Mirage Variation

- by Syrinx -

* * *

Mukashi, mukashi...

Once upon a time...

...a knight and a princess fought together against a great evil. After sharing many hardships, they defeated the evil, broke the spell, and restored to the prince his full heart.

But there was no one left to write a happy ending for the knight and the princess. So it happened that the knight lost his only power, the princess's love married someone else, and the princess herself turned back into a duck for all time.

The knight felt sad for his friend. "I will stay by your side forever," he promised her.

"Quack," the duck told him.

And whether she felt anything at the time...no one knew.

* * *

Part I: Andante

~~~

In the girls' dressing room, Ahiru was slow in getting changed out of her leotard and tights and into her regular school uniform. Pique, already changed and ready to go, poked her head in the door.

"Are you ready yet? We're waiting for you."

"I'm coming," Ahiru replied, hastily fastening her jacket and reaching for her bag. Inside was stuffed her ballet shoes and clothes, sweaty from class. She couldn't let herself forget to take them down to the laundry to wash them before she went to bed. She'd forgotten before--she wished it had only been once or twice--only to reach into her bag in the morning to find them still in a sweaty, smelly ball, or to remember them only in the middle of the night so that they were still damp from washing when she had to put them on again in the morning.

"Ahiru, come on!" This time it was Lilie. "We want to see the cast list!"

"Huh? Cast list?" said Ahiru, crossing the room toward them. She stopped in the doorway, facing her two friends, who were showing signs of exasperation. 'Uh-oh,' thought Ahiru. 'I missed something again.'

"Weren't you listening?" asked Pique. "Neko-sensei was explaining all about it in class. I thought even you would be interested."

"Ahiru was looking out the window at the time," explained Lilie, a mischievous glint in her eyes. "Maybe she had something even more interesting to think about than a ballet...."

"A ballet?" Ahiru sounded surprised.

"Yes, a real ballet," said Pique patiently. "Costumes, scenery, big performance, the works. All the ballet students are going to take part in the performance, and right now we're going to go look at the list of who's been assigned which part."

"Not that we'll be assigned anything interesting..." mourned Lilie.

Ahiru was still somewhat dazed by the idea. They'd seen touring companies perform ballets, and the school always had recitals. But Ahiru couldn't remember hearing that the school ever put on full-length ballets of its own. Her eyes widened at the thought.

Pique bopped her affectionately on the head. "You shouldn't be so surprised," she said with a smile. "During class Neko-sensei must have talked about it for fifteen minutes. And after class he even said to you, 'That means you, Ahiru!' and you responded 'Yes, sir!'"

"I guess I was somewhere else," said Ahiru.

"You've been 'somewhere else' a lot lately," said Pique, her tone becoming sterner. "Care to tell us about it?"

"Well...." Ahiru hesitated.

"Come on," prompted Lilie. "We're your best friends! Tell us so we can help you."

Ahiru didn't say anything at first. She walked past them into the hallway. "There has been something on my mind," she admitted. She moved to the window on the other side of the hallway and looked out at the courtyard below. "Do you think...I mean, is there a way to confess something to someone...without using any words?"

"Confess something?" asked Pique. "You mean..."

"Love!" gasped Lilie, breaking out in a rapturous smile. "It's obvious, Pique. Our little Ahiru must be worried about her stammering. She'd afraid it will ruin her confession of love to Mytho! It's made her lose confidence! She cries herself to sleep at night whenever she thinks about it!"

Pique rolled her eyes, and Ahiru grew red. "A-a-actually, I don't--"

Lilie cut her off. "There's no need to feel ashamed in front of us. We understand completely."

"And there's only one way to confess without words that 's sure to get your meaning across," added Pique, and she and Lilie shared a look that made Ahiru uneasy.

"Really?" she said tentatively. "What's that?"

The other two girls didn't even try to curb their enthusiasm. "A kiss!" they cried in unison.

If Ahiru had blushed red before, now she was practically turning purple. "I-I-I-I-I d-d-don't...I mean...not.... It isn't.... I-I couldn't.... I r-r-r-really...."

As she stammered and turned colors, her friends each took hold of one of her arms and turned to walk her down the hall. "We'll help you plan everything," said Pique.

"And, of course, we'll be there after you--" Lilie broke off mid-sentence. When they'd turned around, they could see the double doors of the main studio, where the partnering class was going on. It was only twenty or so feet away. One of the doors was open, and leaning against the doorjamb was Fakir. He wasn't facing them, so they could see only a part of his face...and the part they saw certainly didn't look happy as he watched Rue and Mytho demonstrate a series of supported movements for the class.

The three girls jumped when they saw him. He was so close he could easily have listened in. But when had he opened the door? How long had he been there and how much had he heard?

He certainly wasn't acting like he'd heard anything, and as the girls crossed silently behind him on their way downstairs the black-haired young man didn't even seem to know they were there.

