InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Edge of Resistance ❯ Book One: The Dreaming World ( Prologue )

The Edge of Resistance

Book One: The Dreaming World

 

PROLOGUE

 

“On the dry and dusty road

The nights we spent apart alone

I need to get back home

to cool, cool rain

I can't sleep and I lay and I think

The night is hot and black as ink

Oh God, I need a drink

of cool, cool rain

Love, love, reign o'er me, rain on me.”

-The Who

 

***

 

 

“Being an account of the origin and early history of the Sacred Jewel”

-excerpts condensed from chapters I-VI of Era of the Sacred Jewel and the Annals of the Everlasting Light

 

 

This testimony was gathered from pieces left behind by those who witnessed these events. This record focuses on those events leading up to the greatest one, the Final Battle waged by the Everlasting Light and the Southern Armies in the winter of 1497 AD.

 

Certain information is necessary for the student to understand these events as they have been described. For some things, no clear record remains, and for others there is only legend, but I have assembled the material in the most comprehensive manner possible.

 

In the distant past, there was a great priestess, whom men called Midoriko. She had the power to defeat the most formidable of wicked demons by purifying their souls and sending them to hell. She met her fate when she was still quite young, in a cave near a village of the demon slayers. There she battled for seven days with a demon like none she had met before. This monster was a collection of other, smaller demons, and was created from the mangled soul of her former lover, tricked into thinking his love had betrayed him. The anguish of his heart, combined with his desperate rage and pitiless rancor, overpowered the priestess. With her last strength she reached into the foul flesh of the demon, wrenching out his heart to combine it with her own heart, attempting in this way to purify the demon spirit. After this was done, the combined heart burst from the priestess's chest in the form of a round jewel, no larger than a pebble. This jewel became the Shikon no Tama, the Sacred Jewel, and in it the battle between the souls of the priestess and the demons continues to rage.

 

If the Jewel fell into evil hands, the demon power inside it would grow, tainting it with corruption and augmenting the new owner's power. If, however, the Jewel was possessed by one of a pure heart, the Jewel's power for evil would be diminished. Thus it was that the Sacred Jewel was entrusted to the care of one Kikyou, a young priestess from the village of Edo in the Musashi country. Though Kikyou guarded the jewel effectively from both humans and demons who lusted for its power, the insidious influence of the Sacred Jewel, its power for hate and bitterness, could not be undone. Even in the care of Kikyou, a dark seed was sown.

 

In a village nearby, there was another priestess in training, one of considerable ability and promising talent named Tsubaki. But Tsubaki's greed and vanity had marred her soul, and in the secret places of her heart she began to believe that the Sacred Jewel should be hers, hers to protect, hers to glorify her name, hers to use to preserve forever her youthful beauty. Thus, in her arrogance and delusion, she assailed Kikyou, in an attempt to gain the Jewel for herself. Her ambition was thwarted and her beauty maimed. It is said that Tsubaki was skilled in reading the hearts of others and in Kikyou's heart she had perceived the presence of a fiery passion. In anger that could not be measured, Tsubaki cursed Kikyou. It was a terrible curse, one which none should utter and none could break, that love would be Kikyou's undoing. There were some that said Tsubaki's madness was caused by the Jewel itself, but this can never be known, as Tsubaki has long left this world.

 

The scorching infatuation Tsubaki had glimpsed inside Kikyou's heart belonged to a half-demon, Inuyasha, the son of the great dog demon Ichiro and the human princess Izayoi. In the beginning, Inuyasha sought the power of the Jewel in order to become a full demon. Kikyou defeated his attempts, but did not slay him. As time passed, the two began a wary friendship, which blossomed into an obsessive and consuming love. Kikyou convinced Inuyasha that he could use the Sacred Jewel to become entirely human. She believed that the Jewel would thus be wholly purified and that then the two of them could lead a normal life together.

 

But it was not to be. There were some who said that the wish to use the Jewel for personal gain was the beginning of the lovers' downfall, or that their love was not enough to overcome their natural distrust, but this also cannot be known. Kikyou's demise would follow the same ruinous path laid by her predecessor. She herself was tricked into believing that Inuyasha betrayed and did violence to her, tricked by the Dark Enemy, he who, to this day I cannot bring myself to name. Wounded and scalded through to her very soul, Kikyou used a sacred arrow to pin Inuyasha to Goshinbaku, the sacred tree near her village. Dying, and still obsessed with accompanying her lover, Kikyou chose to perish rather than use the Jewel to save herself. Instead, she ordered it to be burned with her body and then, a sibilant whisper of her heart's true name falling from her lips, she spoke no more.

 

Kikyou's last wish was thwarted, for Inuyasha did not die. Perhaps destiny intervened. Instead he slumbered unchanged on Goshinbaku, which stood in what came to be known as Inuyasha's Forest. Fifty years passed. A mysterious maiden appeared then, from another time, carried on the current of merciless fate. Hounded by demons, she stumbled upon the petrified tomb that was Inuyasha's tree. Remarkably, this maiden was able to awaken Inuyasha and break the binding spell of Kikyou. It was revealed that this maiden carried in her very body the Shikon no Tama (which I swear I never knew). What obscure powers were operating to bring her to this time and place? Why did she carry the Jewel and why did she bear such an exact semblance to the ill-fated priestess before her? The Jewel was separated from this new, strange priestess, and consequently became shattered. She and Inuyasha set out to recover the pieces and in their journeys uncovered the insidious nature of he who I cannot name; the one who had brought ruin to the hopes of Inuyasha and Kikyou. They were joined later by others, most of them ensnared in the machinations of the Wicked One and the fate of the Shikon no Tama.

 

I have done all that I can to begin this tale, faithfully. Now I will leave you to it.

 

-Sincerely,

The Seeress