InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Tale of Ever After ❯ Chapter 304

I do not own InuYasha or any of the characters created by Rumiko Takahashi


Chapter 304

A/N  Posting this a little early as I have jury duty in the morning.  It is possible that the next chapter might get posted off schedule, counting on what happens next, but after that, everything should go back to schedule.

Unaware of the kami presence hovering over and around them, Miroku and Kagome had their attention focused on Maeme’s house.

“I hope you don’t mind me guiding you in this, Kagome-sama,” the monk said.  He still had his professional face on, looking like a serious, no-nonsense monk.  “I know this isn’t what you’ve normally done with your reiki.”

“You know what Kaede-obaasan said.  She thought it would be useful for my training today,” Kagome said.  

“And I am trying to be a good teacher.” Suddenly his professional face slipped a little. “It won’t be long until I have to start teaching my own young ones.”

“Using me for practice?” the miko laughed.

“Every one who’ll let me,” he said, solemnly.  “The twins – they’re going to be a handful.”

Kagome shook her head. “Be glad they aren’t Sayo’s son Daiki,”

“I thank Kwannon for that quite often,” Miroku said.  “In fact, I fear every day, Yasuo’s going to knock on my door, asking me to teach him. Ready to start again?”

The young miko nodded, and touched the wood again.  

“Remember, don’t go too deep into the ki channels.  But now you are looking to see if there’s more than grief here, something like a presence, or even jyaki. You will need to lightly touch it to feel it.”

Kagome followed Miroku’s instruction, letting her energy flow over the structure, just barely skirting the ki channels.  “I found the sadness again,” she said.

“Now go just a little deeper,” Miroku said.  “Instead of just tracing the energy flow, you want to barely touch it, like a taste.  It’s possible if there’s something dark, with your purification powers, you might relieve it.  Don’t dive in any more than that.”

She followed his direction, and let her awareness expand.  Everywhere her spiritual energy went, she could feel a wrongness.  Something else called to her, and she probed a little deeper. “So much pain,” she said, barely above a whisper.  Her body tensed up in reaction to the feeling “So much pain. The whole house.  It’s more than sadness.  It’s pain after pain built up.  It hurts.”

“Be careful, Kagome-sama.  You are getting further along than I can follow,” Miroku said. “Don’t get caught where you can’t pull back.”

As she let her reiki slip further into the structure, slowly, slowly the building began to glow pink.  Some of the placards and ofuda hung over the windows and eves began to shake as  her touched them.

The monk looked up, his eyes narrowing in a growing alarm.  “This is not good.  It feels like a trap.” Miroku tried to pull Kagome’s hand off the wood of the building, but he couldn’t budge it.  “Let go, Kagome.  Wait until we pull the wards down.  Come back.”

“I...I...I can’t. The house...it’s like Haname was...something dark at the center, pulling...” she said.  “Something here is trapped.” She gritted her eyes.  “It’s screaming because of the pain.  It’s clinging to me, begging. Can’t you hear it?  It’s pulsing, like a heartbeat.  It hurts! I have to help!”

Before the monk could stop her, she placed her other hand on the board, took a deep breath.  The whole building glowed an intense strong pink.  People working in their fields saw a bright flash of light.  A few of them dropped what they were doing and began to hurry in its direction.

Suddenly every ofuda, amulet and placard hung for luck and protection blew off the building.  Some of them began to blaze on the grounds around the house.  

“No. More. Pain!” the miko screamed, and then she collapsed.




At that very moment, before the hanyou could react, Kazuo shoved InuYasha.  “Run, man.  Whatever was in there is free.  Go!”

InuYasha didn’t need any more urging than that, and with all barriers down, he almost flew across the compound, passing Susumu who was already dashing towards the house.  

Miroku, shocked literally by the blast of energy and having been smacked by one of the placards,  rubbed the area that had been hit, checking for blood.  Finding none, he shook his head to clear his senses as he sat up from where the energy wave had knocked him down.  Everywhere there were shards of wood, scraps of paper, pieces of ash. Using his staff, he slowly got up, and then moved next to the miko.  