~~~

Fakir stopped and blotted the ink so it wouldn't smudge. He ran his hand down the rest of the smooth, blank page and skimmed the last few paragraphs with his eyes. It almost made him smile. After all, even though those three girls hadn't known it, he had heard every word of their silly conversation. Not that he had cared at the time. Except for a slight interest in the fact that Ahiru was Princess Tutu, there were other matters that had occupied him more.

But those matters were not going to be a part of this story, and he pushed them from his mind. This was going to be a story about Ahiru and her first ballet, and Fakir had no intention of making himself anything more than a figure in the background. The big, blank book was spread out on his lap as he sat on a large wooden chair out on the pier overlooking the lake. Only the first few pages had been written in as of yet, but he had plans to fill all the pages, and more, with tales of Ahiru's life as a human girl. It was a bittersweet task...for even though remembering these things was cheering at times and it made his current circumstances seem less lonely...it was still a constant reminder that the Ahiru he knew from that time was gone.

It some ways it was a false feeling, because he and Ahiru had been living together in this secluded lakeside cottage for several months...ever since the defeat of the Raven and the destruction of Drosselmeyer's ill fated machine. But she was a duck now, and couldn't speak a word to him anymore.

Fakir glanced around, but didn't see her bobbing around on the lake. She was nearly always close by to him, but at this time in the afternoon he could guess that she was taking a nap, sheltered from the sun and buried in the coolness of the nest she'd built from the rushes that grew on the lakeside. There was a box and blanket for her inside the cottage if she ever wanted it. But usually she preferred her rush nest. She was a duck, after all.

The day Mytho and Rue had left to fulfill their happily-ever-after, Fakir had taken Ahiru and left Kinkan Town forever. Supposedly the magic was gone from that place, but Fakir didn't even want the hint of it in his life anymore. Leaving the academy meant leaving dancing behind, but it was a price Fakir was willing to pay for a life without the specter of magic hanging over it. Besides, Ahiru couldn't dance anymore, and it gave him some satisfaction to think that he was making the same sacrifice she had made.

The abandoned cottage was at the edge of a small lake some distance from the city, and they moved in. He had to cook his meals over a fire outside, and there was no running water. But there was a good woodstove to keep the cottage cozy at nights, and the building had been built well enough to keep the wind out. That was enough for Fakir, and it certainly was more than enough for a little duck--who only needed a lake and a warm bed of rushes anyway.

But Ahiru couldn't communicate with him. She couldn't tell him what she was feeling. She couldn't join in when he was reminiscing about their adventures. She couldn't ask him how he was doing, or even so much as comment on the weather. Though at first she had tried several methods of communicating with him, none of them worked out very well, and as routine and complacency took over their lives it seemed to Fakir that she retreated more and more into her life as a duck. There was no way around it: she couldn't speak to him. Fakir tried to come to terms with it too, but he couldn't help the loneliness that had begun to cast a shadow over his heart.

Stoically, he had tried to ignore it. Even though Ahiru was just a duck, she'd notice if he was unhappy, and it would make her worry. Fortunately for Fakir, the work of scraping a living out of the earth--gardening and fishing, washing clothes and keeping the cottage neat and provided for--did a good job of keeping his hands and his mind busy for months.

But it had come to the point where he was afraid he would forget what Ahiru was like--what she looked like, sounded like, and acted like. Like a dead friend or lover whose face begins to fade from a person's mind.

That was the terrifying eventuality that had driven Fakir to do what he had promised himself he would never do again.

