A History of Light and Shadow

satirical

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In the land Sesshoumaru eased into, mere moments after his death, he saw nothing but swathes of white mist. Cool and moist, it settled against his spirit self and suppressed the pain of his passing, an effective sedative. He had entered this land in the midst of movement, and now continued to walk through the mist, convinced instinctually of his directional accuracy, though he was not aware of his destination. Somehow he knew he had left mourners back in the experiential world, and somehow he also knew that his death had been good—had been noble, fitting. But all these things relied on an intuition he did not try to explain; being dead, after all, didn't welcome existential wonderings. He couldn't have analyzed his situation even if he tried.

The taiyoukai drifted through the purgatory, seeming to glide as he walked—there was no ground to pace with physical feet here, and no physical carcass to drag along his movements. He had once inhabited a powerful, agile body over which he had perfect control, and he had once possessed preternatural speed, elegance, and grace—but that body was gone now, and so were the limitations that came with it.

Preternatural he once had been, but now he was unearthly—beyond the scope of material comprehension.

Slowly, as he grew more and more familiar with his new manifestation, and the knowledge that he was dead tightened further and further around his grasp, the heavy mists began to draw away. Sesshoumaru strode through the last dregs of mists. And found, waiting for him, three guides.

Kagura, whom he had known in those early days, the wind demon. She regarded him with mocking boredom, and smiled mirthlessly when he looked at her. "My, my, Sesshoumaru. Condescended to join us, have you? And you look much the same as ever, though I have to admit, seeing you swordless is a rather new experience."

At any other time, Sesshoumaru would have chosen her company, for at least they had a common understanding when they were both alive. But all her talk brought up images and sensations from the deepness of memory, which repelled him as strongly as an indifferent spirit could be repelled.

The second was his father, who stood there, massive and silent. He watched Sesshoumaru, and the son watched him back. Their history compacted in the distance between them, holding the turbulent afterimages of paternal wisdom and filial arrogance. Yet that had already been laid to rest long ago; there dwelled to be nothing of note between them now, besides the usual tightly woven fabric of blood-relation and mutual feeling. His father had been dead too long for a joyful reunion, and though Sesshoumaru thought he detected signs of pride in the gold gleam of his father's gaze, what had been interred long ago should remain buried under those layers of years.

Kagura inserted some comments about the macho-ism of silent reunions, and Sesshoumaru, after a brief bow, turned away from his father. All that they could say was already rendered redundant; perhaps in another life they would be closer, and happier with each other; now, it no longer mattered.

The last was Goshinki, from whom he had taken his sword. Animosity and unthinking hatred radiated off his monstrous form.

The purgatory had given him three guides to choose from—someone he understood, someone he admired, and someone he never knew. "Am I, Sesshoumaru, to choose from one of you to lead me through this new home?"

"Why else would we be standing here?" Kagura said, curling her lip.

Sesshoumaru refused to choose between these three. He wanted none of them. They reeked of a past he no longer wished to think of, and did not care to cling to. They represented a part of him that he had conquered, a slice of his personality he no longer wanted to concern himself with.

"Don't assume Ineed a guide," he told the three.

"Then, I will see you beyond the Tree," said his father immediately. Deprived of his purpose for remaining within the purgatory, he rapidly faded into the air, transporting himself to the Elysium beyond the barren fields made for the enjoyment of noble warriors and legendary maidens.

Goshinki merely growled. He melted into the ground in a colorless heap that quickly sunk into the dry earth. No trace of his presence remained within the next blink.

"I'm not surprised that you've chosen to go the Journey yourself," said Kagura, dallying behind. Her form was as Sesshoumaru remembered her, yet more insubstantial. "I wonder where you will end up—what do you think? In the Hall of the Worthy, where your father went? He'll be reborn in a dozen centuries, to be another great warrior. Into the flimsy hell of Goskinki for a long torment? Or will you choose go back to living immediately?"

"I don't know." Sesshoumaru said curtly.

He was still dignified enough to feel uncomfortable that he—the determined, exceptional demon lord—did not know his goals now that his position had been deprived, but he wasn't going to allow phantoms from his past alter his future. If he was going to head anywhere, then he would choose it himself, free of interference from his history.

Wasn't he, after all, free from the mortal world?

"I guess you're not going to ask where I'm going," said the smiling Kagura, still cynical, but somehow cheerful all the same. "That's alright; I'll be none of these places and all of them. My death earned me the right to non-manifest. I head anywhere the wind flows, whether it be heaven or hell, mortal or immortal."

