InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Bloodlust: Purity ❯ Divinity ( Chapter 7 )

Chapter 7

Divinity

 

Rin was uncomfortable in her bath. Not that the water did not caress her tired flesh with the same supple hands as always, but the press of thoughts in her mind was heavy, full of worries and an intractable prediction of nightmare on the edge of her consciousness.

Oki felt nothing…she is youkai, she would know if strangeness threatened, if darkness was lingering in the air…

Only once since that first moment of wakefulness, right after she had been given her charge had she felt the same vivid presence, something unnatural that filled her wildness with fear.

Remembered laughter echoed in her head, herself as a child. Such lightness there had been then, such surety when things like this happened. Sesshomaru was her Lord and her savior, and he could defeat anything and protect her from anything- then. So many years of peace had been years of learning for her. Her hands paused in their smoothing of her wet hair, caught in memories thick as spiders-web around her haunted fingertips.

She had tried to live with the humans. When she reached an age her father had though meant she would want a mate, only her mother's wishes had allowed it, Kagome's gentle touch allowing Sesshomaru to accept her back, walking away from him. Something like a strangled moan had escaped him then, a savagery of loneliness in his eyes, but the shutters had closed on them with iron swiftness, and she had thought she would be forgotten.

 

How could she have known?

 

Humans were cruel, jeering, hopeless creatures, wasted life and wasting life, full of endless boorishness and empty manners. Twice in her first week she had been forced to persuade several men to leave her alone. Human she was, but also youkai trained. She could read, she could write, she knew the healing lore and the ancient spells to strengthen an herbal potion. Eldest and Kagome both had given them to her, away from other sight and knowledge, and she worked her way for a while, living off her wild wisdom. Then the dreams started. They were quiet dreams at first, images of the family she had left behind.

No matter what she did they would not leave her, those dreams, and the more she tried to silence the voices from the past, the more they haunted her. She saw her father, on a lonely hilltop crying for his lost daughter. Her mother, piling dirt on an empty grave.

She awoke one morning knowing finally the truth.

They had not forgotten her; she had forced them from herself. The pain of missing them was too much for her solitary heart, and around her the human world contracted back to what it had always seemed; an empty mockery of the world she had grown up in, like children playing dress up.

Then came a day - the last day - when she saw a Prince of some human clan or tribe traveling through the village she had made her home. He had moaned and whined like a petulant child, and he must have had at least ten more summers than she had seen. Nearly thirty summers, then, halfway through a human life, and still bawling for every slightest thing to be exactly as he desired it. Her father would never have done such! He was a true Lord, with beauty and dignity and a power that came from the mastery and understanding of his own soul.

And they said this one was a Prince! Her thoughts laughed at the very notion of respect for such a one, there as she had stood by the village well. He had pushed her aside, this Prince, pushed her so she fell sprawling against the stone base of the well, and with one reflexive motion she had knocked him so hard with the empty bucket in her hand that he fell unconscious. Later his half dozen guards had come and set fire to her home.

She would have fought them, all seven of them together and at once, but she could not fight the fire. So she took the gold comb that had belonged to her father's mother, gleaming red in the firelight, and used the hot metal edge of it to sever the throats of the men who had burned her home while they slept. They bled well, staining the earth, and she rinsed their blood from the comb and pinned up her hair, and walked the twice hundred miles that sundered her from Home.

Sesshomaru had held her, almost strangled her, not reserved as he had always been before. It was a crushing embrace, the proof of his caring that only she could feel, and he looked at her face with a probing stare she had never received from him before.

“Only your eyes have changed.”

 

He had said that to her, quietly, before letting her go to her mother's waiting arms.

 

Rin let her hands drop down into the water, and dove under with a quick breath, sliding into the deeper, hotter part of the spring. Here her toes barely brushed the rocky floor, heated by deep vents, and she let herself float, dislodging her thoughts in that way from enervating the past. She did not like remembering that she was human.

The water was soothing now, bubbling gently over her skin, a tingling effervescence everywhere. Her eyes closed, drifted really, and she dozed halfway, idle humming dripping from her lips as she finally relaxed in the embrace of the water. There was no measure to the time she spent in the half-state between sleep and waking, feeling but not feeling the water against her skin. Fog drifted across her face, still above the water, and against her shoulders, leaving a slightly cooler mist of droplets.

It matched nicely for her with a new tiny tickle of sharp sliding across her hips, and then softness, such softness clinging elegantly and delicately to her lips. The gentleness was exquisite; she did not want to be awake. Still, no dream could touch so perfectly all the depths of her with an anonymous kiss - no one should ever be allowed to do such a thing! Even half-drugged by steam and water she possessed the arrogance she had learned from her father - such a small thing in her - but she opened her eyes.

She saw green - green filling her world and lighting her soul on fire. She could feel herself riding on a crest of light, emerald and clear and impossibly, beautifully glowing. It was quiet, and sad, this green, but deep and so full of tenderness and agony that her heart was wrenched with sympathy. There was fear; deeper than the warmth, this fear! She almost turned away, but was stopped by a blink and the loss of the pressure, that inviolate kiss.

“Kinawai!”

The Taiyoukai turned his eyes back to her, and she was aware again of green, but much shallower this time.

“I…saw you, in the moonlight, at the ceremony. I saw you in the shadows. There was sun in your hair and fire in your eyes. There is no doubt you are human, but something deeper breathes in you. This is only fair - an equal exchange.”

