Chapter 0 - Prologue

Sun looked down from the ledge's top, her outward expression focused and indifferent. The sword she always carried, given to her the night before her parents died, hung in a leather strap around her hips, sheathless; no scabbard had ever encased this broadsword.

At the base of the cliff, a large city rested in the shadow behind the sun, the richer part of the town separated from the poorer by a large wall with several small gates.

Unlike her predecessors, Sun knew exactly what to do. The previous Wings had failed, and now it was her turn to prove that her generation was the best. She took the broadsword out of her belt, but left the small dagger; that, she knew, she was going to need. She uncovered a long, shallow ditch in the ground, placing the sword gently into it. She replaced the cover and renewed the spell over it, in place so no one discovered the weapon by accident.

Then, shouldering a pack of rations, she headed down the mountainside. She looked back at the patch of ground that wasn't exactly ground, and promised - more to herself, "I will return, Hihane."

******

"Once there was a prophet that foretold the coming of the Six Wings, the chosen ones that will save this world from the evil Kami. After Ragnarok, the Akugami took control of the land, but soon he will be overthrown and no one will hunger, no one will thirst, there will be no poverty and it shall rain again. So mote it be."

Jyra, a twelve-turning-thirteen-tomorrow boy of the village, muttered this to himself, a legend whispered across time and land by dissenters of the so-called God of Fumouzabaku. He carried a parcel with him, full of the groceries that his father had sent him to buy - none that they really needed, and all paid for with Jyra's own wallet.

It never rained in the world anymore, except in far southern places, and the mysterious land across the sea; the land, it was rumored, that had caused Ragnarok in the first place. Rumor had it that most of the people of that land never cared for the things which made them special, and the end of that world wiped away all their mistakes.

Somehow, however, though the precipitation never fell in the north, there was always mud to be found in the streets. These streets started off as just plain dirt roads, but when the nobility had found that they could afford more water than those in the slums, they had begun a trend of sending their servants with a few buckets of water and dumping them in the streets, just to show their disdain of the unfortunate people living there.

Jyra had no family but his usually-drunk father and the cat they'd had for three years. When his father was sober he was nice enough, but most of the time, he sent Jyra off to do some exhausting task while smelling of ale. The nearest shop was almost two hours away walking, and they didn't have a wagon or a wheelbarrow to carry the groceries in.

Despite all this, Jyra enjoyed his life, knowing he was better off than a lot of people here. Granted, he wasn't the richest in these slums - that was his father, and he kept the money to himself for his alcohol - but he knew money wasn't everything; stories were. A tale was worth a lot these days, especially the ones that spoke of hope, bravery, and dreams for things to change. Every time he thought he heard a legend being repeated, he would stop and listen 'til the end. The local storyteller knew his name and face, and often she would seek him out first if she had a new yarn to spin.

His favorite legend, however, was the one his mother told him while on her deathbed at his fifth birthday. The legend that had been her favorite, as well - the one that his father scorned and laughed at. The tale about the Six Wings and the day they would come together and cleanse the Earth.

Lost in thought, Jyra didn't notice he was on a crash course until he ran into the man in front of him. The parcel split open from the impact and the groceries fell in the mud. The man turned around with an angry look on his face; raising a hand, he backhanded the boy, sending him face-first in the wet ooze.

"Watch where you're going, kid!" the man snapped as he started off again. Then he stopped; a woman of about seventeen stood in his path. Her bright green eyes glinted angrily, and her brown-and-black hair looked a little too clean for her to have come from the slums.

"You are an idiot," she growled fiercely.

"What did you-"

"Can't you see that that was your own fault? Go back and help that boy up."

Baffled by the woman's outright arrogance, unlike any woman that was socially acceptable, the man shouldered her aside and walked away. She grabbed his wrist, and he turned and aimed a punch at her face. She dodged and brought her knee up into his crotch, and as he fell, gasping in pain, she drove the heel of her hand into his face and knocked him out with a hard blow to his jaw with her other hand.

"Oops," she said, "I went a little too far." She turned back to Jyra and held her hand out to help him up. "You okay, kid?" she asked politely.

He reached and grabbed her hand. "Yeah, I'm all right," he answered.

At the contact, the woman started, but her disconcerted expression vanished as soon as it had appeared, and she pulled him to his feet.

"You know, you should be more careful," she said as she bent to help pick up his things. "It may have been mostly his fault, but adults don't care much."

"I know," Jyra answered. "I've lived here my whole life."

"I wonder why you don't die of misery," she muttered.

"Huh?"

"Nothing," she said. She got up and handed him his groceries. "My name's Sun Liebermann. What's yours?"

"Jyra Thomas," he answered.

"Jyra, huh? Odd name for someone from this place."

"I'm not from here," he said. "My father found me when I was a baby, and I had a note attached to my blanket. A nametag...or something like that." He looked up at her and grinned. "I don't care much, really. Stuff like that's not important in a place like this."

"It's more important than you know," Sun murmured, instantaneously serious. She turned and walked away before Jyra could ask about her sudden mood swing.

"Uh...Thanks for helping me!" he called after her. She waved without turning to show she'd heard. Skirting the unconscious man, Jyra continued on his way, pretending not to notice the stares aimed at him.

In another ten minutes he'd reached his home, but from the sounds resonating within, he could tell that his father, Daemon Thomas, was still drunk. He decided to ride out the rest of the man's intoxication in his room - which wasn't a room; Jyra lived in a small, one-room, no-restroom shack on his father's property, where he'd been moved on his tenth birthday on his father's insistence that he was old enough to live on his own.

Rosie meowed welcomingly as Jyra opened the door, and leaped off his bed to purr and rub against his legs. The small gray-and-white cat was the granddaughter of his mother's favorite cat, Artemis, and was about three years old. Jyra had taken it upon himself to protect Rosie from Daemon's violent, alcohol-stimulated tempers, which was how they'd lost Artemis and Gypsy, Rosie's mother. Jyra fed her with some of the meat he'd purchased (which had been protected from the mud by a paper wrapping) and stroked her while she ate.

"Something weird happened today," he said, more to himself. "I don't know exactly how it was weird, but I think it's important."

*****

A pair of bright green eyes glittered in the moonlight...

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