InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Price of Vengeance ❯ Chapter Sixty-Five (Menacing Shadows) ( Chapter 66 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: YoukaiFate 
Whew! Now it's all straight. WARNING! DARK IMAGERY!
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Drama / Adventure | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.11.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 984 | Status: Completed
Whew! Now it's all straight. WARNING! DARK IMAGERY!
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Hentai / Drama / Adventure | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.11.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 984 | Status: Completed
Disclaimer: I do not own any of Rumiko Takahashi's characters, etc. This story is for entertainment purposes only.
WARNING: Some dark imagery, no one under 17 please!
A/N: Special thanks to Vyncent and DarkQueen76 (among many others!) who kept asking when I would update. Eternal gratitude to Fairia, who helped me write of eagles and eyesight and everything else. (Fate)
Japanese Words
washi - eagle
uma - horse
Chapter Sixty-Five (Menacing Shadows)
“Water? Hot water?” Lady Natsuko gaped at the young woman like a fish caught out of it.
“Water.” The young woman, whose red hakama and white kimono had been tied loosely over her expanding girth, was hollow-eyed and worried. But her dark brown eyes held a hint of steel in them as she summarily ordered the inu lady out of the hut with a wan excuse.
Drawing herself up and regaining her exalted composure, Lady Natsuko sniffed disdainfully. Thin nostrils flaring in contempt, she sneered, “You expect me to---”
Her haughty protest was cut off by an inarticulate cry of pain behind them. Natsuko’s blue-grey eyes widened and she made a whining sound of pity in the back of her throat---a sound she would never admit to, ever after, but one which was echoed by the young inu who hovered beside Usagi. It was the instinctive stirrings of Natsuko’s inu nature, fighting past her haughty control to whine anxiously in the face of another’s pain.
The midwife knelt between the miko’s thighs, and the clean cloths she pulled away were sullied with bright spots of fresh blood. Natsuko’s nose twitched as the sharp, metallic scent penetrated the thick stuffiness of the oven-warmed hut. She flinched as the young girl who lay on the sweat-sodden pallet tilted back her head and groaned sharply with the pain that wracked her weak form anew.
Natsuko did not know enough of humans and their pitiful strength to know what, exactly, was wrong. Her own kind whelped their pups the inu way…in the true form of their canine natures. The instincts of birth soon overwhelmed the expanded limit of their pained awareness of the process, and Natsuko bore only a faint memory of the pain that might have accompanied her own sons’ birth, so long ago in the past now that it was but limited to a warm haze of realization in the aftermath that they had arrived, healthy and sound, and of her former lord, coming with pride to her side to boast how big they were, both Tansei and Genjuu.
Her wandering attention was snapped back to the present when the young miko sobbed aloud. “Why…it hurts…it…”
Usagi made soothing sounds of murmuring nonsense to ease the laboring onna‘s fears. Suzume, the young inu who knelt by the girl’s side, was mopping at the fevered brow. Sweat had whorled the girl’s black bangs into tangled disarray across her cheeks, and the dark circles under the young miko’s eyes were echoed by the lines of tensed worry in her attendants.
“Why does she labor so?” Natsuko whispered loudly in the other onna’s ear. The freckle-faced woman started, and shook her head sharply, motioning the inu female to precede her outside the fire and lamp-lit hut.
Natsuko, for once uncaring of following the bidding of a mere ningen, welcomed the sharp sting of the chilled, but fresh, air outside. Unconsciously, she breathed deeply, allowing the smoky stuffiness of the cot’s interior to leave her lungs. With cleared head and sharper tongue, she turned again to the onna, whose name, if she remembered aright, was Koharu.
“Girl, answer me. Why does the woman pain? It is unusual for an inu’s birth to be so…” Natsuko waved her hand in the direction of the hut they had just exited. A choked cry escaped the wooden confines behind them, and the lady frowned.
“The first child is breech, and Kagome’s hips are narrow.” Koharu said, the strain in her voice matching the darkened worry in her eyes.
Natsuko’s eyes narrowed. “Breech, you say?”
“Yes, Lady. The babe is coming feet first.”
“I know what it means, you insufferable chit. That happens, from time to time. But what does the osambasan intend to do? Turn him?”
“It’s too late for that.” Koharu’s shoulders sagged, her voice soft with defeated sorrow.
“So then the girl must just get on with it, pain or no pain. She must bear down and deliver him, as soon as possible---lest the boy be born dead, denied the air he needs in too long a passage from the womb.” Natsuko said irritably, smoothing the wrinkles from her silken over-robes with sharp jerks of annoyance. The girl’s cries, though muffled outside the cabin, were getting on her strained nerves.
