Shattered: Prolog

Disclaimer: I don’t own Inuyasha.

For CiraArana. Thank you for putting up with my procrastination in beta reading and giving me the desire to write fanfiction again.

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 “But the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish.”

            —Psalm 9:18

 

Soft, like liquid velvet coursing between fingers. Airy and light, silky and creamy. Vanilla, berries, and some vaguely familiar, yet still unidentifiable, musk. If ever it had been discovered, the recognition of that musk was something long forgotten, perhaps even a thing of long-aged memory.

Cashmere, knotted but soft, filled senses to the brim, its softness a bubble of laughter, pressing and caressing. Teasing. Perhaps daring. Every living creature, with unique weaknesses, would have caved to this giggling challenge. Not a single being could resist this.

Flame burned under the velvet, under the silk, the cream, the cashmere. It exaggerated the smell of the berries, pronounced the fragrant vanilla. The musk became a thing nearly tangible, dancing around what flame created.

Brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges demanded attention. No colors on Earth were so vibrant or so alive. In the center of the strange meshing of sight, smell, and feeling was something distinctly Other. It had its own smell, though it was at once every scent and none at all. It had no single color: it was every shade and imaginable hue, yet a complete absence thereof. To touch it was to burn and freeze while drowning in a heart-stopping fall to the earth below. It raged and roared, yet it remained quiet and silent. It was truly Other, unlike anything else.

The whole beautifully bizarre mixture of the common and inexplicable danced in pitch blackness, drawing greenness and blueness from the nothing that had been. It coaxed brilliant and impossible animals and plants into existence like the uninhibited imagination of a child.

As the pitch and darkness fled, the light began to twist itself into visible eddies around the Other and its components. The world bent and swayed as the Other did, forming itself about the Other as if to accommodate. The Other was somehow recreating the world around it to be something more than the dark that it had been. The Other moved, and the world moved with it because in its strangeness, the Other was beautiful and desirable.

Yet there were parts of the pitch that refused to be bent. Those parts slithered over the greenness and blueness, over the brilliant and impossible animals and plants, suffocating and dulling and destroying. A silent wail of distress rose from the Other as the pitch destroyed the beauty it had created as it had traveled through the darkness. It fought against the creeping tendrils that sought to smother it, pushing back until it shook with stress. The burning flame of the Other became brighter and brighter and then, with an agonized scream that was never heard, the flame became smoke and the Other was consumed by the blackness, the nothingness, and the dark.

And he found himself intrigued.

 

The once great, still apparently great, Lord of the Western Lands was grateful when morning came and the sun falling through screens woke him from his dreams. As he lay on his futon, he was grateful the dream hadn’t been of the rape and violent murder of the indomitable soul of someone he once knew. Perhaps it had been rape and murder, but it hadn’t been her rape and murder and, so, he tried to push the dream far from his mind.

Morning turned to afternoon and afternoon turned to evening, but the dream followed him wherever he went. Lanterns cast flickering shadows across his hallways that looked like dancing fire. The servants were pressing vanilla flowers to hang in the castle for luck, and the cooks were making takiyaki and filling it with a blueberry sauce instead of bean paste. When he finally settled back into his futon after the long day of reading over treaties, he couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he was sure the blackness in his room was reaching out for him, trying to consume him as it had consumed everything in his dream. And, while he would welcome death, he would never welcome death from such a thing as that creeping darkness.

A light flickered through the shoji screen separating his rooms from the garden and he turned to it, watching it dance in the night. The small light roared defiance at the shadows in the room and Sesshoumaru felt their malevolence fading. Finally, he was able to close his eyes and enter a sleep troubled by dreams of what might have been.