Disclaimer: Elfen Lied is a trademark of Lynn Okamoto. Many of the ideas here are mine, but the concept and most of the characters are his.

Acknowledgments: This work has been inspired heavily by The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, by The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, by The Terminator trilogy, and of course by Elfen Lied. Without them I could not have found the inspiration for this.

I would also like to thank ElfenLied619 for beta-reading my story and helping me to flesh things out.

We Walk the Banks of the River Acheron

Prologue

Yuka frowned as she tried the sliding glass door again. There was dust building up in the runners and she had to wiggle it several times before it closed properly. "Geez, this is happening because you haven't cleaned for a long time," she called into the bedroom where Kohta was sitting by himself. "Hurry up and do it, otherwise you won't be having lunch!"

"Geez, I know!" Kohta shouted back, barely keeping the anger from his voice. How could Yuka be so selfish and insensitive at a time like this? He sat on the floor, looking at the shell that Nyu had given him that first night he and Yuka had brought her to the Inn. In the background his music box was open and plying Lilium, that solemn little tune that had brought him and Lucy together those many years ago.

It was hard to accept that his childhood friend had killed his father and Kanae all those years ago, but Kohta could not bring himself to hate Lucy, no matter how hard he tried. He had told her that he couldn't forgive her; hell he knew that he shouldn't forgive her. She had killed all those soldiers and that woman scientist right in front of him. Time had not changed her. The monster that had ruined his childhood was still very much awake.

And yet, Kohta did not feel any hate toward her. She had attempted a clumsy apology, and she said she was sorry for all the sad memories she caused; but she had never actually apologized for killing Dad and Kanae. Kohta knew he shouldn't forgive Lucy, yet he wanted nothing more right now than to see her face, to wipe away those tears that had fallen when they parted, to…to tell her that he forgave her.

Kohta closed his eyes and squeezed back the tears. Damn it, why did his heart and his head have to send him such conflicting messages?

"What's the matter?"

Kohta turned to see Yuka standing in his doorway. He hadn't even heard her come is, so lost was he in his own thoughts. "Oh, nothing," he lied.

Yuka turned and left without saying a word. She could tell that Nyu running off, probably for good, was eating Kohta up inside. He needed time to figure out things for himself

-:-:-

Yuka did not think she could really bring herself to like Nyu. She was so jealous of Kohta's attention to her, but what Mayu had said that night, about Kohta trying to help those in need to atone for mistreating Kanae right before she died, had really opened up Yuka's eyes. And now, in spite of herself, she missed the little scamp running around; eager to please everyone, trying so hard to be helpful, playing her little tricks.

Yuka finished setting the fourth place at the table, but it didn't look right. She had grown so accustomed to serving five that four seemed too few. And besides, in the off chance that Nyu returned home she would want to eat as well. Yuka quickly got another bowl and set of chopsticks and set them out. They would probably go unused, but maybe the gesture would cheer Kohta up.

Kohta, sitting in a chair near the doorway leading to the back common area, noticed immediately. "Yuka?"

"Hmm?" Yuka grunted under hear breath.

"You have one extra bowl out."

Yuka gave Kohta a rare smile. "She wanted to eat too."

Kohta smiled in spite of himself. He remembered that first meal of rice balls that Nyu had made such a mess of. "Yeah, that's right."

It was another fifteen minutes before Nana and Mayu had lunch ready. They quickly set the steaming bowl of soumen noodles in the table and took their places.

"Thanks for the food!"

Nana immediately dished some noodles into her bowl and slurped them down. A look of sheer joy spread across her face. "This is tasty!"

Yuka found the ecstasy on Nana's face a little odd. "Oh, is this your first time eating soumen noodles?"

"Yeah, I missed the chance to eat it before, so…" It was the wrong thing for Nana to say. The reason that she missed the chance that night came rushing back; the fight on the bridge, Papa saving her…realizing that he wasn't really Papa…seeing him get blown up by one of his fellow scientists. "Even though there are so many wonderful things…so many…" Nana tried to stop the tears, but they came despite her best efforts. She sobbed, just a little.

