.
So I had gone to Davos and asked if he would return Karenhath and me to life together in exchange of my services, he had accepted on one condition:
That I would help him take over the universe.
He never said what he wanted to do that for, never said what he would do with it once he owned it, but I didn’t care as long as I had Karenhath.
I didn’t have the heart to kill her so I set it up in such a way that she would die at the hands of Nikolai’s most loved guardian. It would bring pain to him, and that made me happy. That whent wrong and I was forced to kill her myself just the same, and Terran watched as I did it. That was what had hurt Nikolai the most, that Terran could have saved her but instead he chose to let her die. It had hurt to do it, but on the long run it would be better.
But it had gone wrong, after Nikolai died trying to protect Terran and the two other princes had killed themselves, an outer power, unkown to me, had set things up in such a way that some day she would return to life....
And so would Nikolai.
But it didn’t specify when or how, so I had to ask Davos one more favor:
To let me come back to life when she did.
He told me he didn’t know when that would be and offered me a different deal, that I would come back to life constantly, during every Earthian warrior cycle, and make sure that if Nikolai was there, he did not regain his memories. The day Nikolai returned would be the day Karenhath came back too so I had accepted this new mission and dedicated my life to it.
Now the day for me to end all of this had come, I would not let him find Karenhath.
She was mine. If the misterious entity interfered again I would kill it too.
For Karenhath.

Nikolai got up and closed his eyes, I saw a brilliant flash of white fading to silver, then blue and finally gold. The Gaian prince stood before me surrounded by his aura in all his glory, with the golden triangle sparkling on his forhead and his impossibly white wings extended in a menacing way.
This was how he had looked the day he defeated me...
Belial was close behind him holding the power draining net in his hands.
Only a few more seconds to go!
Nikolai opened his eyes and hurled a ball of pearly energy at me, I was barely able to dodge it. I landed a few meters away to find him falling onto me at light speed, he kicked me on the back and used me to catapult away just as he threw a ray of icy energy at Belial.
He was fast!
Belial blocked the ray with his mental shield, but the hit had been strong and he staggered back; Nikolai fell in a crumpled heap a few meters away from a crumbling buildind that had recieved too many misguided attacks. I smiled, let him die squashed by that mammoth construction.But wasn’t I supposed to bring him to the Darklands alive? My stomach tightened, I would NOT save him!
Davos’s words rang in my head: I want him alive... I clenched my teeth and ran up to him.
Just as I was reaching him another being suddently coalesced out of nowhere and taking the prince into its arms disappeared again seconds before the building colapsed.
I scanned surroundings for any trace of energy, there was none. Belial ran up to me.
"Where is he!?" He shouted distressed. I looked around stiffling a growl and finally screamed in rage.
"HE IS GONE!!!" Another failed mission!
But the look in Belial’s purple eyes told me he could sense something.
"A psychic took him away. I can’t feel him now but a power level as great as the young lord’s is hard to conceal. I suggest we stand by and wait for him to show up on his own." It made sense so I accepted.... But why the hell did he have to be so respectfull towards the damned Ice-angel anyway?
Hadn’t Belial given up on his Earthian heritage?
I noticed he was trembling. Did it pain him to hurt an Earthian?
Everything became clear to me then; that was why Davos had sent us to capture Nikolai when we where such an incompatible pair. He had wanted to test us, to see if I could resist the temptation to kill the Gaian prince and disobey his orders; and to see if Belial could fight against a memeber of his own world’s Sacred Races.
We were being gauged by Davos during this battle.
Damn him! He hadn’t really counted on us capturing him, he was just finding out if we were as loyal as we claimed to be! The very idea that he would do such a thing to me, after all the centuries I had spent at his service was maddening. How dare he distrust me!
Belial eyed me curiously, obviously at a loss as to why I looked so... Sick. If Davos didn’t trust us then who did he trust? I had always thought that we were his most powerful and reliable warriors...
If it wasn’t us... Who was it? I shook my head to clear my thoughts and let out a small growl, Belial sighed and turned to leave.
After a while I followed him.
 