“Time does not matter. He will be born too weak to survive.” Koharu said with a resignation that made Natsuko’s thin lips curl in derision.
“Stupid girl! What---”
The ningen closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to gather patience to answer the irate lady with. The sadness in her dark eyes for Kagome’s fate had turned the brown depths nearly black. “Lady Natsuko, a human woman carries her child for forty weeks. I know that the inu bear their young much sooner, but a human child cannot live if born too early. At seven or eight moons, perhaps, it might have a chance, but not when it is aged but six and a half moons---”
Natsuko’s lip curled into a full sneer. How pathetic these ningen were in their weakness!
Koharu’s dark eyes flashed in anger. “Kagome’s children are too under-developed. They will die, you obnoxious bitch, and I don’t think you find the idea too distressing!”
Natsuko’s fine, penciled brows flew up at the loathsome accusation in the girl’s harsh voice. Her first instinct was anger at the girl’s audacity, and the cold, grey-blue eyes misted faintly with a touch of crimson outrage before she collared her more primitive instinct beneath the swamping bite of her disdain.
“You stupid, stupid girl! What makes you think the pups are too young to live? They are inu, not ningen.” The lady used every nuance of reproachful sarcasm she had in her skilled repertoire, and her biting voice fairly dripped with scornful contempt for the species.
“They are hanyou,” Koharu gritted her teeth. “Which means they are half-human. Which means that they are not grown enough to live outside their mother’s womb---”
Natsuko’s eyes bled now, as she unleashed her growing irritation with the girl’s continued ignorance. These arrogant ningen with their arrogant presumptions! How dare they presume to know an inu’s significance! “Incompetent fool! You understand nothing! Can you not scent out their growth? The pups are to be born now, and your foolish insistence on the unnecessary might cost them their lives!”
“What mean ye, Lady?”
Both women turned in surprise at the gravel-worn interruption. The old miko---who had drained her strength in healing the taijiya, and had been taken away after to rest and regain her strength by the growling insistence of the wolf healer, Hideki---now stood swaying on the path, her wrinkled features pale, the dark circles under her tired eye telling of exhaustion held off by strict will alone.
“Lady Kaede!” Koharu immediately rushed to the old priestess’s side, her eyes anxious now for the old woman’s fading strength. The miko paid the girl no mind, her attention fixed on the indignant inu.
“Tell me,” the miko’s gaze pierced the affronted inu. “What mean ye?”
Natsuko’s smile was acidic.
*~*~*~*~*
The lady awaited the Seventh Lord’s command. Talons tensed upon her rocky perch as a slight breeze ruffled across her mantling wing-feathers. With a sharp gaze, she surveyed her warriors, pleased to see many of them with gaping beak, a bird’s mimicry of a man’s grin. They were eager, they were ready.
It was this waiting that seemed the longest. All the careful planning and complicated maneuverings in the world might not last once talon was joined and spear was cast. Once the arrows flew, singing their sad, hissing song of dread, only instinct and learned movements---ruthlessly drilled into them until the movements themselves were instinctual as well---would ensure life, and victory, or a lonely, plummeting death to the unforgiving earth below. Her warriors were ready, but she would hold them back until the horselord’s signal. They were the Taiyoukai’s feint, his hidden ally. The dark hanyou would not expect the Taiyoukai to have any aerial strength…the pitiful ploys of the dainty kochou would be no match for the winged serpents the baboon had rumored at his command.
Lusaidh stirred restlessly as she watched the dust-covered forms below. Lord Shichiro, when he gained the second rise, should flail the signal that would send them springing forth. His uma soldiers, a mix of both horse and youkai forms, were completely distinct to her sharp-eyed gaze in the dust their swift passage raised. Her eyes, like those of her lesser eagle brethren, could see through water, let alone mere clouds of rising grit.
Lord Shichiro knew best how to use his men, and sent them in swirling waves of feint and skirmishing attack. While the first wave was sent cresting back like the receding tide on a sandy beach, the second was hard on their heels, aiming and firing as quickly as they could. The impressive tactic provided a continuous barrage of the deadly, little arrows that were the uma’s preferred weapon, and wreaked havoc on the enemies’ braced lines.
