Prelude

Translated by narumo/narumonster on Vocaloid Otaku.


Your absence was for me an unbearable pain

Why do I have this feeling of emptiness?
Why do I feel like I’ve lost something?
Why do I search the world for an unknown face, and feel despair when I don’t find it?
Why do I feel a voice I shouldn’t know, and call a name I shouldn’t know?

You have an older sister, his mother said sounding slightly sad.
In that instant, Len knew that the mysterious feeling he had harbored ever since he was aware wasn’t completely unfounded.
So he asked:
“That girl, is she my twin?”
His parents were shocked into silence. In the end, he wasn’t told in detail how that precious fragment of his soul was separated from him.
He was sure the edges of their souls were connected. But if he tried to put into words that strange feeling, undoubtedly Len would be considered mad.
Since Len was one the smartest children of his town, he made no further attempts of asking his parents for that fragment of himself.
After all, he wasn’t the only one sad about it. If he tried to continue talking, the sight of his mother breaking down in tears left him with no other option but to give it up.
The voice, the afterimage, the traces didn’t vanish from his mind.
Len thought that, since they were twins, she was bound to look a lot like him.
She had to have eyes blue like the southern seas, showing through hair of gold. But, since she was a girl, she must be pretty.
Len loosened his tightly fastened ponytail and laughed.
Even if he looked in a mirror, that image was only himself, not that fragment so distant from him. Yet it felt like the afterimage could chase after him.
(...How do you laugh?)
If he slid his finger over the surface of the mirror, the reflection moved as well, as if in pursuit. The eyes peeking out from between his bangs seemed to be longing for something; to the point he wondered if they were really his own.
He wanted to confirm the existence he felt in the edge of his heart.
All this time, all along, he had been aware of it... 


The girl awakened by the sound of a drop of water falling in a humid and dark place. In the darkness, her soft golden threads slipped from her shoulders.
It seemed she had fell sleep for a while.
She rubbed her eyes, not completely free yet from drowsiness, and looked around in the dim light.
From a distant crevice in the rock face, the sunlight from the outside poured in, illuminating a single point in the rocks.
It was a small pool of sunshine.
“...”
The girl timidly approached the meager sunshine, and extended a hand, as if to ascertain its warmth.
The skin of the girl, barely touched by the sun, was white.
The hair of the girl warmed by the sunlight had the captivating hue of honey, and the eyes that moved as if quietly studying it were a soft blue.
It seemed to blend in with the rocky area, but something different was there in front of the girl’s eyes. With a skin hard a rock, the being was surely sleeping at the moment. Inside its unopened eyelids, slitted pupils of gold existed, that shone even in the darkness.
The being with the form of a dragon was called god of destruction and held as guardian deity; it lived in this land and supported it, and at times brought forth calamities.
Yet this was unmistakably a dragon that once lived in the heavenly realms and was left behind. If it grew restless, it would surely be uncontrollable and engulf this land in a sea of fire.
For the dragon, humans were nothing but weaklings. An existence was not even worth taking.
Everything amassed until that moment would be turned into ashes very easily. Yet the people had one unique method that served as opposition: a voice.
A voice making a yarn of sounds.
It wasn’t just anybody that could appease the dragon; the owner of such a singing voice went to live in a dark and generally uninhabited rocky place, appointed to a shrine that was kept there just for form’s sake, and spent her days coming and going between the shrine and the underground caverns where the dragon dwelled.
Now, the girl was that person.
Making a soft sound, the delicate ornaments on her hair swayed.
The door in the small shrine that led the outside couldn’t be opened from the inside; periodically, food and objects required for her daily needs were sent in.
To put it in other words, she was preserving this land, sacrificing her life in solitude. Apparently, the land where the dragon dwelled was promised abundance.
If one considered the risks that were burdened at that same time, perhaps it was something to be expected.
The girl didn’t know. What was the outside like? The hem of the one-piece dress of soft cloth that was given to her waved as she giggled under the meager sunlight.
At that moment, the big rock suddenly moved. The dragon that should’ve been sleeping had woken up.
The slitted golden pupils stared at the girl, as if inquiring what was amusing. If she was unprepared, it was likely to tear the slender body of the girl into pieces in an instant.
But the girl gave no signs of cowardice.
“Today is sunny. I will sing for you a sunny song.”
Without her notice, a song had come to her mind. There were songs that seemed as if she had heard in various places, and songs that came to her mind while dreaming.
The song her soft lips were spinning was one of those songs.
In her dream, the girl became a boy. She was called a name by different people; Len, she thought it was.
The boy who greatly resembled her had answered back with a smile, and went running full of energy into the sunlight.
That led her to wonder what kind of person was the one who sang before her in this place.
Her role wouldn’t end unless someone with a voice that appeased the dragon was born, or she was killed experiencing the wrath of the dragon.
That she had been put into the shrine just after her birth, without being given the time to reach adulthood, reflected one fact.
The person before her was dead for sure. She had felt the dragon’s wrath, or it had grown tired of her.