Write a story.

~~~

Ahiru's eyes scrolled down the cast list, and the names flew by in a blur. She'd never seen the ballet 'Coppelia,' and so none of what she was seeing made much sense to her. From what she could understand, though, this was a story about peasants and a man who made dolls, and there was a big wedding at the end.

But where was her name? She expected to see it somewhere near the bottom, or in a group with other girls of the Elementary class. That's why it took her a few minutes to see that it was actually near the top.

Ahiru - Coppelia

Her brain processed this bit of information slowly. She had been assigned the role of Coppelia. The ballet was named 'Coppelia.' Therefore...there must have been some mistake. Or maybe she just wasn't reading the list correctly. Starting at the bottom, she worked all the way up, using her fingers to line up the proper name with its assigned role.

She couldn't get it to say anything else. Ahiru would be Coppelia. Ahiru would have the title role in the very first ballet she'd ever been in!

Pique and Lilie were on either side of her, examining the list closely.

" We're peasants in Act One and...peasants in Act Three. Sheesh, how boring," said Lilie.

Pique didn't sound so surprised. "Well, what did you expect? We're only the elementary class." She frowned. " But…Ahiru's name isn't there. Did Neko-sensei forget about her?"

"Say, Ahiru...you must've really upset Neko-sensei if he didn't even cast you in the ballet." Lilie wrapped a comforting, if tight, arm around Ahiru's shoulders, but Ahiru wasn't even paying attention. She was thinking about the one thing that this situation meant to her. If she was the lead, then she and Mytho might finally dance a...

...a pas de deux.

"Ahiru's not that bad, when she pays attention in class. I wonder why Neko-sensei didn't.... Oh, wait...there's her name," said Pique, pointing it out.

Ahiru could picture it all now. She was dancing across the stage in a beautiful white tutu, shiny pointe shoes on her feet. Mytho glided over to her and offered her his hand. Gracefully, she placed her palm in his.

"Hey, Ahiru. Did you see this?" asked Lilie. "You get to be Coppelia! How exciting."

But Ahiru was just standing there, a goofy grin on her face, her face blushing redder and redder by the second. A pas de deux! This was perfect! If she danced a pas de deux with Mytho, couldn't that be her confession without words! Then Mytho would know how she felt, and she wouldn't disappear in a flash of light.

"Lilie," Pique said. "There's nothing to get excited about. This is almost as bad a punishment as getting left out of the ballet."

"What?" said Lilie.

"In this ballet, even though Coppelia is the title role she's not the star."

"Not the star?" repeated Lilie.

Between them, Ahiru stirred in her daydream. Some of Pique's words were beginning to seep through the fog.

"Don't you know the story?" continued Pique. "Coppelia is a doll. She doesn't dance or walk around...she doesn't even get up from her chair. Ahiru is basically going to be a piece of scenery for the whole ballet!"

Lilie was overjoyed. "Oh, poor Ahiru!" she wailed, grabbing her friend around the neck and squeezing. "What a disappointment!"

"Just a doll?" said Ahiru, once Pique had been able to pry Lilie off of her. It was a disappointment, but it also made sense. She was the worst student in the school, and Neko-sensei couldn't afford to let her mess everything up.

Of course there would be no pas de deux. After all, Ahiru couldn't even dance in pointe shoes yet! Still, it had been a nice dream.... And her confession would just have to come another way.

~~~

For Fakir, magic was not just a fear; it was a phobia. It had driven him away from the only town he'd even known. He wanted to write, but he wanted nothing to do with the kind of power Drosselmeyer had wielded--the power that Fakir himself had inherited. Drosselmeyer's machine had been broken. The spell over Kinkan had evaporated. But Fakir's own scars ran too deep for him to approach the matter lightly. His fear of magic had caused him to move out into the wilderness, to an ancient cottage possessing none of the modern amenities. It had caused him to live in a way that he'd formerly despised: filling his days with the work that would feed and shelter him, instead of living in the pursuit of beauty, art, and justice.

And yet even after he'd given up so much, now he found himself undertaking a task that risked throwing his life back into the tyrannical jaws of Magic. He was going to write a story, even though he knew that his own magical power of making stories come true might still be lying dormant within him. This power, and the deadly consequences it had caused in the past, was one of the main reasons he feared magic so much. And yet he was risking it all again...just so he wouldn't forget his old friend and the way she used to be.

It shamed him that he couldn't accept her for what she was now, a carefree little duck living in nature as she should. And so he never talked about this to her. But he embarked on his task despite his fears, and now he was spending several hours each day thinking of and writing down different scenes surrounding the time Ahiru was preparing for her debut role as Coppelia.