For once the barrier had dissolved, the shadowy forms of Naraku’s army had appeared like a darker, seething mass at the base of the mountain. The baboon’s forces consisted of a variety of demons, some of them quite fair and appearing less formidable than their uglier companions. Many were reptilian or insectoid in nature, though there were a smattering of others whose natures were more mammalian, though even the sharp eyes of an eagle could barely make out their myriad forms to individual identity…
Lusaidh hissed, her wings mantling and talons tightening on the upthrust of black rock she clung to. The washi around her stirred angrily as the saw the first wave of Naraku’s serpents take to the air, their sinuous forms writhing across the darkened skies with wings that seemed too small for the length of their snake-like bodies. Behind them rose a fearsome roar, and the very earth trembled beneath them.
*Dragon!*
Before she could stop it, the anger welled up, hot and thick, and all but choking her in its intensity. Tilting her head back, Lusaidh erupted forth with a challenging scream of her own. Her clan had suffered untold horrors at the claws of ravaging dragons in pasts so buried in mystery now there was just the deep enmity that seethed through their very raptorial blood.
The winged serpents had driven back the successive waves of skirmishing horselords, and Lord Shichiro had lost the ground he had hoped to gain. He could not give signal now, and the winged snakes were pursuing the fleeing uma, harrying them back to the front lines with devastating effect. Attacked from above, on their weakest side, the strong little arrows could do little damage to an enemy that just writhed out of the way. Screams of pain broke out over the uma’s ranks, and Lusaidh erupted from her perch with a mighty beat of her wings, her screaming command screeching across the tumultuous field.
*Damn the signal, we attack now!*
Keyaws of angry challenge, fiercely shrill in the cold, morning air, rose from the throats of her warriors as Lusaidh folded her wings into a darting dive for the enemy far below. Speeding to the earth, she aimed for the writhing body of a snake about to bite into the neck of an imprisoned horse youkai. The horse whinnied in terror, struggling to free itself as the sharp, foot-long fanged mouth opened with a triumphant hiss.
Lusaidh’s talons closed on the snake’s tail, sinking through the tough skin and into the meaty flesh beneath. She yanked, whipping it aside just as the jaws closed reflexively, snapping shut in a click of teeth mere inches from the uma’s left shoulder. The serpent snarled in hissing anger at the attack, and twisted upon itself to try and bite at the soft feathers of her underbelly. Inured to such tactics, the golden eagle neatly ripped off a delicately-veined wing as she released her burden on high.
The snake coiled in upon itself, spitting acid in her direction in a last attempt to inflict some type of damage. Neatly avoiding the venomous strike, Lusaidh back-winged and watched with grim satisfaction as her foe fell screaming to the earth far below, its one remaining wing beating futilely to allay its fatal spiral. Assured of the dark serpent’s demise, the eagle youkai swung on a wingtip to catch sight of the next.
There was a angry scream above her, and Lusaidh danced back as another serpent fell with torn wing and broken spine to the earth below. His last launch of venom sprayed wide, however, and acid dripped onto her unprotected shoulder. The pain was horrific, but only fueled the lady’s wrath. With eyes glowing bloody reprisal, she arrowed her body on her next target with screeching challenge.
*~*~*~*~*
“Fall back to the lines!” Shichiro bellowed at his men, who were all too unwilling to heed his command. “Fall back, damn you!”
With the flat of his sword, he slapped the hind-end of the nearest fool, who would run back the other way, too young and eager to fall upon the enemy spears that now erupted in a black forest of deadly spikes behind them. For honor’s sake, and the bloodied gleam of battle-driven fervor in the young warrior’s eye, the colt would impale himself in his earnest attempt to bring “just one more” enemy down.
“Our job is finished!” He shouted after the idiot, who had squealed in surprise at the sudden smack to his hindquarters. The instinct of the uma had taken over, and Shichiro watched with grim satisfaction as the horse galloped back toward their own protective lines, which were forging closer to them with each passing second.
Turning his attention to the next young fool, he saw his eldest son harrying the hard-headed before him on the other side of the rock-strewn valley that defined their field of battle. The boy was young, but made of sense. He would follow his lord’s orders to the letter, and be named Seventh Son, Shichiro, one day. Young Kei had done his blood proud, bringing down three of the enemy with his arrows and one with his spear. Shichiro allowed himself a moment to grin at the thought---the strength of the Clans would be preserved for yet another generation…
A screaming cry behind him made him whirl. He bellowed as he saw the young warrior, who had dissolved from his larger horse form to that of the more humanoid youkai in trying to avoid the ogre’s powerful fist. The ogre, grey-blue in color, stood twice the height of the man, and while the soldier was distracted by its left fist, the right swung for his head with a thorny club held tightly in its three-fingered claws.
