InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Winds ❯ Threads That Bind ( Chapter 7 )

The narrow red slash of Naraku's eyes darted around the room. Except for that, you would have thought he waited patiently, until he began to tap his fingers against the floor. It was a lazy sound, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, his hand hanging off his lap so that his fingers barely brushed the floor. There was a faint sound, the swish of an opening shoji screen, and his eyes turned with a swiftness that betrayed their focus. The fingers stopped - stillness filled the air.

“It has taken you three days to respond to my summons, Kohaku. What is the difficulty?”

The blank eyes of the boy stared back at him - the boy's whole being stared back at him, unmoving. The voice that came from twelve year old lips was heavy and brittle, just as unfeeling as his eyes, as expressionless as his face.

“I followed demon-scent which was like the hanyou, Master Naraku. This was your order. The summons is a greater order. I was far when it reached me, and turned back.”

Naraku's eyes had already widened the briefest fraction, oozing sharp inquisitiveness.

“The source of the demon scent - did you find it?”

Kohaku shook his head.

“No, Master Naraku. You summoned me - I came.”

The curl of responding lips would have curdled new milk.

“And as you followed it, where did it lead?”

Kohaku's empty eyes closed, as he followed his steps backward in memory.

“First to the southwest, in a wide circle that did not encroach on the wolf-territory; then back to the north. When it turned, I noticed the strangeness in it. It is of Inuyasha, yet it is not Inuyasha.”

“That is good. You will no longer concern yourself with this. I am sending you now on a larger task. You will go out, and you will find Kikyou!”

The thinning smile on Naraku's face reached between them, resonating with controlling powers.

“Yes, Master Naraku.”

Naraku stood slowly, an unrelenting push of dark energy growing and pulsating in his palm. A large shard of the shikon jewel glistened in his hand, glowing with an eerie light both red and black.

“You will take this before you go. This shard has been infused with my essence. The miasma will strengthen you.”

With a brutal twist, Naraku forced the darkened shard into the flesh of Kohaku's right shoulder. A dark glow grew and leapt down the boy's arm like a flash of black fire. The hardened grossness of Naraku's will burned through Kohaku, infiltrating the blankness of his eyes. They gained a flashing spark that reflected the heart of evil, the soul of hell.

“Do not forget, Kohaku. Kikyou retains the powers of a miko, but she has no flesh - she is undead. Kanna waits for you outside. She has a gift for Kikyou, which you must bring to her. Go now, and return when you have completed this task.”

Kohaku bowed, and retreated behind the screens that had allowed him in. A slim, pale figure in glistening white, Kanna was waiting for him as Naraku had said she would be. She looked like a slip of girl, but her power was the most sinister of all Naraku's children, her appearance making her all the more terrifying to those who knew her true nature.

The mirror that chained her power was dark and steady in her hands. With a pale wisp of a voice, as emotionless as his own, Kanna addressed Kohaku and held out her mirror.

“Tamashi are held inside. Reach carefully!”

The warning was pointless and unnecessary. Blindly, with a will not his own, Kohaku reached forward into the mirror. The glass was not glass - it gave under his fingers like frozen syrup, thick and clinging.

When his arm was held nearly to the elbow, his grasping fingers felt something hard and cold. He pulled forward, and only then did the mirror resist, wisps and particles making his whole body tingle from the immersion in strange energies.

When he had it out, he held the object up, looking, turning it in his hands. Naraku had said `A gift for Kikyou'.

“That is jishaku no tamashi, the magnet of souls. It has a hold over the soul, but to the dead it is irresistibly attractive - it calls them.”

Kanna's soft voice faded into nothing, and she stepped away, and passed beyond the screens. Kohaku stood, holding a short, pointed cylinder of some black, unyielding stone, and though he knew he held it in his hand, he could not feel its presence there. It was frictionless, drinking the light and withholding it, radiating a dark and subtle power that yet he felt. It was…magnetic.

While he stood holding it, probing the distance with burning red eyes, Kanna returned and stood by his side.

“I can show you where the miko has been - you must find where she is from there.”

An image appeared on the surface of the mirror, slightly blurred. The clearing it showed was not familiar, but the trees that grew there grew only to the south and east. As he watched, the picture shifted, leading away from the trees in a swirl of color and coming to rest on the edge of a riverbank. A bucket lay by the side of the water, tilted on one side.

Woodenly, he turned away from the mirror and jogged out towards the horizon, the gathering sunset red on his back. His footsteps pounded out a rhythm that was repeated instead his head, replaying names and words.

 

Kikyou. Jishaku no Tamashi. Kikyou. Jishaku no Tamashi. Kikyou…Kikyou…Kikyou…

 

 

“What else do you want me to tell? Inuyasha no longer speaks of her; it is too painful for Kagome to hear him speak her name. I have not asked too many questions of him - I have no reason to know of her. Sometimes she was our enemy, and sometimes - “

Miroku stopped, and shook his head with a glint of faint amusement in his eyes.

“Sometimes she was something else. I don't know what, really. She has been the bane of our battle, and yet she has also sent more than one arrow out of the darkness to save us.”