Of course, he hadn't just starting writing immediately without testing to see whether or not his power was still there. If he discovered he still had even the barest trace of the power, he could try to persuade himself to give up this quest...at the very least so that he would not be the cause of any harm to Ahiru by some part of what he wrote coming true.

So he wrote a silly paragraph about a teacup falling off a table, and then kept his own teacup near the edge of the table in the cottage to give it every chance to come true. He wrote another about discovering a chest of money while walking through the woods. These were things that, even if they did come true, they would probably pose no danger to himself or to Ahiru, let alone the citizens of the nearby town. But despite their carefully harmless nature, he spent four nights with very little sleep, waiting for the teacup to fall. And he took several walks in the woods in which every shadow, every old stump looked like an old chest and made his heart leap into his mouth. Even the most harmless story, he knew, could become deadly with just a little twist of fate. He knew that all too well.

But nothing happened, as logic had told him it wouldn't. Drosselmeyer was truly and forever gone. His enchantment was broken, along with all the little traps and surprises that went with it. When it became clear his little test stories weren't going to come true, Fakir could only suppose that his own power had been merely another facet of the storyline that the old sorcerer had controlled. The deadly twists that turned Fakir's stories against him and his loved ones had been Drosselmeyer's also.

With that established, Fakir could see that the survival of his urge to write was proof enough that it was a true aspect of his personality...and therefore something to be treasured.

He still kept those test paragraphs that he'd written, tucked into the cover of his blank book, to remind him the power was gone and to give him confidence to write whatever he wanted. And he wanted to write for Ahiru.

Words had a power inherent to them anyway...because they were able to capture and protect a fantasy...or a memory...that couldn't be preserved any other way.

But that, he supposed, was a safe enough magic.

~~~

Ahiru felt distinctly out of place, and she sat on the very edge of the chair Neko-sensei had placed for her in the corner. Her instructor loomed over her.

"All you have to do is sit here...in this chair...without moving, without talking, without making a sound for one hour. This is what your character must do for the entire first act. At one point, I will ask you to perform one simple gesture. If you can show me that you can do this one little thing, and do it well, then I will excuse you from rehearsals until we move into the theater. If you don't, if you make a sound or move when you aren't supposed to, then you'll keep coming to rehearsals, just like everyone else, and work on it until you get it right. Can you do that, Ahiru-san?"

"Yes, Neko-sensei."

"There is, of course, an alternative punishment..." he began, beads of sweat suddenly breaking out on his forehead.

Ahiru cringed and hastily reassured him, "N-n-n-no, I'll get it right, Neko-sensei!"

Neko-sensei meowed loudly and started cleaning his face with vigor. When he was finished, he turned and walked away to start the rehearsal.

The reason Ahiru felt so out of place here was that this was a rehearsal for Mytho and Rue, and Fakir was also there as Mytho's understudy. The three best students of the entire school, with the very worst one sitting in the corner watching them. Every once in a while Rue shot her a cold look that said exactly what she thought of Ahiru's presence, and occasionally Ahiru would find Fakir looking at her with his signature unfriendly gaze. She thought he'd be different now that he knew she was Princess Tutu, but if anything, his looks toward her were darker than ever. And Mytho...well, even though he didn't seem to see her there at all, he flustered her more than the other two combined.

It was mostly because of the different things Lilie and Pique and told her to do in order to confess to them. But they really didn't understand what she was feeling. To clear her head, Ahiru focused on what she had to do right now. It was her first ballet ever, and even if she wasn't going to be dancing, she'd do her best at whatever Neko-sensei told her to do.

The task at hand didn't seem so hard to her. If she wasn't able to dance very well, at least she could manage to sit in a chair! Neko-sensei would see how quiet and still she could be. He'd forget she was even there....

"The scene we will learn today," Neko-sensei was saying to the others, "is the very beginning of the ballet, so it's important that we get it right. Swanilda is waiting for her lover Franz to meet her. Franz only arrives after Swanilda impatiently leaves to look for him, and while he waits for her, he catches sight of a beautiful doll in a nearby window."

Ahiru realized with a start that they were all suddenly looking at her. She blushed, embarrassed, until they turned away.

"However," continued Neko-sensei, "Franz doesn't realize she is just a doll. He thinks he sees a beautiful young girl."

Neko-sensei went on with his narrative, but Ahiru was caught by those last words.

He sees a doll...but thinks it's a girl, she thought. That's interesting. He sees something not real, and believes it is real. Is it possible to fall in love with an illusion...a dream? And how does Neko-sensei know that the doll isn't real anyway! Ahiru wasn't exactly a regular human herself, but she was real...wasn't she? She chewed on that thought for a long time, letting the rehearsal go on without paying to much attention to it. Some time went by before some activity close to her drew her focus back.

"And now, Mytho," said Neko-sensei. "You go over to the window and the little doll blows you a kiss."

And before Ahiru knew it, Mytho was standing right in front of her, his soft brown eyes staring right at her in soft expectation. Ahiru became so caught up in his gaze that she almost didn't hear what Neko-sensei was shouting at her.

"A kiss, Ahiru," called the instructor. "Weren't you listening? It's time for your one movement... blow him a kiss!"

"K-k-k-k-k-k-kiss?" What was Neko-sensei talking about? She was supposed to blow Mytho a what? She tried to move and found that she couldn't. Everyone was looking at her, and shock had immobilized her.

Why couldn't she just do this? Hadn't Lilie and Pique suggested this very thing?Now here was her opportunity. But she wasn't ready! At this crucial moment, she found that her feelings were...muddled. Confused and embarrassed, Ahiru shot to her feet. But in the process, she found that one of her legs was asleep and the toe of her shoe was still hooked around one of the chair legs. After a moment of desperately trying to maintain her equilibrium, she ended up crashing to the floor, sending her chair flying into Mytho in the process.