*Ichiro!*
Lord Shichiro leapt as he saw his son’s head caved in by the crushing blow. Bellowing his fury, his mind seethed with the anger of regret at the sudden loss of his second boy. He felt his legs lengthening as his hand dropped his useless sword to the ground. Clenched fists formed into powerful, deadly hooves as his body morphed into that of his true nature. The blood-rage was on him, and he screamed a livid challenge as he galloped toward his son’s attacker.
The ogre cowered back, its dull reasoning stunned at the manic fury that sped toward him on four hooves. Leaping into the air, Shichiro twisted around so that his powerful hindquarters could swing in a deadly arc, crushing the ogre’s face beneath their impact. The ogre staggered back, his roar of pain oddly whining in what was left of its mouth. Hot blood spurted across the horselord’s back and legs as he fell roughly to the ground, a stray arrow of the enemy having caught him in the shoulder.
Ignoring the pain, he whirled on his forefeet, avoiding the slamming impact of a second thorny club sent clumsily to where he had stood just a breath before. Curling his lips back over his teeth in a snarl of rage, Shichiro challenged his next opponent, another blue-grey giant, who stood over its fallen brother.
The ogre swung with deadly malice, its dull gaze hot with rage. It bellowed its frustration as Shichiro easily danced aside, backing up for enough momentum to leap up to the giant’s height and serve him as he had done the first. Ogre hide was tough; the only way to take one out was to damage the weaker extremities.
The ogre slashed at him again, the heavy club whooshing past the lord’s laid-back ears with a motion that stirred the smaller hairs of his mane. It was much too close, but Shichiro could feel naught but triumph. “Ha! Your aim is as bad as your---”
His taunt was cut off as flames engulfed him. Screaming in rage and fear, Shichiro, Seventh Lord of the Horse Clans, reared as the white-hot flames erupted across his skin and back, swirling around the legs he tried to kick out against the fiery death that now consumed him. A triumphant roar arose behind him, and a rolling trumpet of imminent, inescapable doom.
*Dragons!*
For a moment, the lord stood there, a rearing statue of a horse enwreathed in dancing fire. His body was outlined by mocking flames, and rage-crimsoned eyes widened at the specter that screamed one last warning before suddenly crumpling in upon itself as the flames burned the heart out of the youkai to ash.
*~*~*~*~*
Her crimson eyes showed nothing, her face a white, stoic mask. But the purple-blackened scar on her cheek seemed to pulse faintly, and the thoughts that seethed in the back of Koga’s mind were awhirl with emotions. Anger, triumph, a poignancy of grim determination, and a small stab of icy terror that was gone so quickly he could not say if his wind-ridden mate had ever thought it. He cast her a sharp glance of concern, but she ignored him to stare fixedly on their goal---Naraku’s lair.
The black mountains that ringed them in on all sides seemed to hold menace in their very shadow. The bite in the air was icy cold, but there was nary a breeze to ruffle the fur of his armor. Instead, the world seemed tensed, waiting, as if it held its very breath. Koga’s ears twitched, and he thought he heard a small rumble in the far distance. Eyes narrowed, he scanned the rocky hills that hemmed them in, even this high on the front slope of a descending mountain’s face.
And then they felt as if the very earth trembled. Something screamed faintly on the air, a mere whisper of sound lost in the distance. The ground beneath their feet seemed to heave and roll, and Koga turned to brace his mate, who might not have the strength to remain standing as the very bellows of the earth seemed to buck in protest to whatever disturbed them.
Kagura was fixed as a pillar of stone, however, and although he wrapped his claws around her slight shoulders, she paid him no heed. Bloody eyes narrowing, her lips thinned in distaste. “He would not be such a fool as to awaken them.”
“What?” Koga snapped out with distraction as he glared at the less than graceful antics of his wolf-brothers, who did not fare as well as the wind youkai in the grumbling protest of the earth’s shaking. Several of the four-legged brethren winced and circled around their sprawled youkai companions with whining unease.
“Naraku,” Kagura said in a bitter whisper. “He has awakened the dragons.”
Koga’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “We can take care of them.”
Kagura just looked at him. She did not need to voice the fear that now nipped across the back of her (and thus, his) mind. Koga fought the fear down, the rock of his arrogance leaving little room for doubt as to the final outcome of this long-awaited confrontation.
Blue eyes glinting with barely concealed anger, he motioned sharply with his head for his men---both eastern and northern---to get up. He tightened his grip on the wind lady’s shoulders, in comfort or homage or vow, he did not know or care. It was time.
