InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Bloodlust: Purity ❯ The Quickening of Dreams ( Chapter 10 )

With stern eyes and a hard face, the Radiant Empress of the Celestial City looked less than pleased. Her mirror was not serving its purpose - it skipped over the lands that existed in the breathing world, showing green fields and brown earth in bright swoops of color, but did not touch on the face or figure that was her most important task.

It was an annoyance she felt she did not have time for. In the predictions of past and future, this woman did not show herself, or appeared only as a shadow, a mist on the edge of Time. There was danger there, although of what kind…well. From the first touch of that presence, she had set conflict in motion and planted the seeds of dissent.

How easy it was to water those seeds from a distance, touching many things with subtle fingers, invisible and lighter than air. The swift song of the mirror's tense search thrummed between ground and sky, growing higher in pitch until it was only a whistling tone. Without really having sound, it pierced the ears, but the Empress did not care.

 

I should not have been called here without reason, without completion, without sight. Why does this reverberate, when there is nothing in the vision?

 

“Kami-sama?”

A low female voice, touched with anxiety, nudged from behind the open leaves of the Throne, and the Empress gestured with an impatient hand. The woman who had spoken stepped forward, and the shifting light of the magic-touched sky revealed a form sharply demonic in its outlines.

“That will do quite well. I will give you a new name for this journey and this task, one that you will remember easily: Murasaki.”

The one newly named Murasaki bowed low, and turned away. As she moved through the doorway, there was a chime behind her so bright and yet so furious that it moved the air like the ringing of a gong. Over and through the sound came the laughter of the Empress, and the sound of her words, ripe with triumph.

“I see her when she stands by the side of a demon - and what do I see? She may be sent to interfere, but she is tainted, tainted!”

The peals of laughter turned the footsteps of Murasaki into a blur of running silk, down a long covered hallway and out through a courtyard to a pool of floating mist. She slowed, and stepped in until the mist lapped around her knees. Without a sound, she was possessed by a white and violet glow, and then disappeared.

Alone, the Empress gathered herself off her throne, a flow of dark hair and indigo robes that flowed off her body like wine. Was it really so simple - was her enemy a true enemy, in form and virtue? Against the power of the heavens and the gifts of the Celestial City, what could one woman, one youkai, do?

 

 

Kagome stood by Sesshomaru's side, and the long scrolls of Eldest's quickly traced characters lay beside each other, both harsh and elegant.

“I can read these words, Sesshomaru. I though she meant the characters that you have given me, but these I learned in another age…”

“Then it is still alive in human hearts, the old tongue? How strange, when it is so far lost among my own people. This is dragon-writing, mate, made to protect the secret things. It is the oldest language writing of any people now living, better by far to give you answers than any spoken words.”

“I don't want secrets - I want the truth!”

“That is a difficult thing to bear, and often when it is shown to us we do not understand. Lies are easier.”

It was a strange thing that she shared with Eldest; the dragon-writing lived completely only in their shared memory, one from past and one from future. There it was no dead remnant but a living tone of words.

Kagome knew many of their meanings, more than enough to tantalize her with a glimpse of the strangeness being told as she scanned the pages.

“Listen to this, Sess-chan:

When the time comes, bring them back to the sunlit world

Know enough to believe the stranger does return, and return again.

Suffer the unrelenting push of feeling from the dead; an unsteady path

It is the only thing flickering under your feet, yet strong enough

For the days ahead.”

She turned to him, and his eyes were drawn tight and troubled. She lay her hand on his arm, and the muscles beneath his skin were trembling with the intensity of a reaction she had not expected. Quietly, she spoke to take the sting of despair from the words she had read.

“It is poetry. It could not be so important…”

His fingers traced down the pages, pausing occasionally as his eyes ran across the characters, seeking, seeking, and when he found what he was looking for he stopped and pressed the page into her hands.

“Read that, and tell me it is not important, that it is only poetry. You of all those who know her should not underestimate Eldest - nor try to offer me empty comfort.”

The second reproof stung more than the first, but she could not do anything but turn to the page and read. The words slipped off her tongue, and sounded hollow in her own ears.

Somewhere a monolith of Shadow, of Darkness

It is built, it is worshipped, and who gives it a name?

The edge of fear already burns in the mind that questions

The earth itself has a longer memory than the sky

Night gathers, the drowning night, the tide of weights

Against our people, the Radiant Flower will not fail

So begins the blight, so comes

The long dark.

Apologetically, almost, she looked down, ordering her thoughts against the darkness she had declared, and Sesshomaru tilted up her chin with gentle fingers.

“Forgive me. I do not mean to frighten you with a tide of words that sound like doom.”

Her voice turned low, and rough.

“Will it be another war? Is this prophecy, and are we coming to a time of danger again? I thought that was past us.”

He enfolded her with the inner touch that connected them, the bond that sprang tighter than elastic between them, and sang the whole while. It was the greatest comfort he could give her - not since the day he had really found her, the day she had become his, had he seen her look so lost.

“Not war as you would imagine it. I think…a shroud encloses us, soft as spider-silk. Even the sensitive eyes of our spirit kin cannot but miss it.”

The words she had read were burning in her thoughts, and Kagome turned back to the pages, seeking understanding, and began from the beginning. It was difficult - those last phrases returned over and over to her thoughts, spinning and spinning, out of control.

So begins the blight, so comes

The long dark.