 

DAVOS:
"I think Nyall was displeased by your choice of actions, my Lord." I turned to look at the creature who had spoken.
"It’s best to be sure of his reliability now than to lament ourselves later." I said in a monotone voice. Avatar smiled and lifted an eyebrow questioningly.
"Will I be tested like that too?" His tone was certainly mocking, he knew that it was improbable that I would ever feel the need to doubt him, I had created him for this purpose. A creature whose emotions were nonexistent, he acted as if he possessed them, but I knew better; he pretended to have feelings in order to seem more... Normal.
"Maybe... You never know." He snorted humorlessly.
I studied my creation critically, he was by any standards more powerful than most Gods and certainly more intelligent; his body was lean and well proportioned, his eyes a deep shade of red, the same colour as his waist-length hair and clawed nails; his features were defenitevely elfin and his smiles downright seductive; since I had decided to create an invencible being why not make him handsome too? Most people thought him to be nothing but a conceited arrogant bastard, some day he would kill them all; but for now it was better to keep his powers and origin a secret.
"Go and practice outside for now, Avatar. I’ll call you if anything happens." He adjusted the folds of his red and gold robe and turned to leave without even bothering to bow. It would have angered me in any other creature, but I made him that way and I felt a sort of... Fondness for him.
But since my own emotions were also quite restricted I didn’t think it qualified as that.
I resumed watching the situation on Earth, Athena still hadn’t comunicated with me but given that she had set out to kill two of princes I strongly suspected we would be hearing from her soon. She had allied herself to me in order to gain power over Gaia, now it was all hers, but the resurrection of the three princes put her empire at stake, she would come to me...
Oh yes, she would come to me.
The Shidralians were also beginning to realize I was moving again, good for them. After having left them to themselves for all these millenia it was natural that they took so long to become aware of my suddently expanding frontiers. As long as my brother didn’t interfere everything would be fine, and if he did I would kill him.
And as for the beautiful Karenhath... Let her try to reach her beloved. I would kill them both then.
But I needed Nikolai alive in order to bait the Shidralian princess, so I had better keep a close watch on Belial and Nyall. She was the last shidler so when she died it would be the end of Shidral and its wonderful hegemony. This wouldn’t just be the last Earthian cycle, it would be the last War.
And once it was over I would be able to sit down and ponder over what foolishness led me to listen to my brother and create such a chaotic universe so full of... Emotions.
There was no balance or reason in them and almost always led to foolishness, I had made a mistake in allowing the existance of such creatures. But I couldn’t unmake them so I would just have to destroy them.
Where had emotions come from I would never know, but I hoped that I would be able to get rid of them soon. Of all  the emotional Gods I had created and all the emotional mortal beings they had given life to.
It had all been a mistake....

A flaw.
 

KARENHATH:
I glanced nervously at my Cancer warrior and finally accepted her petition; but I couldn’t refrain from giving her one last warning. "He might not remember you,Temis."
The elf-girl smiled and sat down beside me on the bed. "Is that wat’s keeping you from going?"
I laughed softly and shook my head, no... that was not it. "I want to see if he still loves me."
"So you are going to wait for him to contact you? How is he supposed to do that?"
I smiled at her surprise. "There is such a thing as teleportation, Temis."
"Yes but he might not remember the coordinates." I felt something akin to fear grip me momentarily, then recede.
"The cloths will remember..." Temis frowned, her delicate eyebrows coming together in a very feminine way, her feline-slitted pupils giving her a very ferocious expresion.
"I just hope you don’t regret not chequing on him." She said worriedly, my smile widened unaccountably.
"I am going to check on him." I said with mischevous tone in my voice. Temis tipped her head to her left questioningly and made a small curious sound.
"I thought you said you weren’t going to keep on interfering with Terran’s dreams. You already told him you forgave him!" She looked so cute when she was at a loss... It was a pity that she rarely showed her true self to anybody, she was an adorable person, not nearly as conceited as most elves; but still as beautiful as only elf females could be, and probably a bit more seductive even. But, that was her way of being...
It was what love had driven her to become throughout her continous reincarnations.
"I won’t meddle with Terran’s dreams!" I answered smiling at her and batting my long eyelashes. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again, her expresion told me she had finally understood.
"So that’s why you are letting me go! I should have suspected!" She wasn’t really even half as annoyed as she sounded but I pretended to feel menaced by shielding my face with my arms. We both broke out laughing.
"You didn’t honestly expect I’d let you go there and not ask you to keep and eye on my little Niko, did you?" She smiled warmly and shook her head, it was my turn to frown. "But what will you do if he doesn’t remember you?"
"I will meddle with ihs dreams just like you did with Terran’s!" She informed me calmly. "After all." She continued "Dream meddling is my specialty." Yes I told myself, it was.
"And maybe this time he will have the guts to choose you over duty."
Temis sighed. "I hope so..."
The last time her beloved had ended up choosing not be with her and had followed his duty. But for some odd reason I had the impression that things were not what they looked like. Temis had been weaker in that life, so maybe...
I shook my head and hugged Temis. "Take care, and keep your eyes open."
She hugged me back and whispered in my ear. "I promise to keep an eye on Nikolai."
After that she got up and we both stepped out of my palace room, her eyes becoming cold and her smile less frank.
To me, she was Temis, my romantic best friend, but to the world she was Dreamscythe, the powerful yet emotionless dream manipulator and Shidralian Cancer gold warrior.
That was the price to pay for love, she was strong and respected now. Would that make a difference this time?
We were about to find out.

