֍PROLOGUE: Flaming Dawn 

“It’s funny that the thing I remember the most when I was about to die was of the time when my twin brother and I laid down on the ground, looking up to the sky as the maple leaves of multiple colors floating down from the withering branches.” 

It was a snowy night. If he wasn’t going to die from the blunt force trauma to his head, he was sure he would die out of hypothermia. But he knew even then that his attacker would not let that happen. 

“Those leaves look like flames. It was like flames pouring down on us that day. That was the day our parents got divorced and we knew that we would be separated. Things could have been different if that day never ended that way.” 

The attacker wrapped his hands around the neck of the boy, choking him, smiling to himself as he saw the life leaving out of the boy’s eyes slowly. He then loosened his grip to let the boy catch his breath but then tighten the grip again. This went on several times until he was thoroughly satisfied and he took a final grip, breaking the neck of the fragile boy underneath him.

 “Even as my life leaves my lungs, my thoughts are filled with him. I know he will come and find me. My memories will be left here for him to seek. We are connected in the most complicated ways. But still, I have regrets of my own. Of things I never had the courage to tell him about. I will carry this regret to the grave.”

 In another city at another country, another boy is struggling to be free from an invisible grip around his neck. He was suffocated and he can feel the snap of the bones in the neck but it was all sensory. He is still alive and breathing when it was over. Tears trickling down his face as he screams out the name of his twin brother, knowing dreadfully that something awful had occurred on the other side of the world.

 They say twins are connected in the most complicated ways. One was declared missing but the other knew right from the start that his twin brother was no more. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months. And months into years. They never found him. No traces of him. No clues. No witnesses. No reliable suspects that they can definitely pin on. No body. Nothing.

 But it won’t be long before he is found. Only his twin brother is qualified enough to look for him since they are after all connected in the most peculiar, impossible ways that no one can even begin to fathom with. He will find him. He swears that he will find him. The flaming dawn is his witness to this oath.