Kouga shook his head, and took a few swift steps forward, peering ahead, and even further with nose and ears.

“What about her family? Who are her parents? Does she have a home, or does she wander like Kagome?”

Miroku laughed shortly, and contemplated briefly telling Kouga about his precious Kagome's origins.

 

What a conversation that would be…but he would never believe me. One of these days, when he sees her go down the well, and not come up again…

 

He could not prevent a grin from following his laughter, but turned quickly grave, and stared forward at Kouga, paused now between trees, crouching in the undergrowth.

“She most definitely wanders - but not like Kagome. I know nothing of Kikyou's aims, or purposes, except that until quite recently she desired Inuyasha's life - to bring him to the underworld with her. He would have gone with her, but Kagome changed that. You know.”

The clenching of Kouga's fists was not as tight or as quick as Miroku had expected, and the sight that filtered through the unclenching was thick but light.

“And her family?”

Miroku hesitated.

“I…know of her sister, only. Nothing of their parents, and I do not believe there was another sibling. The name of her sister is Kaede; she is the miko of the village where our group often stays.”

Kouga's brows drew together pensively, brooding over this unexpected piece of information.

“You say they are sisters, but I have heard of this Kaede and she is old. `Kaede-baa-chan', Kagome calls her. My spirit woman is young, and her flesh is soft with youth even while it lacks warmth!”

Miroku couldn't let him go on. With disbelief heavy in his voice, he penetrated the frothing tide of Kouga's words.

“Have you forgotten everything I already told you? Do you not remember that she is the one who Naraku desired when she had a human form, fifty years ago? How could you sleep with her and not know her nature? Kikyou does not have flesh!”

Kouga was taken aback by Miroku's fierceness, shocked into silence.

“She does not have flesh, or muscles, or skin, and the bone within her is the ground dust of her burned self. She is made of herbs, and sorcery, and mud, burial-clay and bone ash. The only true life she carries is a fragment of Kagome's soul!”

Miroku expected horror, or panic, or disgust - nothing burning eyed look that touched him.

“I may not have known all of this, Houshi, but I knew she was not human - I knew she was not Kagome. Except…afterward - afterward, she was warm for a moment. Almost glowing.”

With a sudden surge of inexplicable and undeserved anger, Kouga turned back to Miroku and covered the ten steps between them in a breaths' worth of time.

“Tell me, Houshi, since you know so much - why did she go? Why would she leave me without a word?”

Miroku's anger pushed back at him, equally hot, equally inexplicable.

“I already told you, I know nothing of her motives! You are such a fool, Kouga! You find a woman in the forest, and she seems to desire you, and she has Kagome's face. So without a thought for consequences, without a question, you take her, and then expect the first one you meet who knows her name to tell you her life and her reasoning - to save you from that foolishness!”

Kouga stood stock-still and stared wit ha gaping jaw, cowering just a little. Miroku had risen over him on tiptoes with a blazing aura of houriki and a menacing staff, which was still darting threateningly close to his head.

“It was not a time for questions, Houshi. There was nothing…it was an enchantment without an enchanter, a moment no man can understand until it comes on him. It will come on you - there is no doubt of that - and when it does, tell me again of foolishness.”

The air around them had gathered in stillness, flecked with darkness.

“You wish to know more of Kikyou, Kouga? Very well. I will tell you the long -short story which I know of her. A piece of this, not even Inuyasha knows - because I have not told him.”

Kouga's eyes grew large and hungry.

“Tell me!”

The growling baseness of possession was already beginning to flame in his voice. Miroku had heard it run over Kagome's name too many times not to recognize it.

 

“When she was alive, Kikyou was miko, one of the strongest of our time. She was the training companion of Tsubaki, who became kuromiko. In the days after she returned to her home village, a group of demon-slayers from the village of Sango came, bringing with them the sacred jewel which had been formed in a cave not far from them, and whose power drew the desires of demons and evil humans both. They sought a miko to subdue the spirits of evil that still wound about the soul of the miko trapped in the gem, and purify the jewel from this world.

“Kikyou took the jewel, to keep it safe until a way could be found to purify it, and began her life as a miko, as guardian of the shikon no tama. All was well, until Inuyasha. How, and why, I do not know, but they became companions, and close, and felt love for one another that was forbidden by nature and custom. Desiring a life as a normal woman, without powers or protecting, Kikyou promised Inuyasha that their desires could be fulfilled by using the jewel to wish for him to be fully human. He would be normal, accepted, and she would be able to give up the colors of a miko.

“No one but Kaede, her sister who was then a child, knew that Kikyou kept a horribly mangled man in a cave near the village, a thief who had been burned over his whole body, yet clung to life. Clinging to life, he came to desire Kikyou, and his desire for Kikyou gave him the will to beg for demons, and become Naraku.

“Naraku's desires have remained the same all this time - he desires Kikyou, and he desires the tainted power of the shikon no tama, thinking its beauty all the more shining when its light is darkness.”

Miroku stopped for breath, watching the continuing hunger in Kouga's eyes, the reach of his breath and the assimilation of this new knowledge into his own desirous thoughts.

“Shall I continue?”

Kouga's growl was more than enough affirmation.

