Dusk Chapter 10 Preview
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Present Day
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Aoigawa Hospital of Chronic Heart Diseases, late afternoon
Shirano Yuri was barely nine years old and suffering from a heart failure. Her frame was small for her age, bony and fragile. With her sickly pale skin, platinum blonde hair, and big misty grey eyes, she looked almost transparent against the white background of the hospital room.
When Yuri sensed a chilling presence from outside the window, she was surprised to find a lady with very soft pink hair sitting on a tree branch. Yuri’s grey eyes met with mystifying sea-green orbs. The lady smiled politely. Yuri was surprised at first, but then her thin lips pulled sideways into a toothy grin.
The lady smiled back. She glided smoothly into the room, as if she was riding the wind with a pair of wings on her back. ‘Strange’, Yuri thought, she did not remember leaving the window opened.
“Hello,” the lady greeted kindly as she sat down next to the little girl on the bed.
Yuri liked her voice. It was calming and soft.
Lulling.
She was feeling sleepy again. She had been sleeping a lot these days. Each time she fell asleep, it was getting harder and harder to open her eyes. Sometime ago, Yuri would wake up to her mother’s frantic screaming and tears. However, now days she would wake up alone in the peace and quiet of her hospital room. If not, Yuri would wake up in the other room, with a familiar intrusive feeling of various tubes connecting to her little body as her only friend.
Closing her misty gray eyes slowly and tiredly, Yuri smiled as she asked, “Is it time for me to die, oně-chan?”
The lady was surprised, “Why do you ask me that?”
Yuri opened her heavy eyes, searching for the lady’s sea-green orbs. “Aren’t you an angel, oně-chan?”
The lady smiled sadly, “No, I’m not… an angel.”
“But then, how did you fly so high to that tree?”
Yuri remembered that her room is on the fourth floor, and the tree outside her window doesn’t have enough branches to be climbed. A long time ago, when she still had a lot of energy in her, Yuri had tried to climb down the tree so she could run away from the hospital and meet her friends. However, her resolve wavered when she looked down and saw far distance to the ground.
“If you’re not an angel… then what are you?” asked Yuri, confused.
A long pause, but then, the lady replied, “I am… a soul collector.”
Interested, Yuri tried to sit more straight on her bed. Her misty green eyes twinkled like stars, “Why do you collect souls, oně-chan?”
The lady was not looking at her, but staring outside the window with a far-off look. “I need them to be alive. I need them… to continue living.”