"Nana?" asked Mayu.

Nana immediately and stubbornly fought down her emotions. The others would ask questions and they must never know why she was crying. "I'm… I'm sorry! Hey, let's eat! Come on now!" she reached out and began serving herself some more noodles. It was considered bad luck to serve ones self at the table in Japan, but no one noticed or cared.

Yuka smiled at Nana's hearty appetite. She really did eat a lot for being so small. "You won't be able to grow big unless you eat a lot," she joked, "so…"

In the front yard between the main doors and the gate, Wanta began barking. Trough the large window, a figure could clearly be seen waiting on the other side of the thick, dirty glass panes. "Oh? I wonder if we have a guest," said Yuka.

"Ill go check," said Kohta, getting up from his seat. He walked down the hall past that old grandfather clock that Nyu had enjoyed messing with. He put his shoes on and hesitated a moment before going to open the gate. It was the way that Wanta was barking; not an alarm bark, but a happy greeting bark, like he expected an old friend to be waiting on the other side of the gate. Wanta jumped forward on his leash, knocked himself over, and resumed his happy yipping.

As Kohta stepped off the wooden steps onto the dirt path to the gate, a sound behind him caused him to stop. It was the grandfather clock, chiming the stroke of noon.

"Huh?" grunted Kohta in confusion. "It's working." He listened to the chime for a moment before realizing why he was there in the first place. "Sorry," he called out. "I'm coming, I'm coming!"

In the dining room Mayu and Yuka looked curiously at Nana as she dropped her chopsticks onto the table, an expression between horror and joy on her face. She had felt that presence almost as soon as Kohta stood up and there was no mistaking it. "It's her," she whispered.

Kohta slid the gate open, ready to dismiss whoever it was as politely as possible. "I'm sorry but, the Maple Inn isn't currently open for business, so I'm afraid you'll have to…" Kohta stopped in mid sentence as he saw who it was. Dried blood caked one side of her face and matted her hair. Her other horn was missing, but there was no mistaking that face that looked at him now; that haunted face that was filled with so much pain and sorrow, yet looked so strangely at peace.

"Kohta…"

12 Years Later…

Jim Anderson waved his brother Thomas back as he peered through the night gloom. "Turn that light off!" he hissed, "they'll see us and we're dead if they do." Thomas switched their kerosene lantern of and crawled back to the shattered store front window, careful to avoid the broken glass. They waited in the shadows of a crumbling building, one of many in this part of Salt Lake City.

When the diclonius had struck quite a few of the nearby major cities, Las Vegas, Denver, Boise, Tucson…they had gotten hit pretty hard, but for some reason Salt Lake had been spared. Jack figured it had to be the fact that there were so many farms in central Utah, or maybe that two major highways met there as well and the diclonius could not risk damaging such a valuable resource; but either way, they had a better chance of finding supplies in the ruins here than anywhere else.

It did not come without a price though. A hive of diclonius had settled into what was left of Denver and they made regular sweeps of the ruins of the nearby cities, looking for the few human survivors who carried on, and raiding whatever supplies those survivors had gathered.

Jim gripped the stock of his rifle even tighter. He looked sideways at his brother. "Keep a good hand on Wyatt's collar, and don't let him bark."

Thomas adjusted his grip on the collar of the large German shepherd dog that crouched in the ruins with them. The dog could sense the anxiety of his masters, and he could smell the strangers approaching, but he knew better than to bark. He growled softly and tensed up, ready to spring into action at his master's command.

"I think I can see them," whispered Jim. In the whitish light provided by the moon reflecting off the fallen snow he could clearly see four figures picking their way through the burnt husks of automobiles and rubble from torn down buildings that choked the streets. The tallest was missing a leg and hobbling along on a crutch, two were adult women, and one was clearly a little girl. "It looks like there are only four of them, and at least one is a man."

"Then that means they're Normal's," Thomas whispered. "If it were a raiding party there'd be hundreds of the Horned Ones."