With a grim smile, he ordered, “We go.”
*~*~*~*~*
A/N: First update in over a year and I write yet another cliffy! I bet y’all could kill me right about now… (Fate)
WARNING: Some dark imagery, no one under 17 please!
A/N: Special thanks to Vyncent and DarkQueen76 (among many others!) who kept asking when I would update. Eternal gratitude to Fairia, who helped me write of eagles and eyesight and everything else. (Fate)
Japanese Words
washi - eagle
uma - horse
Chapter Sixty-Five (Menacing Shadows)
“Water? Hot water?” Lady Natsuko gaped at the young woman like a fish caught out of it.
“Water.” The young woman, whose red hakama and white kimono had been tied loosely over her expanding girth, was hollow-eyed and worried. But her dark brown eyes held a hint of steel in them as she summarily ordered the inu lady out of the hut with a wan excuse.
Drawing herself up and regaining her exalted composure, Lady Natsuko sniffed disdainfully. Thin nostrils flaring in contempt, she sneered, “You expect me to---”
Her haughty protest was cut off by an inarticulate cry of pain behind them. Natsuko’s blue-grey eyes widened and she made a whining sound of pity in the back of her throat---a sound she would never admit to, ever after, but one which was echoed by the young inu who hovered beside Usagi. It was the instinctive stirrings of Natsuko’s inu nature, fighting past her haughty control to whine anxiously in the face of another’s pain.
The midwife knelt between the miko’s thighs, and the clean cloths she pulled away were sullied with bright spots of fresh blood. Natsuko’s nose twitched as the sharp, metallic scent penetrated the thick stuffiness of the oven-warmed hut. She flinched as the young girl who lay on the sweat-sodden pallet tilted back her head and groaned sharply with the pain that wracked her weak form anew.
Natsuko did not know enough of humans and their pitiful strength to know what, exactly, was wrong. Her own kind whelped their pups the inu way…in the true form of their canine natures. The instincts of birth soon overwhelmed the expanded limit of their pained awareness of the process, and Natsuko bore only a faint memory of the pain that might have accompanied her own sons’ birth, so long ago in the past now that it was but limited to a warm haze of realization in the aftermath that they had arrived, healthy and sound, and of her former lord, coming with pride to her side to boast how big they were, both Tansei and Genjuu.
Her wandering attention was snapped back to the present when the young miko sobbed aloud. “Why…it hurts…it…”
Usagi made soothing sounds of murmuring nonsense to ease the laboring onna‘s fears. Suzume, the young inu who knelt by the girl’s side, was mopping at the fevered brow. Sweat had whorled the girl’s black bangs into tangled disarray across her cheeks, and the dark circles under the young miko’s eyes were echoed by the lines of tensed worry in her attendants.
“Why does she labor so?” Natsuko whispered loudly in the other onna’s ear. The freckle-faced woman started, and shook her head sharply, motioning the inu female to precede her outside the fire and lamp-lit hut.
Natsuko, for once uncaring of following the bidding of a mere ningen, welcomed the sharp sting of the chilled, but fresh, air outside. Unconsciously, she breathed deeply, allowing the smoky stuffiness of the cot’s interior to leave her lungs. With cleared head and sharper tongue, she turned again to the onna, whose name, if she remembered aright, was Koharu.
“Girl, answer me. Why does the woman pain? It is unusual for an inu’s birth to be so…” Natsuko waved her hand in the direction of the hut they had just exited. A choked cry escaped the wooden confines behind them, and the lady frowned.
“The first child is breech, and Kagome’s hips are narrow.” Koharu said, the strain in her voice matching the darkened worry in her eyes.
Natsuko’s eyes narrowed. “Breech, you say?”
“Yes, Lady. The babe is coming feet first.”
“I know what it means, you insufferable chit. That happens, from time to time. But what does the osambasan intend to do? Turn him?”
“It’s too late for that.” Koharu’s shoulders sagged, her voice soft with defeated sorrow.
“So then the girl must just get on with it, pain or no pain. She must bear down and deliver him, as soon as possible---lest the boy be born dead, denied the air he needs in too long a passage from the womb.” Natsuko said irritably, smoothing the wrinkles from her silken over-robes with sharp jerks of annoyance. The girl’s cries, though muffled outside the cabin, were getting on her strained nerves.
“Time does not matter. He will be born too weak to survive.” Koharu said with a resignation that made Natsuko’s thin lips curl in derision.
