Summary: A five-hundred-year-old prophecy, a demon with the power to bring the dead back to life. When the destruction of all living beings looms ahead, the Gatherer of Souls calls upon the brothers of the fang to bring the prophecy to fulfillment...
Disclaimer: Inuyasha does not belong to me.
The Gatherer of Souls Chapter 1
It was a barren place.
Never had he seen so desolate a landscape, so stark a plane of existence. Never had his eyes beheld so dead a land. And he had seen many in his long life.
There was life here, so to speak. There were demon birds, soaring through the magenta sky, screeching their eternal despair, trapped forever in this blighted place. Strangled, twisted shrubbery sprouted in the crumbling soil, stunted under the sickly purple sun. But it was not true life. It was a terrible place, though not the worst of places to die. It was a fitting grave.
As he scanned the horizon, a cold wind whipped his midnight black hair about his face, teasing strands of silky hair from his long braid to twist in the gusts of stale air. Pushing the vagrant locks away from his dark, frozen eyes, he slid his hands into the opposite sleeves of his black, formal kimono. For a brief moment, his gaze caught on the blood-red symbol emblazoned on the sides of the long, billowing sleeves that hung well past his fingertips. The symbol of his trade, his purpose, his life. His very being.
He was the Gyazaseishou.
Stepping away from the portal behind him, he allowed the tear in the fabric of the world to close. He could open it again when the time came. To walk between worlds was just one aspect of his power. Slowly, he moved forward, his feet making no sound on the rocky ground. Ten paces, and then he stood at the edge of the precipice, looking down on the bones of one of the greatest demons to ever live.
It was sad, to see those bones that had once been a living, breathing being discarded so. Had any besides he and a few select others ever truly known, ever really understood, the difference this demon had made in his lifetime? A life that had been cut so tragically short . . .
Many did not realize that the reason the world today was consumed by petty war and needless famine, overrun by foul, bloodthirsty demons and rampant, needless death, was not some random happening, but the slow decay of the society this demon had worked so hard to build, to stabilize? No, many did not know. But he did. And because of that, he loathed what he was about to do, the crime he was about to commit.
It rendered his heart, but he no longer had any choice. No matter his personal preference, this was what had to be done. He could see no other option.
A full hour passed as he made his slow way down the precarious cliff towards the distant body. When at last he stood at the foot of the skeleton, he craned his neck upwards, his dark eyes narrowing as he took in the oddity he had not seen from afar. The left shoulder was shattered . . . and the damage was fairly recent. Who had dared trespass in this grave? Who had dared go so far as to violate the body?
Shaking his head, he put the matter out of his mind. It made no difference at this point. Closing his eyes, he allowed himself to sink into a trance, the trance that allowed him the power of life and death. His power, his birthright.
When a life ended, that soul would pass on into the other world, the world of the dead. There, the soul would move to the part of that world which most suited it, that gave it peace—if that was what the soul desired. Souls ravaged by hate or bitterness, tainted by ambition or sadism, those souls found their way to what humans called Hell. It was their own inner essence that drew them into the horror that was the darkest depths of the netherworld; it was not condemnation by any god, as so many believed.
Souls that craved peace in the light could easily find it, and spend the rest of their existence in harmony and tranquility. The more time that passed as the soul existed in that peace, the more it would fade into the distance, eventually becoming a whisper in the light that would be reborn into the living world again. Time had no meaning in the world of souls; for some, they faded quickly, being reborn in a mere few centuries by living standards. For others, time stretched into the realms of infinity as they waited in the other world to once again rejoin the living. All depended on how strong the soul was upon the death of the body—and how quickly that soul was able to find peace. Occasionally, a soul that had died with a purpose incomplete and was unable to attain peace could find its way to a living body in the form of reincarnation, and then try to complete what it failed to achieve in its first life, but those instances were rare.
