Prologue: Nightmares

Sajyou Ayaka blinked in disorientation, adjusting her glasses as she tried to clear her vision. What had happened? Where was she? She instinctively felt an oppressive force in the room, some sort of palpable evil threatening to close in and snuff out her pitiful life, but no matter how her being screamed at her body to run she found she could scarcely move.

And then, as her senses returned to her, she heard them, the tortured screams of the dying, and she smelled the stench of the dead all around her. Fighting off her mounting nausea, she fearfully looked around and found herself within a cavernous auditorium. Upon the stage in the center there was a golden cup, shining in the light, and she immediately knew what it was – the Holy Grail of Fuyuki, the wish-granting relic that her older sister, Manaka, and their father, Sajyou Hiroki, had been fighting for against six other teams of mages.

But something was terribly wrong. For out of the Grail spewed forth a continuous stream of an unnatural mud, and she could tell at once that this mud was the source of the evil she had felt. And once the mud reached the ground, it would assume the form of dark tentacles, reaching out to victims who seemed unaware of their impending doom, as if in a trance, and then… burning, dissolving, rending them to death like a voracious monster. She wanted to cry out and warn them, but her voice died in her throat as she noticed another horror. For only meters away from her was her father's dismembered corpse, lying in a pool of his own blood.

"Father!" she screamed after a moment of disbelief.

"Don't worry," an angelic voice said from above her, and at once Ayaka looked up toward her savior. She knew that voice. And sure enough, it was that of her older sister, her golden hair, bright blue eyes, and matching dress untarnished amidst the violence. "It'll be okay. This will soon be over, and then we'll have everything we've always dreamed of." Her words were so calming and spoken with such conviction that Ayaka could not help but believe them. If anyone could save her, it would be her genius sister Manaka. She could stop whatever was wrong with the Grail and bring back Dad. Right?

But Manaka's attention was no longer on her, for she had turned to face someone who had just entered the auditorium.

"Welcome, Emiya Kiritsugu," she said, giving a curtsey. "I had thought that my Servants should have kept you from here. At the very least, you would have had to bring Saber with you. But if you call her here and then promise to stand aside we can finally finish this."

Kiritsugu surveyed the scene, glancing from Manaka, to the Grail, and back again. And then he raised his gun and fired it at Manaka without another word. Her sister tried to defend herself, but it was too late, and the bullet pierced Manaka through her heart. Moments later, violent spasms shook through her body, and she crumpled down like delicate doll whose strings had been cut.

"Why?" Manaka murmured, still struggling to realize that she had been shot. But as the realization that she was dying dawned upon her, tears rolled from her eyes. "I'm…. sorry… that I couldn't… save you…" she managed, and then she died.

Overwhelmed by grief and with her last hope for survival crushed, Ayaka felt her own consciousness slipping away. All she could pray for now was that the end would be quick and that she might see her family again in the next world.

xXx

Fires raged all around the boy amid a devastated landscape filled with rubble, smoke, and the dying. He had been walking through the ruins for so long, and those he passed had pleaded with him for help, but he had forced himself to ignore them. We wanted to live, and if he stopped walking he would die with them. But his strength was quickly giving out, and soon he collapsed, unable to take another step. So that was it. He would die now, and just like all of those others there would be no one to save him. He had been so desperate to live that he had carried on even when he could no longer remember his family or name, but now there was no sense to any of it.

And so he simply watched the flames around him and gazed up at the baleful hole in the sky, saying not a word as his life ebbed away.

But then he heard footsteps approaching through the rubble, and slowly a dark-haired man came into view, carrying the unconscious form of a bespectacled girl with dark brown hair in an arm while his eyes scanned the rubble for other survivors. The girl was about the boy's own age, and he had a passing thought that she looked pretty, but above all he was relieved to see someone who could help him.

There was a dead look in the man's eyes, but as the man knelt down and saw that he was still alive, that was replaced by a look of pure joy. And the boy could not help but feel jealous of the man; it was as if in saving him, the man had saved himself.

The man produced something that glowed brilliantly, and as he was suffused in its light, the boy felt a pleasant warmth welling up within him, carrying him away from the horrors of the fire as his vitality, once moments away from being extinguished, returned. But whatever it was could not change the fact that he was exhausted in body and mind, and before long the boy's eyes fell closed into a restful sleep.