They could not have been prepared for the ruin. Hell was put off, but at a heavy cost. When they burned the hanyou's body Kikyou shut herself up in a house apart from the others of Edo and buried herself alive. In the remaining years of putting their lives together, with wars, marriages, children, deaths, domestic chores, numerous afflictions and countless daily disasters—the others forgot about her.
Many
years later, when the house was discovered by a descendent of one of
those stubborn souls who had thrown everything at their enemy , it
looked so desolate in its decrepitude that he thought it was empty.
When he forced open the door, he was greeted with an apparition of a
woman with transparent skin and fading eyes. He faltered.
"Get
out." That was all she said, and with a terrific force he was
thrown about thirty feet beyond the door.
When he related the story to Kagome and Sango, two bent old women who were burdened with generations of cares, Sango let out a startled exclamation. "Oh my God!" She shouted, "She's still alive?"
Only Kagome had never forgotten her old rival. She thought about her at six in the morning when the place in her heart that was black ash woke her in her freezing bed. She thought about her at four in the afternoon when she combed her silver hair and examined the ravishes of time with a cool detachment. Kikyou was in the chimerical beauty of summer nights. Kikyou was in the breath of confusion that the grandchildren of Sango carried into the house. Kikyou was in Kagome's own martyred virginity. Kikyou in the red geraniums, Kikyou in the heat of the afternoon, and Kikyou forever.
But in the growing autumn of her years when solitude had become irreversible and unforgivable, Kagome had come to love her only enemy. She sent the children to restore the house as best they could, though Kikyou never even opened the door. She even indulged in the useless gesture of sending her baskets of candied fruit, salted pork, and jars of marmalade, despite that the undead had no need of such things.
When, on a Tuesday in the spring, she saw the omens that heralded her own death she told Souta that she was sailing at dawn and then she laid down and never got up again. The last thought that went through her mind was that her soul would not in fact sail away but would return to that husk of a woman at the other end of town—not knowing that Kikyou had just decided to shut the soul-catchers out for good and had perished, a pile of stones in a ruined house. The dawn carried off both widows.