~~~

The sun was setting, and Fakir put down his pen, raising ink-smudged fingers to pinch the muscles between his brows. The light had faded so gradually that he hadn't noticed, and now his eyes and forehead ached from squinting.

Should he continue the story now or wait till tomorrow morning? He could always light a candle in the cottage and continue, but...this was a good stopping place for now. There was no anxiety about getting all the ideas out on paper before they flitted from his brain. Rather, the project was stimulating. And he rediscovered the fountain of his inspiration whenever he took up the pen.

Perhaps it was because Ahiru was with him. Right now she was paddling around in the lake, not straying too far from the pier today, and every once in a while ducking her head below the water as she found something to eat, her hind end wiggling shamelessly in the air.

But the project wasn't all fun and amusing. Fakir found himself writing things that he didn't feel he had much control over...things he wasn't sure he liked very much. But he let them stay on the paper and didn't erase the words by scraping them off with his penknife.

Although the story in some ways was taking on a life of its own, such a thing wasn't unnatural when it came to writing. It had nothing to do with magic. Stories often did that to their writers, or so he'd heard. Nevertheless, it was disturbing to see a reflection of himself--who he'd been before, with all his old meanness and fears--come to life again on the page before him...and from his own pen.

Perhaps that was a sort of magic, too.

The summer haze was a rosy red around the trees and watery thickets of reeds on the lake. It was going to be a humid night, as foggy as the last. The ghost-like wisps of vapor were already waiting at the wings, ready to obscure the lake scene in a thick white curtain.

Fakir always stopped himself whenever he found he was seeing the world in terms of a stage. Like right now: fog as curtains, and the lake as a scene? It might only have been his background in ballet that caused the tendency...or his recent experience of having his world turned into a stage before his eyes. But he took care to stop himself every time. He never wanted to become someone like Drosselmeyer, someone who saw the world as his stage and who wanted to manipulate it and the people in it.

He and Ahiru nearly hadn't escaped from the old sorcerer's story. They nearly hadn't saved Mytho. And though everything had miraculously worked out, in the process everyone had shed tears of deep pain...Mytho, Rue, Ahiru, and himself...and Fakir didn't want any more people going through such a thing ever again.

His eyes found the little duck again. She certainly seemed carefree now. But that thought didn't make him as content as he thought it should. Was she still the same Ahiru? She seemed more and more like a regular duck to him every day. But that was for the best, he reasoned. Surely she was happier back the way she should be, the way nature made her, before sorcery got a hold of her life and her heart.

The only question was, was Fakir as happy with her this way? He shut the book with a snap and rose from his chair. He head back for the cottage so the preparations for dinner could occupy his head and hand, and drive out the unwanted struggle between reason and sentimentality waging in his heart.

He fed her some pieces from his meal as he cooked it, and she ate some as always, but her tummy was already full of the muddy worms she'd dug up for herself, and she soon padded off to bed. Fakir didn't eat much of the dinner either, and after he'd cleaned up and put everything away, he went outside to stare out over the lake.