He raised his arms above his head. Blood-red marks, matching those on his kimono, glowed on the backs of his hands. The power of life and death, the power over the soul, swirled about and through him, and a small part of his mind not consumed by his spell wondered if this demon who lay before him had yet to find peace in the other world. It seemed unlikely, but then, that demon had been a difficult character to understand. Perhaps he had found his peace.
The more time that passed after death, the further from the boundary between worlds the soul moved, sinking deeper into the world of the dead.
And the more difficult it was to call that soul back to the living once again.
Come, he thought, sending out his call through the boundary between worlds, using the body before him as the link. Come . . . return to this world. You are needed, my brother.
Power flowed in his veins, pulsing through him, and he needed every drop of it for this task. Again, he sent a thundering command into the world of the dead. I, the Gyazaseishou, summon you to return to this world, to live and breathe and walk among the living once again. Heed my call, brother of the fang.
In the physical world, so far detached from his consciousness, the wind howled and sky darkened. The bones before him began to glow with an eerie blue light.
I summon you.
The very earth trembled beneath him, but he took no heed, absorbed in his task, the conduit between life and death, between two worlds—as he called out to a soul two hundred years gone from the world of the living. He dragged forth every vestige of his power.
I summon you.
Light flared forth, consuming the skeleton, obscuring everything with its brilliance. He began to channel power into the body, fueling the regeneration of flesh and blood to recreate the body that would house the soul as it flowed along his call, drawn irresistibly by his command.
I summon you.
With an explosion of light, the soul burst forth, hovering for a moment above the gently glowing form of its body before descending to once again become one with its flesh. Pulsing with the beat of a heart, the light throbbed, then diminished, slowly fading as the body absorbed its soul.
There were many ways to resurrect the dead. To call the soul back to dead flesh, to manipulate the reanimated body like a puppet. To create a new body, made of human remains and graveyard soil, and to return the soul to that body made of earth. To use the power of the Shikon no Tama or another such relic to recreate the semblance of life in a dead being. There were others, more complicated, more difficult, but equally fraudulent. That was not true life, a true resurrection. There were only two beings, aside from the gods, in any world, in any plane of existence, with that power.
One was the Gyazaseishou. And the other, the other was the one who bore the sword of healing, Tenseiga.
He watched, his expression unreadable, as the last of the light faded, and the body before him took its first breath in over two hundred years. During the course of the resurrection, the demon had assumed its everyday form, much smaller than that of the skeleton, a form similar to that of a human. A form so familiar it brought an ache to his heart to behold.
The resurrected demon knelt on the ground, eyes wide and unseeing as he gasped the stale air of the strange dimension where they currently existed. The Gyazaseishou waited.
Slowly, the demon regained his senses, his eyes filling with sharp intelligence, his muscles flexing with strength long forgotten. After a moment, he brought his body under his control and stood, studying his surroundings. Then he studied the demon standing before him. His golden eyes narrowed with the unspoken question, the undeniable demand.
The Gyazaseishou took a step forward, watching the demon, his heart aching. He then dropped to one knee and bowed low in respect and apology.
"Welcome back to the world of the living, Inutaisho," he said softly. "Forgive me."
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A/N:
Could it be? Yes, it is! I have begun a new story on FFnet! Yes, a multiple-chapter story!
I finally realized that I would never have time for fanfiction anymore, and that I would have to make time. So this is my experiment to see if that is actually possible. Please have patience with my sporadic updates. I will do my best to update no less than two times a month, though I'm hoping for more than that. We'll see how it goes.
To my past readers (if there are any left at this point...), I'm really looking forward to finding out who's still around—and whether any of said readers gives a whoop that I'm back, heh. For any new readers, I hope you don't mind my rambling author's notes and death-threat-inspiring cliffhangers.
And to everyone, I hope you enjoy!
On a more relevant-to-the-chapter-I-just-posted note, "Inutaisho" is my final decision on a name for Inuyasha and Sesshomaru's father, since I couldn't find any definitive ruling on the proper form(s) of address.