Rin blushed vivid red, but her skin was already flushed with the heat of the water, and there was no visible change in her color. He moved away from her, into the mist that had dotted her cheeks and shoulders with drops like dew, and her eyes were delighted by the smooth flowing of the muscles in his back, the curve of strength in his arms, and the memory of one kiss; her only kiss - her first kiss.

More red flushed through her, deeper this time, a hot pulse. She staggered away through the water when she was sure he was gone, and wandered towel-clad to the room where her sister waited. Kystra's bathe would come another time.

 

When there was assurance that Rin had gone into the chamber, when the sound of the door closing had faded its echoes off the hallway's tapestries, Shippou slid out of the shadows that had followed her, eyes first as he always chose to do.

“So, Kinawai and Rin…I like it!”

 

 

 

People ran from the flames that leapt up and ate their homes. Roofs fell first, blazing and crackling, but no one was left to watch them collapse, just as no one was left to see the lingering shells of dwellings crisp into salty ash. The rampage of youkai was terrible to see - it followed the trail of people along the road, and up into the mountains. There, a few escaped, scattering pell-mell in too many directions to be followed. The sounds of death were terrible and lasted longer than it seemed they should. The shrieks had been silent for a long while; finally, only groans and sighs were left.

The youkai swarm rose up in the air like a great, struggling cloud of serpents and shot off over the mountains, threading the narrow passes with a howl like a hundred typhoons. On the other side of the range, a sprawl of houses and fields dotted the landscape all the way to the coast, divided by a long stretch of forest. The demon-boil twitched, and then flailed its way down the mountainside.

A few villagers closest to the mountain that chanced to look up were too overwhelmed by terror to run. They stood, and screamed, pointing with faces more terrified than any noh-mask had ever portrayed.

Fingers of forest reached down from the green slopes of the mountains, and the demons raged through them, sending a wave of crashing noise and the smell of rotten death before them. The screaming villagers were the first to die, alone on the edge of their fields. The noise woke terror in the rest of the village; women ran outside with children, mules brayed and kicked in their stalls, oxen snorted and turned over their carts. At the last moment possible, a sudden rush of wind blew up between the village and the oncoming youkai. When it subsided, a trio of women was left behind.

Two drew shining arrows from full quivers that glittered across their backs, and began to destroy the demons that had sped in front of the large group, arrow after arrow turning each youkai into a ripple of dust. Between them, a taller woman who seemed older despite a lineless face snipped a few long strands of her hair and pressed them to her lips. She murmured something, though no one but her companions heard what it was, and let the hairs slip into the wind.

A shining orb of blue light coalesced around the strands, and grew. Soon it had spread into a shining shield, which glittered transparently between the women and the rush of youkai. The snarl and the noise trampled rampantly toward them. The younger pair trembled, and each strung a final arrow, holding them ready on taut strings.

When the sound was unbearable and the villagers had run screaming to hide back in their houses, certain of destruction, older children peered through their curtains with their hands over the ears of their younger siblings, whose faces were turned into skirts and trouser-legs. The howling youkai reached the shimmering shield, and as each one touched the light it burst into blue flames and flailed into the sky. When the last one had been consumed, there was a rain of blue sparks, and then silence.

Slowly, peering up with wide and frightened eyes, parents and children left their homes and came out to stare at their unknown saviors. They were right to stare - nothing like these women had been seen before. They were dressed as miko, but in fine Chinese silk. Finely embroidered peony and double-happiness patterns were crested in gold thread, and their sleeves were long and dripped with many more delicately dyed layers of Chinese silk.

None of the people in this poor village had ever seen nobility, or members of the Imperial court - perhaps then they would have been less ready to believe. The headman approached slowly, and bowed three times.

“Noble Ladies, our village owes you a debt we can never repay. Though we are unworthy, and not fit even to lie at your feet, we offer you thanks.”

Two stepped back, and knelt at the side of their companion. She, obviously more powerful, bowed very slightly and smiled with slow precision.

“I am happy to have helped. It is the duty of all miko to protect humans from youkai, especially those of such evil and destructive power as those. It is lucky for you that we came in time - villages on the other side of the mountains were not so fortunate.”

Once again, the headman bowed, and the two younger miko stood beside their mistress.

“Soon, we will return, for the destruction of this great mass of demons will call more dangerous spirits to your village.”

From her hair, she pulled a small white flower, and handed it to the headman, who was becoming more and more astonished.

“If the demons return before us, hold this flower close to the heart of a pure child, and ask them to speak my name - Leiko. I will know of your need then.”

She turned, and the two others followed her away from the village and into a mist that rose suddenly through the first trees of the forest and passed away, taking them with it.

 

On the other side of the mist, a mirror reflected its shadows and the three miko. The surface of the mirror shimmered and parted, and Leiko stepped through and shook out her sleeves with a sigh. She mounted a set of crystal stairs, and sat.

“Lady, is that truly how you intend to accomplish our goals?”

Leiko gifted her apprentices with a thin smile, and nodded slowly, pressing her fingertips together one at a time. A thick crimson fall of fine silk spilled out of her sleeves, and splashed down the arms of her throne. Behind her, the sky swirled with blue and green lights, dashed here and there with pink and violet storms.

“It is exactly what we need - time to collect ourselves, and seek out the heart of the evil. It is not a light oath I have taken; I will not rest until these devouring youkai are destroyed.”

The two novice miko bowed, and sat on the lowest step of the dais. In front of them, the face of the mirror that had admitted them into Leiko's strange realm danced and sparkled, as its mistress's power was focused on it, seeking.