"Then I will have the pleasure of your presence wherever I go?" said Sesshoumaru, displeasure covering his voice with venom.

"Yes and no. We may see each other sometimes, but I have better things to do than to run after big strong youkai wandering about the Journeylands. Freedom is a headier drug than you." Still smiling infuriatingly, Kagura too lightened into the air, becoming more insubstantial with every passing moment. Before she finally disappeared into a gust that blew across the tops of the dry grasses and danced along the air, she gave a parting wink to Sesshoumaru.

After she left, he wheeled about, finding his way easily enough; his mind lingered on Kagura for a moment—and if he were capable of earthly emotions, perhaps he even may have missed her now that she was gone.

The Journeylands, she had called this place. It was a dull purgatory, where the sky stretched on, overcast and grey, suffused with light from no source Sesshoumaru could discern. No sun gleamed behind the clouds, no moon opened to view, and no stars could be seen. Yet the whole place was as bright and mellow as early morning.

No rain seemed to have fallen here for eons; the grass grew in parched, yellow tufts, and the dirt road, paved occasionally with rough stones, was dry and cracked. The wind itself was cold and dry, and it stirred dust into the air; the long fields undulated in tones of gray and yellow, stretching out beyond sight into the immeasurable horizon.

Sesshoumaru walked—or, rather, flew—along the road for what must have been half a day. Even thinking that, he realized, felt wrong, for there were no human conceptions of time in such a world, and no such thing as half-anything… not even half a day, because for all he knew, the light would never change.

The road had been the only one he had seen, a poor, ill-kept path that was no better than a thinly trampled trail. After a long walk along it that seemed to come to nothing (for the Journeylands remained as flat and dry as ever, and no matter how much he walked the landscape never seemed to change), Sesshoumaru decided to cut across the fields of yellow grass and see if he could come upon another path. To go off the beaten trail was quite familiar to him; a tingle of remembrance shivered up his spine as he moved away from the preordained route.

But the land never seemed to change, nor did the sky. He didn't find another trail, yet when he decided to set back, counting the paces back to his former location, he couldn't find the first trail.

Fruitlessly, he circled about the grasslands under the never-shifting light. That he may have benefited from a guide never occurred to Sesshoumaru—or maybe it did occur to him in the dark recesses of his unconscious mind, but it was a truth that he rejected and probably would never admit. His supplied guides had, after all, been compliant when he told them he wanted to go on alone; it wasn't as if he couldn't do it.

With the disappearance of the trail went his directional sense. All around him he saw desolation—a sort of endless dehydrated despair.

So the taiyoukai did the only thing he could do. He stood still. He stood still and listened to the movement of the grass against each other, rubbing little cracklings against each other with relish as the wind pushed each shoot on top of its neighbor. He listened to the ringing silence, as harsh and lost as the land, as harsh and lost as he.

Where was he?

And suddenly he knew. The land was parched, lost, stagnant. So was he under that gray sky. Its parallel couldn't be a coincidence.

This position is called the Journeylands because it corresponds to each visitor's personal Journey; Sesshoumaru's Journeyland would not be the same as any one else's—for to go on a Journey is to trek through the unnoticed dayscape of the soul.

That he was lost could not be changed in a moment—but that he was sunless and joyless, that he was as indifferent as this flat landscape, as dry and withered of existence as these fields, could be altered. He wondered, then, about death. What was he to do now? What is his new driving purpose, now that he has lost the past?

Did he want to be estranged from his history, from the past that had defined him?

And the answer was simple. Yes.

Suddenly, a new landscape came forth like a spring emerging in the midst of the droughted plains. Darkness—merged with the scent of newness—mingled in the air. The clouds cleared away, and the lights dimmed, and before Sesshoumaru's eyes, the moon emerged, but it was a tremendous moon, larger than he could ever fathom, staring into his face with all the gravity of a progenitor, echoing the starkness of his renaissance.

He was standing on a dark street in a small village, in late evening, and the moon glared at him from her vantage, impossibly large and close in the sky.

And there was someone else with him.

The spirit of a young woman, who also stood regarding the moon, hovered a dozen long strides from him. She looked vaguely familiar, and had the kind of ethereal beauty that mirrored the lunar splendor he'd just witnessed.