It was a few hours after she had left that I was finally able to lie down on my bed and relax. My thoughts kept wandering back to Nikolai...
The very thought of being in his arms again sent shivers down my spine. I would have given anything to be able to run to him right now, but I had better wait until he had sorted things out with his team. Then I would go to him, but I was quite sure he would come to me first.
My beloved Nikolai...
This time I wouldn’t let anybody keep us appart; this time I would be with him forever!

My love....

Outside the stars shone brightly and the first of Shidral’s three moons had risen, its blueish light filling the room.
Soon...I would be with him, he had better wait until then and not get involved with any other girl!
I laughed aloud at the though and curled up in my bed ready to get a good night’s sleep.
And just like it had happened for the past sixteen years of my present life, I dreamed of him and only him.
And of a bright future full of light, where we could be together.

Forever.
 

SHAINA:
He gave me a piercing look so I looked away. How could he still be alive?
Marin made a strangled little sound beside me but didn’t move.
:What do we do now?: She asked me urgently through telepathy. I felt too scared to answer. Was this man inmortal?
He turned to Julian an expression of infinite love on his face and carefully wiped the sand from his face with the back of his hand.
:Let’s go back and tell Athena.: I answered, feeling cowardly about sugesting it but Marin nodded, so we left.
I had felt unable to hurt them when I saw the look of worry on the man’s face.
Kanon was worried about Julian.
Kanon was alive....
But that wasn’t what bothered me... The real problem was that I had been unable to hurt Julian. The very thought of harming  him seemed impossible.
But why?

So I returned to Athena, to tell her that we had failed and that Kanon was alive; but I felt empty inside and so did Marin.
I didn’t want to do this! I wanted to be with Seiya, to kiss him again!
Instead I was helping the woman who hurt him the most.
But he loved her...
Was that good enough a reason to stay?
(But deep down...)
The sanctuary looked so cold in the fading moonlight, so devoid of emotion.... Would I end up like that if I stayed?
(I knew the truth.)
The vision of the moon-washed tiles used to impress me, now it filled me with terror.
She was evil now.
Athena was evil.
And I was no better, for I was helping her.
But how did I know this?
(Deep down...)
Seiya...
(... The truth.)
Marin touched my arm and slowly we walked up through the narrow secret passsages to Athena’s temple.
We were alone now, we had chosen to stay because duty was too important to us.
It was a hell we had chosen for ourselves, and I hated myself for doing so.
Because deep down...
Deep down I knew the truth.
I wasn’t here  because of duty.

I was here because I didn’t have the guts to be anywhere else.
 

END OF CHAPTER TWO
Hidden memories
 

Author’s note: Phew! I almost forgot! All disclaimers apply! Original characters and storyline all belong to Kurumada-sama and Toei! But Karenhath is MINE! BWAHAHA!! (Evil laugh.)
What!? I said it was a weird fic!
I hope you enjoyed it anyway, I’m really working hard on it but my typing is so slow it will take AGES before I finish it! Oh well, I just hope no Saint Seiya fans will be offended by this fic, it is a bit unusual. *Sigh*
For all those who like it, thank you very much and please send me your comments to this address:
Karenhath21@hotmail.com.
I don’t have internet at home so it might take a while before I answer any mail, but I would appreciate the support! ^_^;
And here is a sneak preview to what questions will be answered in the next chapter:
Who is Temis going to see and where? (Though I think it’s pretty obvious where she is going.)
Will Marin and Shaina kill Julian? (Now that’s a stupid question!)
How will Johdas face up to his past life’s identity?
What about the Hilda/Siegfried relationship?
Did Dohko put the announcement in a magazine? (Another stupid question, mind you.)
How’s Camus doing?
Will Seiya find Shun in time? (will he find him at all for that matter!)
What will be Athena’s next move? (Ok, I admit it. I DO dislike her.)
Who rescued Hyoga from Nyall and Belial? (You are a lost cause if you didn’t figure that one out!)
AND WHERE THE HELL IS THE PHOENIX WHEN YOU NEED HIM!? (probably reading playboys *sigh*)

All this and a bit more in my next chapter. And to all those who were wondering or desperately searching for the name Davos in mythology enciclopedias... Give it up! HE’S MINE TOO!!! BWAHAHA!!! *snicker*
 
                                                                Lotsa luv:
                                                                       Sofía (Toffee) Francisco.