Chapter 8:

CHIMAMIRE NO YUME/BLOODY DREAM

Sakura of the wind,Blade of withering shadow


My hand grips grandmothers locket with all it's remaining strength.
Over and over my mind won't rest,I hear the blood crying around me so loudly,I rise up from my spot on the grass,we are not quite far away from the estate and Kiko sleeps beside me soundly,looking as though a perfect angel in her slumber.

I attempt to simply walk a circle around the camp,I watch around us hoping no other shinsengumi,madmen,warriors or even the emperor himself appears.I feel lost,I can not breathe calmly here,I don't even feel like I can cry again over grandmother now,I can't check on my Father who is probably a mess since I am never away longer than a few hours and I am over a hundred years gone away.

I can not escape the sounds that the wind carries my way,all of them are from the burial place that the Warrior dug himself for the fallen on both sides.
"I could have never believed it to be, so had I not seen it........"
The voice I hear but the owner I do not.
"Kyoto will be a disaster if this occurs child,do not let that talisman reach that place,do not let it reach Lord Kokoro."
Another voice echoes,this one is haggard and not so grief filled  as the first voice was,"Could that voice been Takahira San?who is the other one?"I mutter more and more questions in my head finding more questions to ask those mental questions on and on.
Strange to note how when one is distracted they lose all concept of where on when they are,I look up to find myself at a place I had seen only once before,I see a well and a young woman,she is striking to behold.
She holds a child in one hand and a dagger in the other over someone else,one who is full with child herself(this is different than the first one,I believe she was alone save the child and the Warrior running to her)The sight somehow is making me physically ill,I hold my own stomach somehow trying to protect that poor woman and her own abdomen.The Warrior is like a horse in speed and a tiger in ferocity as he nears the women,the one wielding the child over the well smiles with a smile of bitterness and death.

The Warrior screams to hasten himself and to reach as the child is dropped in the well,poor thing looks barely old enough to walk,it screams terribly but the Warrior reaches him in time,all the while his abdomen gets slashed viciously  with the dagger,the woman who did so only begins to weep then,gently caressing his mask less face all while the woman beside her gets her abdomen cut.

The Warrior was barely holding onto the baby and to the wells edge,he roars,throwing himself back on the ground and twisting to unsheathe his sword to slice the woman nearly in half,the baby weeps in his arms and the other woman.....

"Noroi says we must leave now."
The not so gentle nudge awakening from Kiko only frightens me more.
I had no idea I was even dreaming.
Nor did I know the identity of the man I saw at the very end who watch on from the gateway of the wall side,his eyes were as though having been through that ordeal himself but clean of the blood of it.
Clean......
That is a sight that may soon become abnormal to me.