The sun had long set, and the moon was just rising, and the veils of fog were already making a labyrinth out of the lake, just as he'd predicted earlier. He began to walk along the bank. Carefully. Though it had been months, he hadn't taken so many walks out here that he was completely familiar with the territory; and the lake wasn't the perfect circle you sometimes saw of lakes in paintings. It had an irregular edge, with narrow penninsulae jutting out onto the surface here and there, wiry trees growing out of the shallower places, and patches of reedy marsh that could easily be mistaken for solid ground. Not the safest place for an evening stroll, especially with the fog like this, but Fakir had a good sense of direction, and he wasn't planning on going far.

Was Ahiru happy now? He couldn't let go of the question--though even if he could find out the answer, there was nothing he could do to change the situation. Though she'd been more than willing to give up her piece of Mytho's heart, she'd given Fakir the impression that she wanted to stay as a human.

He kicked at a stone in his path, equally and irrationally angry with her for being so selfless, Mytho for taking back his heart piece, and Drosselmeyer for causing the whole mess in the first place. But he told himself it was better this way, even though his soul seemed to ache. If he did know that Ahiru was miserable in this life, the fact that he had no power to change her back would have brought back Helplessness to wrap its iron fingers around his heart.

He came across a felled tree, and he sat down. Why couldn't he live a happy life? Even now, when he was free? Why couldn't he accept things the way they were?

Ahiru would make the best of the situation. Put on a cheerful, determined face and gone on with what she could do. Only...there was nothing Fakir could do. The closest thing was to write his story about Ahiru. It was something, at least. All he could hang on to.

Did she have any dreams for her future...when she was a girl? Was this truly where her heart had wanted herself to end up despite her strong front? Fakir thought of himself as her protector, but there was no way for him to make her dreams come true, no matter what they were.

What would she dream about, he wondered, if she still dreamed now? He smiled. She would dream, perhaps, of being a good dancer. He could see her in his mind's eye, dancing a beautiful variation. He could imagine how her technique would've improved (now that she didn't have a monster raven or Drosselmeyer to worry about!). The thought ignited a pain in his chest. If only she'd been given a few more years! With a sincere heart like hers shining though, the results would have been truly beautiful.

But who are you to get upset over all this, he told himself. It was something she herself probably didn't even think about anymore.

His writer's imagination took over, however, and he began to envision what he thought she would look like. The image came easily, instantly to mind: a tiny Ahiru in a simple white costume, dancing with all the energy of her heart. Not cold, pristine technique like Rue's, but dancing that showed her beautiful love shining through.

The vision he conjured up so easily was a little too faultless, he realized with a wry smile, and he tried to correct it to make it truer to his memory of her.

But the image would not change. Try as he might, the imaginary figure of Ahiru kept right on dancing with every detail intact, just the same as when he'd first thought her up. It was a strange feeling. Why could he only think of her this way?

Then the hair on the back of his neck began to prickle. He blinked his eyes. She remained. He shot to his feet, shook himself, and looked again. The veils of fog shifted in the night breeze, obscuring his view. But he could have sworn...not in his mind's eye, but with his real eyes...that he'd seen something.

The fog shifted again, and again he saw it. What looked like a long leg with a pointed toe appeared and disappeared. Then an arm. He had to be mistaken. A person dancing out here? It had to be a trick of the moonlight, reflecting off the water and the fog. He started to run along the water's edge, his flesh growing cold. What would someone be doing dancing out here in the middle of the night? It was weird, and the worst thing was that it reminded him of those days when Drosselmeyer was in control and weird things happened all the time.

He tripped over branches, sloshed though marshy parts, and nearly fell into the lake twice, all while trying to keep his eyes on that lone figure in white, out on what had to be the middle of the lake, the fog swirling around thickly, never giving him a good look.

Finally he rounded a large oak tree and was suddenly dazzled by a space in the trees and fog where the moonlight shone through and reflected off the water.

He couldn't move, but could only stare at the figure. The wisps of fog swirled about her like translucent veils, but he could see her clearly now. A dancing girl on the surface of the water, with reddish brown hair and blue eyes wide with the innocent joy of dancing for dancing's sake.

Fakir's feet were rooted to the ground, and he could go no closer. The ghostly figure...looked just like Ahiru.

___

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