Kagome was lying on the ground.  “My head...”

He took her hand, and helped her  sit up.  She had a smudge of dirt across one cheek. “Kagome-sama, what did you do?”

“I...” she started to say.   She cupped her head in her hands, rubbing it along the temples.

Before she could finish, she was wrapped in red firerat as a panicked InuYasha pulled her into his arms. “Are...are you all right?”  

She looked up, at the intensity of his amber eyes, how his ears were focused in on her, how his nose was sniffing extra hard,  trying to check her out.  She reached out and touched his cheek, gave him a small nod.   “Your youki...it’s not reacting any more.”

“I bet it’s not.” He looked around at the mayhem her spiritual powers caused.  “You must have purified the hells out of whatever was causing it to act up.  Nothing dark could have made it through all that much purifying power.  Lucky the building’s still standing.”

“I’d say she did,” Miroku said, nodding.  “I don’t know how often I’ve seen something like this.”

Susumu hurried up, and began stepping on a smoldering placard.  “I don’t know what I just saw, cousin, but I am pretty impressed.  Please, never let me get on your bad side.”

Kagome, tired, and more than a little overwhelmed by the entire experience, leaned into InuYasha’s arms, burying her face into his shoulder.  “How...how does the building feel now?”

Miroku walked over to the door frame and touched it gingerly.  “Rather amazing, Kagome-sama,” he said after a moment.  “It was a place of dark sadness just a few minutes ago.  Now it feels, well...clean.  Pure.  Neither happy nor sad, just waiting.”

The village guard walked around the building, looking for other smoldering and burning bits of now shattered wards and placards.

“There was something there, so dark, something hurting, in such pain,” Kagome said. “It was buried beneath all that darkness.  I saw the little I was doing melted away the dark, chipping it away at the edges.  So I poured as much as I could into it, and you saw what happened.”

Susumu finished his patrol, and returned to stand next to the monk.  “We better look inside to see if anything else is burning.”

“Good idea,” the monk said.  “Would you like to come inside, Kagome, InuYasha?”

Kagome started to unwrap herself from InuYasha’s hold, and then clasped her head. “My head...”

“Feh,” the hanyou said, holding her close. “You just rest here for a moment. Let the Bouzu figure it out.”  

Miroku, looking down at Kagome and seeing the look the hanyou,who was not in a mood to be questioned about his wife at the moment, gave him, gave the couple a quick nod in return, and headed for the door.



Shimame floated from the roof to land next to the other kami.  “I do believe that I’m getting a bit tired of all the dramas we’ve been having here lately.”

“Agreed,” Hitoshi said.

“What I want to know is how did someone with that much reiki escape from the shrines at Ise or Izumu?” Yoshio asked.  

“I understand that it was part of the deal that allowed her to appear here to begin with.  In order to allow her to appear and destroy the Shikon no Tama, the guardian of the well required that no other kami allow their shrines to claim her for duty,” Shimame said.  “A wise bargain, considering how the hanyou’s tied so tightly to her soul.  I feel for any power that tries to keep them apart for more than a few minutes, youkai, human or kami.”

“It is their destiny,” Kazuo said.  “Anybody even with a casual glance at the record could see that.”

“That doesn’t always stop the foolish,” Shimame said.  “So we will do what we can to shield them.  The well guardian and the Goshinboku kami will aid us.”

The other kami nodded their agreement.

“She needs more training, though,” Hitoshi said.  “Big bursts like that can’t be good for her. She’s done it two days in a row.   It was just as impressive and a big use of her power when she healed Haname. And this time she was doing more than purifying jyaki.  Human magic is harder.”

“True, true,” Shimame said.  She opened her fan and turned to face Kazuo.  Yoshio and Hitoshi joined her.

