<span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: arial;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 8pt;"><strong><em>In Inceptum finis est</em></strong><br/><br/>She should have trusted her instincts. Something about that guy had been off, something about him made her think of... she pondered for the words like a life preserver, something incorporeal to hold onto. The mystery boy made her feel like she was standing near the edge of a precipice, her heels touching the air, her toes digging into rock while she struggled to maintain her balance. Then, he turned and began walking away, not noticing her, and she felt as if she could breathe again. But then, he disappeared.<br/><br/>Kagami inhaled, and exhaled, feeling the cliff crumble just slightly. <br/><br/>Gekkoukan High School and its surroundings were nearly silent, the reticence unnerving and broken only occasionally by a car or motorbike passing by, the sounds of life and traffic distant. She didn't normally walk around town in the middle of the night, especially towards places she didn't like to frequent during the day (and school was definitely on that list of places), but for some reason she found herself walking in that direction and now emerged from the street lamp she'd concealed herself behind. She had seen a boy standing in front of the school's gate and paused, wondering what the hell he was doing, peeking through the bars like he was going to break in or something. Kagami had stopped and quickly hid, peering around to observe when suddenly the guy was walking and had simply vanished.<br/><br/><em>'Gut Gott,'</em> she found herself thinking, <em>'Did he just...? No way!'</em><br/><br/>She crossed the street and placed herself in the same spot that she had first seen the Mystery Boy, hands on her hips and head tilted quizzitively to the side. <br/><br/><em>No wormhole, no trap door...Maybe it was just a dream?'</em><br/><br/>She had sleptwalk before, and wondered if maybe it was happening again. Kagami looked down at her clothes, and sure enough, she was dressed in pyjama shorts and a shirt, though how she managed to get her trainers on was something new. She sighed, feeling like an idiot and trying not to feel frightened. She had always had trouble with numerous sleep disorders, insomnia and sleep walking being high on the list, but it wasn't like her to do it so frequently. It used to be a once or twice a year affair that had morphed into a once a month excursion, where she'd awake in the morning in different parts of the house. Comical as her cousin Kotori might find it, it was annoying to go to sleep in your bed and wake up seven hours later in another room, wondering how you got there. But she had never left the house before. <br/><br/>Kagami shook her head in exasperation and sighed, turning to make the trek back home when she noticed a shoelace had come undone. She bent down to tie it and gasped when her fingertips touched the pavement and came back wet with something warm and dark.<br/><br/>Blood...?<br/><br/>Somewhere indeterminate, a bell chimed for the twelfth time and the ground underneath her sank. Kagami stumbled and started running while the world around her metamorphosed into a gross parody of a haunted house, coffins standing upright in the middle of the road while above her head the moon swelled outrageously and glowed with an ethereal halo of light. <br/><br/>She felt something wet hit her cheeks and dragged the back of her hand across her eyes, coming to the realisation that she had started crying. <br/><br/>In her mind, her grandmother chanted '<em>Gutes und Barmherzigkeit werden mir folgen mein Leben lang, und ich werde bleiben im Hause des Herrn immerdar,</em>' the prayer she always tucked Kagami into bed with, and the memory only made her run faster, her feet hitting the sidewalk painfully now as she pushed herself faster and faster. <br/><br/><em>It's finally happened,</em> Her mind insisted, <em>You finally cracked and this is your punishment. She was right, I finally lost it after all.'<br/><br/>'Papa...'<br/><br/>'Papa...'</em><br/><br/>Her chest burned with the exertion of having run nearly four miles, but her feet wouldn't stop although her muscles began to cramp and her energy dwindled. Then, up ahead, what she saw made her stop in her tracks with awe. <br/><br/>A building, surprisingly normal-looking in the hellish surroundings was the backdrop of a scene Kagami thought could have been straight from <em>Purgatorio</em>. A group of schoolkids around her age were gathered at the entrance of the building, attempting to flee what looked like a shadow born to life, vaguely human-shaped but with eyes that glowed with the same hue as the moon above them. This creature was fighting off a group of other shadows, <em>monstrous</em> creatures of someone's demented nightmare birthed into existence. <br/><br/>One of them was injured. One was trying to get the others inside the building, and...She spotted the boy she saw in front of the school before everything had happened. <br/><br/>Suddenly, Kagami became very calm. She kept her eye on the group of humans and the aggregation of shadows, suddenly noting with an almost languid curiosity that she was closer to the shadows than the people, and that it was going to be impossible for her to make it over to them without drawing the wrong kind of attention. <br/><br/>The thought made her feel very disjointed, and eventually her whole body relaxed as she collapsed to the ground. </span></span>