“Stupid girl! What---”
The ningen closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to gather patience to answer the irate lady with. The sadness in her dark eyes for Kagome’s fate had turned the brown depths nearly black. “Lady Natsuko, a human woman carries her child for forty weeks. I know that the inu bear their young much sooner, but a human child cannot live if born too early. At seven or eight moons, perhaps, it might have a chance, but not when it is aged but six and a half moons---”
Natsuko’s lip curled into a full sneer. How pathetic these ningen were in their weakness!
Koharu’s dark eyes flashed in anger. “Kagome’s children are too under-developed. They will die, you obnoxious bitch, and I don’t think you find the idea too distressing!”
Natsuko’s fine, penciled brows flew up at the loathsome accusation in the girl’s harsh voice. Her first instinct was anger at the girl’s audacity, and the cold, grey-blue eyes misted faintly with a touch of crimson outrage before she collared her more primitive instinct beneath the swamping bite of her disdain.
“You stupid, stupid girl! What makes you think the pups are too young to live? They are inu, not ningen.” The lady used every nuance of reproachful sarcasm she had in her skilled repertoire, and her biting voice fairly dripped with scornful contempt for the species.
“They are hanyou,” Koharu gritted her teeth. “Which means they are half-human. Which means that they are not grown enough to live outside their mother’s womb---”
Natsuko’s eyes bled now, as she unleashed her growing irritation with the girl’s continued ignorance. These arrogant ningen with their arrogant presumptions! How dare they presume to know an inu’s significance! “Incompetent fool! You understand nothing! Can you not scent out their growth? The pups are to be born now, and your foolish insistence on the unnecessary might cost them their lives!”
“What mean ye, Lady?”
Both women turned in surprise at the gravel-worn interruption. The old miko---who had drained her strength in healing the taijiya, and had been taken away after to rest and regain her strength by the growling insistence of the wolf healer, Hideki---now stood swaying on the path, her wrinkled features pale, the dark circles under her tired eye telling of exhaustion held off by strict will alone.
“Lady Kaede!” Koharu immediately rushed to the old priestess’s side, her eyes anxious now for the old woman’s fading strength. The miko paid the girl no mind, her attention fixed on the indignant inu.
“Tell me,” the miko’s gaze pierced the affronted inu. “What mean ye?”
Natsuko’s smile was acidic.
*~*~*~*~*
The lady awaited the Seventh Lord’s command. Talons tensed upon her rocky perch as a slight breeze ruffled across her mantling wing-feathers. With a sharp gaze, she surveyed her warriors, pleased to see many of them with gaping beak, a bird’s mimicry of a man’s grin. They were eager, they were ready.
It was this waiting that seemed the longest. All the careful planning and complicated maneuverings in the world might not last once talon was joined and spear was cast. Once the arrows flew, singing their sad, hissing song of dread, only instinct and learned movements---ruthlessly drilled into them until the movements themselves were instinctual as well---would ensure life, and victory, or a lonely, plummeting death to the unforgiving earth below. Her warriors were ready, but she would hold them back until the horselord’s signal. They were the Taiyoukai’s feint, his hidden ally. The dark hanyou would not expect the Taiyoukai to have any aerial strength…the pitiful ploys of the dainty kochou would be no match for the winged serpents the baboon had rumored at his command.
Lusaidh stirred restlessly as she watched the dust-covered forms below. Lord Shichiro, when he gained the second rise, should flail the signal that would send them springing forth. His uma soldiers, a mix of both horse and youkai forms, were completely distinct to her sharp-eyed gaze in the dust their swift passage raised. Her eyes, like those of her lesser eagle brethren, could see through water, let alone mere clouds of rising grit.
Lord Shichiro knew best how to use his men, and sent them in swirling waves of feint and skirmishing attack. While the first wave was sent cresting back like the receding tide on a sandy beach, the second was hard on their heels, aiming and firing as quickly as they could. The impressive tactic provided a continuous barrage of the deadly, little arrows that were the uma’s preferred weapon, and wreaked havoc on the enemies’ braced lines.
For once the barrier had dissolved, the shadowy forms of Naraku’s army had appeared like a darker, seething mass at the base of the mountain. The baboon’s forces consisted of a variety of demons, some of them quite fair and appearing less formidable than their uglier companions. Many were reptilian or insectoid in nature, though there were a smattering of others whose natures were more mammalian, though even the sharp eyes of an eagle could barely make out their myriad forms to individual identity…
Lusaidh hissed, her wings mantling and talons tightening on the upthrust of black rock she clung to. The washi around her stirred angrily as the saw the first wave of Naraku’s serpents take to the air, their sinuous forms writhing across the darkened skies with wings that seemed too small for the length of their snake-like bodies. Behind them rose a fearsome roar, and the very earth trembled beneath them.