She noticed him as well, and said gravely to him, "Well met, fellow Journeyman." Her dark voice had a quality about it that startled him (he'd heard it before, but those first times had been wrapped up in his many worldly ambitions and had not paid much attention to it; now, hearing it with the moon's brilliancy lighting it all around with soft eeriness, he was too surprised to speak).

She turned away. Seeing her profile illuminated his memory, which became more immediate under the lunar scrutiny of his new environment instead of fading away. He recognized her.

"Well met, miko."

"You are here presumably for the same reason I am, lord. You understand, of course, that the position of 'miko' is a fetter I seek to liberate myself from." Which meant: You want to be freed of your past, and I of mine—don't call me that any longer.

"I am not who I was, either; not a lord, as you must know, nor a taiyoukai," said Sesshoumaru. "A favor I'll grant, for a favor in return, Kikyou." He tried her name and found it hard to say, as if it curled about his mouth like an avoidant kitten, refusing to emerge.

"I don't intend to stay long enough for either of us to use our names with each other," the woman said. Her attire, not the traditional costume of the priestess, was instead a long white robe on which words were written in small, cramped, blood-red letters. He looked down, and saw that he was wearing something similar.

The moon seemed to shrink, and its radiance died a little. Kikyou frowned. "It appears that I have to move away from the severity of my past, however, to free myself from this life I once lived. Perhaps, then, we should speak a little longer; we're strangers to each other, after all."

The moon redoubled its lambency. "Why," asked Sesshoumaru—trying to inquire without demanding, and falling short, "are you in my Journeyland?"

"I'm not. Our Journeylands happen to overlap. I spent a disgraceful amount of time in the swamps of my past, and when I finally decided to let go, and to change myself entirely, here I stood, and with you nearby."

Sesshoumaru found himself seeking to move away, but although he walked toward the moon, and although the hutches of the village passed by quickly enough, Kikyou was always standing just a little behind him when he turned back again. He judged the situation quickly, and before she could turn her attention away from the moon—whose pale whole reflection he could see glowing in her eyes—he said, "I think it may be wise to journey a short while together, since we apparently have a similar course."

Kikyou looked on the verge of protesting, but stopped herself before she spoke and nodded. When she started to move toward him, the land quickly fell away from the darkness in long sloughs, as if water running down stone walls, and the white moon facing them metamorphosed into a gigantic white sail. The midnight sank into a long river of a similar concentrated blue, whose banks were just barely visible. The pair were now standing on the deck of an autonomously operating boat.

Sesshoumaru, not used to conversation, was more than a little annoyed with Kikyou—on some whim, or intuition—began to speak, but the annoyance fell away gradually as he noticed that the boat moved more quickly while she talked. She narrated the pain of responsibility as if to herself, though he was obviously her audience. She told him that all she used to dream of was to be a regular woman who could love without reproach, and who didn't have the burden of protecting the jewel. Her robes appeared like garments made from a journal, or written on in a thousand different hands, but as each heavy truth emerged from her (recalling fables of jewels dropping from blessed lips), another bitter line evaporated from her clothing.

"My first death was a tenuous peace at best, a rest without respite. Still it was better than anything else I had whilst alive, and it was the worst of pains when I was pulled unwilling from that peace. But to pass finally, cradled by him, gave me a peace that stayed with me through all the swamp of my first Journeyland, and until I could learn to finally let go of that dream of him—him that cried for me—I couldn't emerge from that place. Love is a key that cages as well as frees; until I could abandon love, I could not move on."

She looked almost immaculate now, and the boat was heading nearly at full speed. Yet despite the fact that a long, heavy line of words still wound about the waist of her garment, she settled back as if finished with her death-narrative, and regarded him with her dark eyes. The details of her existence—and the details of her spiritual image—had vanished as she spoke, until it was difficult to look at her. Her features were blurred, lacking in definition.

He knew that his were still sharp and focused, for he carried his history deep within him, a burden he couldn't lift. But that they had him in common—a young man who had been both a brother and a lover—gave him a topic he could speak on, though that path held naught but a bitter taste. The tales of his father and his mother, of his youth and of his arrogance, of the powerful inheritance that he coveted came out of him once he began remembering his half-brother.

Soon, though he couldn't think why, in a rush it all woke from its long dormancy: Rin, regaining his arm, redemption.

When he was finished (and in his usual terse way, it was nowhere near as long as Kikyou's story), he saw that the writing upon him had faded as well, leaving only the wrap-around waist words.