 

Days and nights were beginning to blend in Rin's mind. Though she sometimes left Kystra's side to tend to small matters of her parent's realm or walk in the gardens, full of moonlight, everything seemed to take on the cheerless tone and texture of the room where her sister lay, dreaming.

The strangeness of presence that had lifted her senses awake on the night of Oki's tea came now more often and urgent - if she was already awake, she pushed it away with all her strength, though strength of a kind she had not used before. She would never allow any patient of hers to come to harm; especially not this one who bore the name of `sister'.

No longer was she waked by the strangeness that confronted her in daylight, but she still was sensitive to that roaming feel in her touch on the world. Sleeping or not, she did not know ever afterward, but the drowse of one night brought her down from her parent's balcony, following the gentle bitterness of a well-tuned koto, played by unknown hands.

She walked on flower-footsteps to the edge of a half-frozen fountain, rough slush surface pebbled under her eyes. As she touched it, the water flowed freely - ice returned when she pulled away her hand. If she were the heat of the sun, warmth would have followed her thus, on the brush of her touch. Purple and blue thinned and cracked in the ice, following the ethereal fire in her new presence, a pulse of weirding.

The music was leading her back to Kystra's side, green grass blossoming, and then burning under her feet. Charred, the blooms dissolved into excitable ashes, leaving flower prints in the dirt. Words echoed around her, creating a vacuum and realness in the dream.

“I saw the sun in your hair, in the shadows…”

There was sun in the shadows of all her dreams, but this sun was green and violent. Protected, drifting back into herself, she felt no fear of nightmares.

 

Unaware of the dream that followed him, Kinawai played his koto to soothe his own soul and avoid the film of memories that threatened so often to overwhelm him. He felt possessed - not the Master of his own words or actions, no matter how many others he might have power over.

It had been his fault, he knew, but the promise of music had drawn him, lulling him, until he had come upon her floating n the water. She tasted like flowers in moonlight, the returning of spring though the sun shone on snow. Nothing in his experience blessed him with the ability to understand this wonder - old scars deepened, fading, the wounds that made them disappearing into a darkening past. This was, indeed, a problem. There were always problems, of course, like the words of the disgruntled injured - of course they were well enough to go out, but only in their own minds.

Kinawai refused to violate his friendship; everything about this was wrong, so wrong. There were no words to give If he had any courage left, he would relearn his own name, and forget it in time to meet sleep without questions. He had learned that questions could bring the sobriety of pain, and there were still recurring answers that he did not want, explanations of grief and old mistrust.

They castigated his mind and left him flayed open, until he wondered that others did not see his blood, his life, the flesh of his body turned to unimportant dust, all too soon forgotten, not soon enough.

His notes became more agitated, full of this thing that made excuses for the breaking of taboo.

Why worry? It was not forever that he must put down the new desire in him; less than another half century and she would be gone, dead, and full of succumbing to the reaching hands of her mortality. A pulse of guilt flashed striped before his eyes, and he moved faster through these hiding gardens, his fingers plucking a staccato tremor into the air. It was a call for change, magic music; he was glad no one heard all these keys of distress, changes and signatures of crying self paradox.

Loneliness conquers all in the end, even the brave. In that moment, Kinawai did not remember ever holding his own courage close to his breast. It had been endangered for as long as he could remember. He was still capable of the harsh, the necessary, but every wounded cry he heard bit deeper. Stories of betrayal elicited sympathy, a foreign thing; illicit pain would rock the core of his being.

So he wandered; note sparkled fingertips ripped starshine from the strings. He had forgotten the warning tremor of his own strength, clawing away from silence, and the strings shattered. They broke into thin-wire threads that would never again conjure such haunting music.

Regretfully, Kinawai looked down at his koto, music no more, and retreated then in silence and darkness through the castle to the chambers that had been given for his comfort.

*Comfort! I am ruled by turmoil this night, in a sudden and impossible way. I gave what was owed, nothing more, but I truly let her in, and she saw more than I meant her to. Perhaps it is not so strange that I am moved by this…no one else has touched my soul but her mother-and at my most desperate hour.*

He laid himself in stillness on his bed, composed for sleep, tension walking even there. Still, he dreamed music, a lullaby that softened the edges of his pine into a wine-muffled cohesion, slippery and fine as diamonds.

 

By the side of a lonely lake in the wood that bordered Sesshomaru's fortress, a thread of light grew down from the sky like a bleeding wound of cloud, and fell to the ground. The woman Murasaki fell out of it with staggering steps, and slid down to her knees, and then the ground.

She had no clothes, and her pale skin was something more than human. Her flesh lost the glow that had penetrated the whole lakeside from the slit in the sky, and the outline of her self against the ground was softened by lines of hair, and the tilted angle of her ears, and the soft flow of tail that curved around her hips.

The moan that she uttered was pained, but more like the whining cry a young animal might make, and the trees near her parted with a wild suddenness that perfectly presaged the one who leapt from between them.

Murasaki had been given the shape of youkai - the shape of a wolf. Kouga looked down at her with incarnate eyes, and for a wide, sudden moment all remembrance of himself was wiped free again.

“I am Kouga. If you are wolf, you have heard of me. Who is the leader of your tribe?”

Murasaki remained silent, and shook. With a sigh, he lifted her, and turned the only way he could think of.

 

Miroku will help her. Miroku will help her, and he will not ask too many questions.