*Dragon!*
Before she could stop it, the anger welled up, hot and thick, and all but choking her in its intensity. Tilting her head back, Lusaidh erupted forth with a challenging scream of her own. Her clan had suffered untold horrors at the claws of ravaging dragons in pasts so buried in mystery now there was just the deep enmity that seethed through their very raptorial blood.
The winged serpents had driven back the successive waves of skirmishing horselords, and Lord Shichiro had lost the ground he had hoped to gain. He could not give signal now, and the winged snakes were pursuing the fleeing uma, harrying them back to the front lines with devastating effect. Attacked from above, on their weakest side, the strong little arrows could do little damage to an enemy that just writhed out of the way. Screams of pain broke out over the uma’s ranks, and Lusaidh erupted from her perch with a mighty beat of her wings, her screaming command screeching across the tumultuous field.
*Damn the signal, we attack now!*
Keyaws of angry challenge, fiercely shrill in the cold, morning air, rose from the throats of her warriors as Lusaidh folded her wings into a darting dive for the enemy far below. Speeding to the earth, she aimed for the writhing body of a snake about to bite into the neck of an imprisoned horse youkai. The horse whinnied in terror, struggling to free itself as the sharp, foot-long fanged mouth opened with a triumphant hiss.
Lusaidh’s talons closed on the snake’s tail, sinking through the tough skin and into the meaty flesh beneath. She yanked, whipping it aside just as the jaws closed reflexively, snapping shut in a click of teeth mere inches from the uma’s left shoulder. The serpent snarled in hissing anger at the attack, and twisted upon itself to try and bite at the soft feathers of her underbelly. Inured to such tactics, the golden eagle neatly ripped off a delicately-veined wing as she released her burden on high.
The snake coiled in upon itself, spitting acid in her direction in a last attempt to inflict some type of damage. Neatly avoiding the venomous strike, Lusaidh back-winged and watched with grim satisfaction as her foe fell screaming to the earth far below, its one remaining wing beating futilely to allay its fatal spiral. Assured of the dark serpent’s demise, the eagle youkai swung on a wingtip to catch sight of the next.
There was a angry scream above her, and Lusaidh danced back as another serpent fell with torn wing and broken spine to the earth below. His last launch of venom sprayed wide, however, and acid dripped onto her unprotected shoulder. The pain was horrific, but only fueled the lady’s wrath. With eyes glowing bloody reprisal, she arrowed her body on her next target with screeching challenge.
*~*~*~*~*
“Fall back to the lines!” Shichiro bellowed at his men, who were all too unwilling to heed his command. “Fall back, damn you!”
With the flat of his sword, he slapped the hind-end of the nearest fool, who would run back the other way, too young and eager to fall upon the enemy spears that now erupted in a black forest of deadly spikes behind them. For honor’s sake, and the bloodied gleam of battle-driven fervor in the young warrior’s eye, the colt would impale himself in his earnest attempt to bring “just one more” enemy down.
“Our job is finished!” He shouted after the idiot, who had squealed in surprise at the sudden smack to his hindquarters. The instinct of the uma had taken over, and Shichiro watched with grim satisfaction as the horse galloped back toward their own protective lines, which were forging closer to them with each passing second.
Turning his attention to the next young fool, he saw his eldest son harrying the hard-headed before him on the other side of the rock-strewn valley that defined their field of battle. The boy was young, but made of sense. He would follow his lord’s orders to the letter, and be named Seventh Son, Shichiro, one day. Young Kei had done his blood proud, bringing down three of the enemy with his arrows and one with his spear. Shichiro allowed himself a moment to grin at the thought---the strength of the Clans would be preserved for yet another generation…
A screaming cry behind him made him whirl. He bellowed as he saw the young warrior, who had dissolved from his larger horse form to that of the more humanoid youkai in trying to avoid the ogre’s powerful fist. The ogre, grey-blue in color, stood twice the height of the man, and while the soldier was distracted by its left fist, the right swung for his head with a thorny club held tightly in its three-fingered claws.