The sail, bright and grand, fell from its height and toppled over where they sat, yet it was a slow fall and neither did anything to stop it. They held each other's smudged eyes as the whiteness descended and folded over them, sitting and watching each other.

Blink.

And it was no longer grand, smooth cotton, but a hill of snow. They were standing knee-deep in the snow, and the words that had circled their waist now moved onto their chest to form larger words.

Names.

"Kikyou." "Sesshoumaru." These name read their past; they held the final vestiges of who they once were. Without them, these spirits could be reborn. The two hesitated.

The snow, around them, was blinding. A cold sun shone directly overhead, sending their shared Journeyland ablaze with painful light. All around them, coldness bloomed like a cavern of newness and erasure. All they could do was stand closer to one another, trying to see if the other was going to do it—if they were really going to forget everything, to start anew.

"We—was we were—will be reborn in a thousand years if we don't give up our names," said Kikyou. "Without them, we are no longer the souls of the past. Without my name, I am no longer a woman bound by duty, but a spirit totally untied from any harbor, held adrift until a quick rebirth."

Their lives had been stinted, had held pain—but it was still a possession to be treasured, because it was purely theirs. Who knew what they would be reborn as? A three-legged kitten? An orphan doomed to an early death? A cruel and forgetful monarch? Themselves in a new form?

All their memories and their ties to the old world had been easy to give up in the Journeylands; the dead could not be concerned to hold the grudges and passions they did whilst living. But to give up their names is to give up also their new place within the Journeylands, to be truly dispossessed. It may be too much to demand either of them to have the strength to discard their selves.

His father had not been able to forget his past life, and had gone on to live in the Hall of the Worthy, where surely his human wife resided with him. He expected his son to come attend them.

Sesshoumaru (though he would deny it) had to be glad there was another person there across from him, in a similar situation. In her pale face was reflected his uncertainty. Kikyou had lost her details, but she remained herself; her soul remained impressed upon him with the shadow of a former existence. And now, in non-existence, she remained the person she had been, only less defined, less definite. No longer a miko, no longer a lover, not even a woman.

So must he seem to her—still the person, only without all his trappings of demon lord and killer. He was even thinking of—of going to the Hall of the Worthy, to fulfill a filial obligation he should have long been freed from.

It came back, a brief, short pain. He remembered the fragment of his daughter's smiles. He remembered his croaking retainer and his brother baring his fangs. He had once resented his brother, but now, surprisingly, he was beyond even that. Those emotions that had plagued him in his life did not hold sway over him now; envy, rage, pride, and longing all faded away from his awareness as attachment sputtered from his soul's jurisdiction.

Freedom.

Kagura had found her own definition of this; now he was being drawn back into the world he had been determined to escape from. He had almost forgotten that with his identity came limitations he was exhausted of. With his identity came an unbreakable pride, a rigid hierarchical position, and the remnants of a life he no longer wished, nor needed, to care about.

So he spoke:

"I relinquish my name, and choose to be freed and unmoored. I will pass on now to the world of the living."

The surprise in Kikyou's face was palpable. But she, emboldened by his move, gathered her courage and volunteered her own identity as well, letting her name slip from her as sweetly and softly as a twilight ceding to the dawn…

Nothing seemed to happen, and yet everything happened.

--

In the Journeylands, toward the end of a long and variable road, are two figures moving. They know instinctively where they are going, that the well at the end of the path will take them to their fates. They know that the other is headed the same way for similar reasons, and that their equal, mirroring pace is heartening to the other.

They do not know the past occupations of their existence. They do not know that they were once on opposing sides, and once roamed the world at the same time.

At the Well of Rebirth, their Journey ends.

The dark one—these spirits were genderless and featureless, moving only as variegated phantoms of different colorings, one dark and pale like death colored over, the other light and unworldly, a shining being of power)—kneels. Its companion mirrors it, beginning to dip its skin into the glittering water, clear as a mind at birth.

"Will we know each other on the other side?" asks the dark one, a sudden loneliness descending across its heavy-lidded eyes.

The light one hesitates. Then it lifts up the glistening water and douses itself with the liquid. In a moment the light one becomes nothing but suffused mist, spreading across the well and over into the sky. The dark one cries out, but its companion has already gone; one trace of the light one's reply remained, and it was carried on a sudden gust of wind that whispers a quicksilver promise into the dark one's ear.

It smiles, and reaches for rebirth.