| | | Prologue - In the Night | | | Author: Moonflow

"Oh my goodness..." Rina's mouth had barely moved as she muttered whispers to herself. The bright lights of the television screen flashed in front of her eyes. Ice cream, colored in brown, beige, and pink slipped down onto Rina's shirt, yet she picked it right up and licked it off her fingers.

She sighed, shutting the television off. The news at night were always depressing; she didn't need any more that made her day worse. She had just got laid off from work that day, so she had nothing better to do, but to eat her depression away in front of the television.

She had just discovered her favorite ice cream was named "Neapolitan" instead of "Napolean" when she heard the disturbing discoveries on the news. There had been several cases where completely randomly chosen people were killed in their sleep with scratches and lashes dug deep into the skin on their back. It made her shudder just to think of it.

Rina quickly jumped off of the sofa and set the box of ice cream onto the table. Her dark brown hair whipped behind her, flying like the wings of angel, but as black as the eyes of a demon. "Jake!!" she called down from the base of the stairway. She and her brother, not much younger than her, had been living in the same apartment since they had gotten out of college and just began starting out lives on their own.

"Coming..." he said in a soft, frail voice.

Rina grumbled. Whenever he said "Coming" or "I'll be there real quick", it always meant fourty-five minutes later. Giving into impatience, she ran up the stairs to his room and kicked the door open.

"Jake! You know I-" However, as Rina stared at the bare back of her younger brother, her jaw dropped. She never finished her sentence...

| | | Prologue - In the Night Part B| | | Author: Aki1

His skin was bathed in the light of the hallway that spilled into the room where darkness had just been reigning. She saw the rumpled sheets gathered in a messy pile around his waist, leaving his torso bare...bare and covered with a tight pattern of lashes and cuts that struck the flesh. Her horrified eyes took in the scarlet leaking out of the breaks in the skin, but not far enough to mar the eerie and cryptic symbols seemingly carved into her brother's back...

She could hear his voice, although feeble and in a mere whisper laced with pain and quivering fear. "What...is it? How bad...?"

She could almost feel his pain, simply by looking at those repulsive but hauntingly intricate writings presented in a stark contrast of crimson to the paleness of his skin...too swift and heavy to be by blade, and yet too perfect to be otherwise.

And how familiar the symbols looked...

"It hurts..."

How strangely familiar, not just by the random flashes she just saw on the news, but as though she had seen these writings before, with her own eyes -

"...Rina??"