"You're right," agreed Jim. "I'm willing to bet that they're just a small group of lost nomads." He handed his rifle to Thomas. "I'm going to go see what they want; see if they're friendly or not. If they try anything funny, release the dog."

Jim cautiously took the lantern and climbed out of the shattered window. "Hello?" he called out. "We know you're out there, so don't try anything funny. I'm going to turn a lantern on, and you just step into the light nice and slow." Jim turned the lantern on and set it on the roof of a car. Within moments, the small band of nomads came into the light where he could see them.

They all looked Japanese. The man, obviously the leader, had his hair and beard growing long. His left leg was missing from the knee down and he had a bandage wrapped about his head that covered his left eye. Jack would have put his age at between twenty five and thirty (though he had a hard time telling with Asians). He also traveled with two Normal's, a young woman who looked slightly younger than him, and a little girl who couldn't have been more than eleven. But he also had a diclonius with him; she looked like she had to be in her mid thirties. He had never seen a diclonius that looked any older than eighteen since they started appearing.

"Look," the one-legged leader said in heavily accented English. "We have no valuables on us. The only things we have are some meager supplies, and if you try to take those, we will be forced to defend ourselves!"

"It's ok, friend," said Jim, "We're not robbers." He whistled twice into the night. "It's alright! They're not Savages or Horned Ones!"

Lanterns flared to life from two more buildings. The rest of the Anderson family crawled out of their hiding places as well as the Douglas family. All told, there were ten of them. More lanterns were lit as the two families anxiously gathered to see the newcomers.

"My name is James Anderson," Jim said as he extended his hand. "You can call me Jim though."

"My name is Kohta," Kohta replied as he shook Jim's hand. "That's Mayu, Nana, and my daughter Kanae."

Jim shook hands all around. He regarded Nana suspiciously. "You travel with a diclonius? I'm not sure if I want to put my family at risk of being attacked or rounded up."

"Nana is not part of any of the hives," said Kohta. "She can't explain why the hive minds cast her and another diclonius I knew out, but I have my theories."

"I don't care what your theories are," growled Thomas as he stepped into the lantern light to join his brother. He shouldered the rifle and leveled it right at Nana's head. "Where are my daughters, Horned One?"

Nana just looked at the rifle pointed squarely at her face. She cocked her head to one side and smiled slightly. "That rifle isn't powerful enough to hurt me. I can block bullets that small quite easily." She continued to stare at Thomas for a few more moments. "Are you going to shoot me?"

"No one is shooting anyone," said Jim as he stepped over to Thomas and pointed the rifle at the ground, "Because killing a scout from the hive will bring the rest of them down upon us like the wrath of God." Jim placed himself firmly between Thomas and Nana. He curled his lip in disgust as he addressed Kohta. "You and your human friend, and your daughter may stay with us, but the diclonius has to leave. We're not going to shoot her, but I'm sure that the elements will take care of her before she makes it back to Denver."

"I don't see why I have to leave," whimpered Nana. "My own kind casts me out as well as the humans…am I not going to be welcome anywhere I go? Nana never does anything bad! I have protected my human family ever since they took me in, and I've never hurt any humans either so I don't see why I have too..!"

"Its ok, Nana, I'll handle this," said Kohta. He turned and looked Jim straight in the eye. "I can personally vouch for Nana. She has saved the lives of many humans in her time and she is not bound by the will of any of the hive minds. If she leaves, we leave with her. Are you really going to drive us out into the winter…especially as young as my daughter is?"

Jim stared hard at Kanae for a moment. She had the thin, pinched look of someone who was not eating well and she shivered uncontrollably under her thin, threadbare, woefully inadequate coat. It was only moments before pity overruled caution. "If your Horned One try's anything funny, if I get one eerie feeling, if one hair stands up on the back of my neck…I'll kill her." He continued to glare daggers at Nana for a moment before his expression softened. "Where are you from Kohta? You look like you've been traveling for quite a while."

Kohta leaned heavily on his crutch and sighed. "We've been following the highways north since the spring. My family settled in Las Angeles from Japan, but we had to relocate up here when it got hit."