“I do believe you should be the one to handle this,” Shimame said.  “She is, after all, a child of your ko.  As is the old miko and the headman.  And perhaps, you might let her rest before you attend to trying to fix every other problem in the village with her as the catalyst.”

“And maybe let the rest of us relax as well,” Yoshio said.

Kazuo rubbed his hat across the top of his head.  “You might have a point there.  I will work on that.”



Susumu opened the doormat.  “My, my,” he said.  “What happened here?”

Miroku followed him in. The room looked like a wind had hit it. There were cloths scattered around the floor.  The basket of laundry Sukeo had brought in the day before had lost the top levels of its contents, and they had ended up in the center of the room.  A couple of cups had rolled around.  Ash from the firepit  coated the floor The oddest thing, though, was on the kamidama.  The large stone that had sat in the place of the god symbol had shattered. There were shards of it still on the shelf, but the big part of it was on the ground, broken into many chunks.

“I looked into the house before we started,” Miroku said, tapping his staff.  He bent down to pick up a small piece of the shattered stone.  “It looked perfectly neat.  And this stone was dark, like basalt.  And now look at it.”  He held it out to the guard. “It looks almost white.”

“It’s like something was released,” Susumu said.

“It does,” Miroku said, nodding. “But this feels...pure. It couldn’t have been something dark.

As the monk and guard entered the house, a white form, unperceptible to the humans gathered there, stepped out of the building taking small, hesitant steps.  In shape, it looked like a small, beautiful woman, with long trailing white hair dressed in robes of the palest blue.  On the top of her head, two fox ears perched, and behind it, four white tails trailed behind under the hem of her robe.

She blinked hesitantly, as if the touch of daylight was hard on her brilliant blue eyes. Seeing the land kami and the others, she bowed low.

“My greetings, illustrious kami. I am Tenko no Chiako, servant of Inari no kami. Are you the ones who freed me from my prison?”

“I was definitely wrong about it being an angry ghost,” Yoshio said.  He looked at the tenko with some amazement.

“A tenko? A heavenly fox locked in that dark place?” Shimame asked, opening and closing her fan.  She tapped it against her hand.

“Alas, it is a long sad tale about treachery and trust misplaced.  A blackhearted follower of the way of the Yamabushi tricked me one day on Mount Ofuna and locked me away in a black stone.  He used my grief and anger as fuel for his dark magic. I must thank whoever did this deed.”

Shimame pointed to the hanyou and miko. “The miko there purified everything in the building. It must have been her.”

“A miko with a hanyou?” the heavenly fox asked.  Her eyes grew wide.  “Then the prophecy was true.”

“A prophecy?”  

“The evil one who sealed me into the stone – that it would take youki and reiki joined beneath the eye of the kami, working as one to set me free.  He thought it meant never, but I see the wheel of destiny had something else in mind.”

She walked over to where InuYasha sat, holding Kagome. “What an odd pairing, but so blessed.”  

“Don’t manifest where they can see you,” Shimame warned. “Your presence here was very hard on the hanyou. It kept pushing him away. And she is sensitive enough to the kami that we have to shield carefully to make sure she doesn’t sense us.  I don’t know how he would react to you.”

She placed a raised hand over InuYasha’s head. “Yes, this. This is the one that my last owner warded against most strongly. He keyed the magics to always react in his presence.” She sighed. “And he has a good heart, too. Totally undeserving of what that man did.” She moved to Kagome, and repeated the gesture. “What a destiny the wheel gave this one. Give her my eternal thanks,” the Tenko said.  She made a sign of blessing over the house. “And may everything touched by the blackness that covered me receive the light of heaven in return.”

Suddenly, she began to fade. “May the August court bless this place! But Inari is calling me home. Fare well!  I will tell them of your kindness.” Bit by bit she grew more transparent, and with a final sigh, she was gone.
 
Once again, the land kami opened and closed her fan, “My, my. That was...interesting. Enough. We have one last thing to do, and if any more interesting things happen before the barley harvest, I will be petitioning the August Court to have a change in position. This is not how village life should run. Let’s go.”