“Fifty years passed, in which there was peace, until Kagome came with the sacred jewel bursting out of her body, and Kikyou's face. She woke the demon centipede, and broke Inuyasha's seal. She shattered the shikon no tama, and swore and oath to return it to its rightful form.

“There was nothing but chance in the coming of Urasue. She took bone-ash and burial soil from Kikyou's grave, and used special herbs and black magic knowledge to create a body which would do her bidding, retrieving shards of the shikon jewel easily with Kikyou's famed spiritual power. Urasue reckoned with Kikyou's living incarnation - Kagome - and without the strength of will and memory that Kikyou's soul possessed.

“Seeking only the power of the miko, Urasue was blind to everything else. She was destroyed, purified by Kikyou herself, but Kikyou retained only a fragment of her soul - the soul she and Kagome shared. That fragment remembered the desire for vengeance which ruled Kikyou's last moments in life, her desire to kill Inuyasha who she believed betrayed her.

“More than this dark remembrance is with her now; she knows Naraku, and his guilt. In her new form, Kikyou requires the souls of dead maidens to keep this second life, and it is by following her soul collectors that one can always be sure of her presence. More of Kagome is in her now - I do not know if she still has need of them, or if that need is something that can never be changed.”

Kouga held up a hand in confusion, halting the flood of information, and Miroku peered across at him quizzically.

“What is it?”

“What do you mean, more of Kagome now? They are the same soul - “

“No!”

Miroku's sharpness was sudden and unexpected.

“They shared a soul, once. The day she was born, Kagome may have shared Kikyou, but I do not think that even then the resemblance was pure. Too much time had passed- who knows how many lives that shared soul might have lived, and been neither Kikyou, nor Kagome, but someones in between? No, Kouga, they are not the same.”

It had always seemed so obvious to Miroku - Kikyou was darkness, and Kagome was light. By design or necessity, this was so; someday, Kikyou would go back to the earth, and there would be no Kikyou - only Kagome.”

“I said that Kikyou was more of Kagome now, because she is. That fragment which was stolen at the beginning when Urasue created her has been given back, and increased. Naraku wounded her, and Kagome healed her - Kagome gave her more soul.”

With a sudden increase in intensity, Miroku's eyes burned into Kouga.

“You must tell no one this, nor mention it to Kagome. She has told no one, and does not know that I was witness.”

Kouga only nodded, stuck in a new silence, contemplating Miroku's reprimand and the nature of the soul. Abruptly, he stood and stared up into the sky. While he had sat and listened to the Houshi, night had fallen.

Sleepy stars yawned and then twinkled brightly above them in the darkening sky, a slippery purple, deep and bruised.

“We should camp here tonight, Miroku. You are strong, but you are still only human.”

Miroku smiled widely, his grin gleaming through the dark.

“Then I will send you, oh strong demon, to gather firewood.”

With a huff, Kouga stalked off through the trees, zipping from one patch of deadwood to another, and Miroku walked casually back along the path they had last covered, ears wide open, eyes half shut. After a minute passed, and then two, he stopped, and looked away to one side.

“You can come out now, Kagura. He should be far enough away by now.”

Like an angry toss of the hair, branches, leaves and grass all shook around him, and then grew unearthly calm. From the side he did not watch, Kagura came up to him, and her gaze was creeping and uncertain. Like some small creature coming out of its burrow, she slunk towards him, and then stood two feet away, staring.

Miroku lifted his eyes to look at her, and almost let his surprise show. He had never seen her this way, except in the moment after she escaped from a battle. Somehow, it was almost worst than when her wounds were open and bleeding. Blood still stained her torn kimono in many places, though they looked faded and washed. The rents and tears she had done nothing about, and paleness of her skin shone through in many places.

It was, however, her face that caught at him. There was something gaunt and helpless about her, something vulnerable in her features.

“Do not stare at me!”

Her voice was still fierce, but it was a fierceness that was losing its edge. Her hands grasped vainly at the edges of tears in her kimono, trying to hide her skin from view. It was then that he noticed the peeking sheen of her beauty, the falling edges of cloth opening across her breasts and thighs, one sleeve hanging.

“Kagura.”

His voice was soft, and sympathetic. He was close to pity, but he knew she would never forgive him for that. From a deep pocket, he retrieved his own needle, and a long spool of purple silk.

“You are needing these, I think. Perhaps I should come back when you are…more covered.”

“Houshi, wait.”

Miroku turned back to her, forcing his eyes to meet her eyes, and stay there.

“I cannot use these, Houshi. Do you think this is the kind of thing Naraku teaches?”

He laughed, and pulled out a length of thread into his own hands, measuring with his eyes against the length of the tears.

“A woman who can't sew? You are something else, Kagura.”

Venom struck at him off her tongue, unexpected and potent.

“I am not a woman, Houshi. I am Naraku's monster, and you would be wise not to forget it!”

Miroku caught her chin in one hand, and turned her face from side to side, watching her. Her eyes followed his face as he looked at her, and the warmth in his smile touched her, though how she did not know.

“I guess you are right, Kagura. And wrong.”

He dropped her chin, and threaded the needle, and bent over her torn sleeve.