InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Long, Stout, and Sharpeye - A Fairy Tale ❯ The Princess and the plea :p ( Chapter 2 )
[ A - All Readers ]
A/N sorry for the short chapters, but don't fear, as my updates should(obviousley) be prompt in coming. :) Oh, and by the way, if you haven't been able to tell so far, the characters will most assuradley be ooc, but I am trying to stick some of their original personalities in there when I can
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Inuyasha stepped forward eagerly to examine the first beautiful princess - for she was indeed a princess, as, he noticed, they all were. Upon reaching the window and beginning his examination of the beautiful glass, he almost jumped when the glass appeared to shift, so that it was as if the woman raised her eyes to his and smiled.‘Keh, it must be the light playing tricks on my eyes’, the young prince reasoned. And slowly left the first princess and moved to the next. But he found the same peculiar shifting of the glass as it appeared once again that the princess was raising her eyes and smiling at him, and so on with the third and fourth princesses, until Inuyasha finally found himself gawking at the movement of the fifth, for he now knew it could not be the light, and rather felt certain that there was indeed some enchantment at work.
This realisation would have startled him so, enough perhaps to even cause him to bolt from the room, (though he was a hanyou and of demon blood, he did not often experience magic or enchantments as it was banned from the castle and frowned upon by the human commonwealth) had the beauty of the sixth princess not caught his eye. He moved on to examine her, but found that the seventh out shined her as well, and so did the eighth and so on till the end.
It was when he came to the eleventh, surely the most beautiful of all, that he noticed a large white sheet covered that of the window beside it, the twelfth window, obstructing his view of the beauty he was sure lay beneath it.
Not thinking twice Inuyasha quickly and almost roughly drew back the curtain, his claws biting into the soft material, to gaze into the eyes of the most beautiful of all of the princesses.
In the shimmering light of the sun, she stood, as beautiful as life itself, and, he noticed, as sad as death. Her skin was almost ghostly pale and she was clad in an all white robe with a band of silver across her waist. She had the most stunning deep blue eyes that seemed to hold all the sadness of the world, and she had the most jet black hair that cascaded down her shoulders stopping mid-waist.
On top of her head was a crown of pearls, so wonderfully offsetting the blackness of her hair. She was the picture of an angel, Inuyasha was sure.
He stood there as if turned to stone. He felt such a deep sorrow for her pain and was so overcome with her beauty that he felt it turn to love and at length he found himself announcing to the empty room; “she shall be my mate, if she lives anywhere in this world - for now I have seen her and I can surely love no other!”
Upon his declaration he noticed the princess look up smiling sweetly at him, with the most pretty blush adorning her lovely features, and as the last echoings of his words died from the room he found the princesses in the other windows fading away until no trace of them remained, leaving eleven windows of ordinary glass.
Hating to tear his eyes away from her, but doing so upon remembering his fathers words about returning quickly to him with his answer, rushed from the room, banging the door shut thoughtlessly behind him, as he fled down the stairs and to his fathers side, eager to tell him his news.
“Father, I have chosen! She is the most beautiful of any woman and could not have dreamed a such a beauty existed!” he breathlessly said as he continued to tell his father of his choice.
As the old king listened to his sons excited words, his face fell until at last he cried “Alas! You should not have looked upon what was hidden, for you are running into great danger. The princess is the prisoner of the wicked and evil hanyou Naraku, who has tried more than once to swallow our lands whole!” the Kings face was pained and showed his obvious distress.
“But, as you have said of your declaration, you gave your word, and it cannot be broken!” the king paused to slow his erratic breathing, before continuing in a slightly more calm tone, having resigned himself to his sons fate.
“Inuyasha, I am afraid that he lives in an Iron castle across to the north, quite a great distance from here. My son, many a prince and knight has ventured forth seeking to rescue her and therefore win her hand, but none have returned!” his voice once again holding the despair from before. "Inuyasha, I beseech you this,” the king almost pleaded, “if you must go, and you must, then leave now so that I will not have to suffer from the torment of being kept waiting any longer than I have to learn if you succeeded in your quest or if you have failed.”
Struck by his fathers words, Inuyasha briefly wished he could rescind his promise and remain here with his father, forever forgetting the beauty hidden away in the iron castle and in the window in the tower, but as he thought this the image of the princess floated into his mind and a need to protect and rescue her surfaced so fierce that he immediately discarded such a ridicules thought as leaving her to her fate.
And so, with the thought of the princess in his mind, he left his father, and the safety of his castle to venture forth into the most peculiar and life-altering adventure he had yet come across.
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