Demons of Mercury

Even as she perused the thick, dusty books from the old library’s ancient shelves, despair began to weigh heavily on her heart. "It’s useless," she mumbled breathlessly, surveying the room for a sign of hope.

But none was there. The weary candle dimly lit the room, but it flickered constantly, the chill wind from the open window never ceasing to threaten it. Through the stained glass windows, opened a crack, she could see a sliver of the moon, and she wondered how the rest of the world fared that dreary night.

She went back to her books, straining her eyes to read the ancient text in the disappearing light. White hair dripped across her bony shoulders and her entire body ached with arthritis and lack of rest. But she knew that hidden in those fragile manuscripts was the key to her future and the part of her that she had lost, and she was going to stop at nothing to find it again. And so she studied, her tired eyes peering into what the scrolls prophesized to be the future. But nothing of her lost soul, or of the second dimension, or of the Demons of Mercury.

PART ONE

Prologue

Three centuries later, the old woman’s descendent was enjoying her youth. Her name was Sakura, and in an uncanny way, she resembled her great-great-great-great grandmother Myuta immensely, to the last freckle, her father said. She assumed that her father had only known from an old painting or something. How else could he know what his great-great-great grandmother looked like?

"She was magical," he had often told her wistfully when she was a child, but she sensed that he was regurgitating stories passed on to him by other ancestors. Though he seemed to have an almost personal relationship with Myuta, and Sakura didn’t really understand it.

But all the same, Sakura definitely had Myuta’s characteristics, as had her mother and her grandmother, ever since Myuta had born a child. And Sakura felt in a way that she almost knew Myuta as well, even though the feeling scared her. But the white blonde hair, the blue-green eyes, the full lips the color of a rose. It was undeniable, as all her relatives claimed. She always wondered if her mother had gone through the same thing.

But Sakura’s mother was not told of her resemblance to Myuta anymore, she was dead. Supposedly killed in a car wreck, but all her grandmothers, aunts, and uncles told her something different. Killed by demons.

Sakura never believed them, she had always thought that they told the story to all the children to scare them enough so that they’d go to bed. But as she came unto her own, she began to realize that they weren’t lying. Every word they had spoken was coming true, and as Sakura began her own journey, the path of her ancestors began to unravel, pulling her deeper and deeper into the depths of her curiosity.

Myuta’s life, through what her relatives told her in pieces, was troubled. The demons of that age were powerful, and they called themselves the Demons of Mercury, for reasons unknown to everyone else. They stole something from her, something she had worked so long to find, and they took it, and hid it from her. The rest of her life she spent searching and researching, looking upon the tiniest clue for a new trail. And because of her search, her life was stretched, with her refusing to die and nature insisting it was well time for her death. Ultimately, half of her was taken from the living world while half remained, a ghostly spirit still searching for what she had lost.

Everyone in her family believed that she was still searching as a ghost, and that when she figured it out, what she had lost would be restored to the youngest member of her bloodline. And Sakura was the youngest member to date.

So even with three brothers and four sisters almost an exact replica of herself, she could still be different, and that made her happy.