Thomas edged his way closer. "My sister-in-law was living in LA. Is there any chance that she survived?"

Kohta shook his head. "The diclonius hive that rose up there pulled down most of the buildings and bombed it once they figured out how to work the aircraft from a nearby Air Force base. We were lucky, two of the diclonius I was traveling with felt the uprising and we were in the process of escaping when they struck. We didn't all get out though. My…my wife and a close friend died there." Tears began to run out of Kohta's one good eye. "And my other daughter was absorbed into the hive."

Jim nodded in sympathy. "My brother Thomas and his wife Erica, they had two daughters; both diclonius who tried to kill them. They don't know what became of them either. Why don't you follow us back to our shelter? We'll give you a place to stay tonight and we'll see what happens from there."

"Lead the way," said Kohta.

-:-:-

The shelter that was being used consisted of a cleared out basement in a nearby department store. They had salvaged quite a bit of useful gear; sleeping bags, propane stoves, cookware, and quite a few items that made the place seem "homier" than Kohta had experienced in months. A meal was being made from what looked like a large supply of canned goods and a couple of animals Kohta did not recognize were being roasted over open fires in makeshift stoves.

"Where did you get all this?" Kohta asked as Mayu, Nana and Kanae came over to sit next to him. "It seems you got lucky in picking this area to hide from the diclonius hives."

Jim shrugged. "This seemed like the natural place to try to survive. Outdoor recreation used to be a big hobby here, and the Mormons advocated emergency food storage just in case something like this happened, so most of the homes had the basic necessities tucked away in their basements. Game is plentiful here; raccoons, rabbits, deer, feral cats, so we don't want for meat. We didn't stumble on this area though, we came here on purpose. It wasn't easy; we came up from Huston Texas, and got assailed by a band of Savages." He noted the confusion on Kohta and Mayu's faces. "Anarchist humans who live in groups less structured than a pack of flipping wolves; doing whatever the hell they feel like since there are no laws to enforce anymore. There were thirty of us then; they killed most of our group and took the women for their own physical satisfaction and the children to serve as slaves. The few of us left here were the lucky ones."

Nana made her way over to the heater where everyone was gathered and sat down with the rest of her family. She noted the German shepherd and gave the large dog a broad smile. "Wow, I've never seen a Wanta that looks like this one. What's his name?"

"His name is Wyatt," replied Jim. "Is Wanta the Japanese word for dog?"

Mayu rolled her eyes. "No, the word for dog in Japanese is inu. Nana knows perfectly well that these animals are called dogs. She thinks she's being funny. Nana was raised in a research facility that studied diclonius, and she had never seen a dog before until we met. I had a little dog named Wanta, so she thought that's what all dogs were called."

"Konnichiwa, Wyatt-san," said Nana as she extended one hand to pet the German shepherd.

"Wait!" cried Jim. "Don't try to pet..!"

It was too late. Wyatt snarled and leapt forward, snapping his jaws on Nana's fingers. She gave a squeak of surprise and pulled her hand away. "He bit me!" she exclaimed. She rubbed her hand and began to cry.

Jim's wife, Judith, came over and took Nana's hand. "Here, let me see…huh? You're not bleeding?"

Nana shook her head. "I'm not hurt" she sobbed. "I just didn't expect your dog to be so mean. Most of the dog's I've ever met were friendly."

Judith patted Nana on the back reassuringly. "Well, all dog breeds are different. These dogs, German shepherds, are well known for being suspicious around strangers. Give him time; he'll warm up to you. You've got to be more careful around strange animals though."

"How is it possible that you aren't bleeding?" Jim asked, suddenly very serious.

Nana detached one of her prosthetic limbs and handed it to Jim. "My arms and legs are all like this. It's a long story."

Jim returned Nana's arm and regarded these newcomers. He wasn't sure what to make of them. "Your friend mentioned a research facility where you were raised; explain, please."

