Chapter 9

Rosa's eyes opened into black. Then the world started to shift around her. Hills with a beautiful sunset behind them. Green grass and animals. An uncountable number of flowers. And a beautiful woman smiling, running through the field.

Rosa had had this dream for the past two years. Every night. Though she never got bored of it. And it always left her wondering: who was that woman?

She looked oddly like Rosa. But different. She looked Roman. She always wondered if that was her mother, but how would she remember what her mother looked like? And running through a field that she'd never seen, nonetheless. She'd never meet her mother, as she was forced back to Rome a few months after she was born.

Then she heard something that she'd never heard before: A voice. The voice was fuzzy and she couldn't make out any words, though they didn't sound Japanese in nature. Maybe a Mediterranean language? The voice sounded like that of a woman's. She looked at the woman, her mouth blurred.

What? Rosa thought, I can't hear you. Oddly, she wasn't able to speak, only think. The woman walked up to her, her mouth unblurred and a smile to replace it. She walked up to Rosa and put her hands on Rosa's face. She placed her forehead on Rosa's and looked her in the eyes. The field had been filled with the sound of animals and the breeze, but now everything was silent. Rosa looked to the side to see that all the animals were looking at them.

The woman, still looking her in the eyes, foreheads still touching, spoke. "Keep going, my dear. Don't give up, even when everything seems hopeless," The words were in Latin, proving that she was speaking Latin when her voice was fuzzy. She switched to Japanese, "When you hit your lowest point, your greatest change and ally will appear," And with that, she faded. Then the animals, the trees, plants and grass, the sun and the hills, all vanished, leaving her in the dark.