*Ichiro!*
Lord Shichiro leapt as he saw his son’s head caved in by the crushing blow. Bellowing his fury, his mind seethed with the anger of regret at the sudden loss of his second boy. He felt his legs lengthening as his hand dropped his useless sword to the ground. Clenched fists formed into powerful, deadly hooves as his body morphed into that of his true nature. The blood-rage was on him, and he screamed a livid challenge as he galloped toward his son’s attacker.
The ogre cowered back, its dull reasoning stunned at the manic fury that sped toward him on four hooves. Leaping into the air, Shichiro twisted around so that his powerful hindquarters could swing in a deadly arc, crushing the ogre’s face beneath their impact. The ogre staggered back, his roar of pain oddly whining in what was left of its mouth. Hot blood spurted across the horselord’s back and legs as he fell roughly to the ground, a stray arrow of the enemy having caught him in the shoulder.
Ignoring the pain, he whirled on his forefeet, avoiding the slamming impact of a second thorny club sent clumsily to where he had stood just a breath before. Curling his lips back over his teeth in a snarl of rage, Shichiro challenged his next opponent, another blue-grey giant, who stood over its fallen brother.
The ogre swung with deadly malice, its dull gaze hot with rage. It bellowed its frustration as Shichiro easily danced aside, backing up for enough momentum to leap up to the giant’s height and serve him as he had done the first. Ogre hide was tough; the only way to take one out was to damage the weaker extremities.
The ogre slashed at him again, the heavy club whooshing past the lord’s laid-back ears with a motion that stirred the smaller hairs of his mane. It was much too close, but Shichiro could feel naught but triumph. “Ha! Your aim is as bad as your---”
His taunt was cut off as flames engulfed him. Screaming in rage and fear, Shichiro, Seventh Lord of the Horse Clans, reared as the white-hot flames erupted across his skin and back, swirling around the legs he tried to kick out against the fiery death that now consumed him. A triumphant roar arose behind him, and a rolling trumpet of imminent, inescapable doom.
*Dragons!*
For a moment, the lord stood there, a rearing statue of a horse enwreathed in dancing fire. His body was outlined by mocking flames, and rage-crimsoned eyes widened at the specter that screamed one last warning before suddenly crumpling in upon itself as the flames burned the heart out of the youkai to ash.
*~*~*~*~*
Her crimson eyes showed nothing, her face a white, stoic mask. But the purple-blackened scar on her cheek seemed to pulse faintly, and the thoughts that seethed in the back of Koga’s mind were awhirl with emotions. Anger, triumph, a poignancy of grim determination, and a small stab of icy terror that was gone so quickly he could not say if his wind-ridden mate had ever thought it. He cast her a sharp glance of concern, but she ignored him to stare fixedly on their goal---Naraku’s lair.
The black mountains that ringed them in on all sides seemed to hold menace in their very shadow. The bite in the air was icy cold, but there was nary a breeze to ruffle the fur of his armor. Instead, the world seemed tensed, waiting, as if it held its very breath. Koga’s ears twitched, and he thought he heard a small rumble in the far distance. Eyes narrowed, he scanned the rocky hills that hemmed them in, even this high on the front slope of a descending mountain’s face.
And then they felt as if the very earth trembled. Something screamed faintly on the air, a mere whisper of sound lost in the distance. The ground beneath their feet seemed to heave and roll, and Koga turned to brace his mate, who might not have the strength to remain standing as the very bellows of the earth seemed to buck in protest to whatever disturbed them.
Kagura was fixed as a pillar of stone, however, and although he wrapped his claws around her slight shoulders, she paid him no heed. Bloody eyes narrowing, her lips thinned in distaste. “He would not be such a fool as to awaken them.”
“What?” Koga snapped out with distraction as he glared at the less than graceful antics of his wolf-brothers, who did not fare as well as the wind youkai in the grumbling protest of the earth’s shaking. Several of the four-legged brethren winced and circled around their sprawled youkai companions with whining unease.
“Naraku,” Kagura said in a bitter whisper. “He has awakened the dragons.”
Koga’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “We can take care of them.”
Kagura just looked at him. She did not need to voice the fear that now nipped across the back of her (and thus, his) mind. Koga fought the fear down, the rock of his arrogance leaving little room for doubt as to the final outcome of this long-awaited confrontation.
Blue eyes glinting with barely concealed anger, he motioned sharply with his head for his men---both eastern and northern---to get up. He tightened his grip on the wind lady’s shoulders, in comfort or homage or vow, he did not know or care. It was time.
With a grim smile, he ordered, “We go.”
*~*~*~*~*
A/N: First update in over a year and I write yet another cliffy! I bet y’all could kill me right about now… (Fate)