Kohta gave a tremendous yawn. "Could this possibly wait until morning? We've traveled a long way and I am very tired from the long walk. I promise, first thing tomorrow you will get all the information you want and then some."

-:-:-

It was just before dawn when Rebecca Anderson woke up. She usually woke up before everyone else and she normally went to another part of the basement to read. Today however, she was curious about these newcomers. She hadn't seen any new people in almost a year and she wanted to find out more about them. Rebecca had the impulsive nature of all sixteen year olds and had on occasion driven her parents, Jim and Judith, absolutely nuts with her antics.

She crept over to where Kohta was snoring softly. He had an old battered backpack that he was using to carry supplies and Rebecca could just make out the end of what looked like an antique wooden box. Carefully she pulled it out of Kohta's bag and held it up in the growing light to examine it more closely. It was a bit battered, but she could still see the light reflecting off a bronze plaque on the lid. The word Lilium was intricately scrawled across it. Cautiously she opened it.

It was a music box. It tinkled a slow, very solemn tune that Rebecca found quite engaging. It wasn't lively, or happy, but still very pleasant to listen to. In the music box were three photos. Rebecca pulled them out to examine them. The first looked like a family photo, and it must have been taken years ago from the looks of how faded it was. There were five of them; Rebecca recognized Kohta, and was certain that the youngest girl with short black hair was Mayu, but the other human was a mystery to her. She looked about Kohta's age and had her brown hair trimmed short, almost like a boy's hair. The other two were clearly Horned Ones. Nana was recognizable, but the other, the one who looked the most solemn, was not.

The second photo looked like it had been taken on a wedding day. The brown haired woman was dressed in white, like a bride, while Mayu, Nana, and the other Horned One were clearly dressed as brides-maids.

The third photo was of Kohta and the brown haired woman. They had a girl with them who looked like a much younger Kanae, as well as an infant with two stubby horns and a thin tuft of pink hair.

Rebecca was about to return those photos when she noticed something that was hidden underneath them. Gently she picked it up and saw that it was a small seashell. The edges were a little chipped, and it was by no means perfectly shaped, but it was still a lovely shade of pink. Rebecca examined it closely, wondering why on earth Kohta would keep such a thing.

"Did you find anything interesting?"

Rebecca yelped in alarm and dropped the shell. Kohta had woken up as soon as Rebecca had opened the music box and had watched her examine its contents for the last minute. Rebecca's cry of alarm awoke the rest of the group of survivors and they scrambled over to see what the matter was.

"Geez, I'm so sorry Mister Kohta!" shrieked Rebecca as she hurried to return the shell and music box to his bag. "I didn't mean to go though your private things, but I was curious and I..!"

"Hey, calm down. There was no harm done." Kohta pulled the music box back out of his bag and propped it open. Most of the Anderson and Douglas family gathered around, curious to see what had caused the commotion.

Kohta gently held up the family photo so everyone could see it better. "This was taken almost twelve years ago, when I was still in college and living at an old inn owned by my uncle's family. That was me back then." The Kohta of twelve years ago hardly resembled the Kohta of now. His hair was still long, but not the wild unkempt mess that it was now, and he did not sport a beard in the photo. "Nana and Mayu have gotten much older, as you can see, and this was my future wife, Yuka."

"Who's that?" asked Rebecca, pointing at the last person.

Kohta lifted the shell from the music box and looked at it for several long minutes before answering. "She…was one of the most tragic people I ever knew, and also one of the bravest. She endured so much more hardship and suffering than any person should have to. But…it's also in part because of her that the diclonius have risen up and all but destroyed us."

"You're kidding!" exclaimed Jim. "You know how the Horned Ones came into power?"

"I do not have all the facts," said Kohta, "But I can guess at most of what happened since Lucy and Nana were caught in the middle of it. I haven't just witnessed our past, but I do, in a way, know the final outcome of human history."

Kohta set his crutch on the ground and sat cross legged. He looked at the shell as everyone gathered around to hear him better. "This is going to take a while to tell," He began, "But for us, the last of our kind, the story needs to be told…"