Disturbed Waves, Spanning Dark Oceans

They spoke about it as if there was more to it than there was, as if it was a thing lauded by history, entrenched in mythology, but to him it had always, quite simply, been the game. When his sister had scrawled those first pictures of the other world in childhood, when they had spent those long and lonely days locked together in the attic of their family home, he understood now that she had been tapping into something old, something ancient, something neither of them had possessed the words for at the time.

In the long years since, there had been explanations, many words used that his child self could not have hoped to have understood, but none of that mattered; all that mattered was the game.

Through glass and mirror, Kanzaki Shiro moved, travelled across the other world, the world that Yui had once glimpsed with her imagination, the world that she had populated with monsters and beasts sworn to their service.

In the long years before his final apotheosis, before his understanding of what the mirror world was, of how to summon the beasts within the glass into their world, he heard snatches of whispers, fragments of rumours about an organisation whose members secreted themselves away in hidden locations in the frozen north, sending out their armoured knights to do battle with the spirits of things that became too real, that threatened the shape of the world they were sworn to protect. Kamen Riders, these men and women had been called, knights of a secret order policing the lines between what was real and what was not.

In his travels, Kanzaki had heard that title mentioned again and again; in the great and forbidden library of Venice, wherein the mysteries of such things suppressed by the early church were held, in curiosity shops in London, amongst antique hordes in Berlin, again and again, he had encountered the stories of those Kamen Riders, their tales ill transcribed in books, their presence whispered of by scholars, and each time he heard of them, he heard mention of also of the great dragons harnessed only by the very strongest of them.

Brave Dragon, he thought, his likeness passing through the reflection of a parked car, the young man in the red and silver armour lashing out at the serpent that threatened to overcome him; Jaaku Dragon, he considered, appearing momentarily in the glass door of an office building, the knight before him on his knees, his hand trembling as he tried to hold onto his blade, the serpent rearing up before him.

"Jaou Dragon," he said aloud, the shape of him, his tan trench coat open, his hair at his shoulders glimpsed in the turbulent waves of the ocean, his younger sister sitting forlorn and melancholy on the shoreline.

In each of these stories, each time a dragon appeared, chaos reigned, whether intended or not. Thus far, there had been none in the game who had been strong enough to seek out Jaou Dragon, to make a contract with that ancient and illusory monster, its essence the bound spirits of countless of its kin, and yet there was one such man who had claimed Dragreder, a dragon of no less wonder and strength.

What would a man such as this, a man such as Kido Shinji, be like if he were to inherit the awesome power of Jaou Dragon, he asked himself; what would a man such as Kido Shinji, little more than a boy really, be like if he ever really uncovered such awesome power, such true power?

And what, Kanzaki Shiro asked himself, the water lapping at his shins, would happen if those ancient Riders of myth, those Riders of legend, ever caught wind of the game that he now played, his own sister, Yui's life hanging in the balance.

They could not know; they must never be allowed to know. On the beach, Yui lifted her head, a look of surprise forming on her soft, young face as their eyes met. In the distance, Kanzaki Shiro thought he heard the roar of a terrible and hateful dragon.