Hello: Lutair
Rating: T (so far)
Pairing: Sesshomaru Kagome
Prompt: Self-prompt - turn
Beta: None
Warning: Swearing, violence, author liberties
Dizclaim'd.
"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air." - Galadriel, Lord of the Rings
Ch. 1: Wherein a hole is delivered and a girl loses something of little importance
It started, as most things of dubious, fate-touched nature do, with a dream. Or, to be more accurate, a series of nightmares, the type that led one to believe that the entire world was uplifting and rolling around, but waking up presented no change to suggest such a thing. These dreams, or haunting memories, are seldom forgotten and rarely discussed in the light of day.
There is little light in this place, only the distant flash of white (a star? the moon?) and, forward, beyond, a ghost-trail of purest gold and its tail of white. She fumbles through the dark, bumbling over unseen obstacles in the earth, the night an oppressive blanket over her already dull human senses. It was neither hot, nor cold, and no wind blew, although the air was not stagnant. Her fingers reached out, tentative, searching, lost children in an unfamiliar place. She could not hear her own breathing, although she assumed that she was panting, or gasping quietly. Her heartbeat was also absent from the non-noise of the unusual place she had landed in, lending a particular quiet to the normal background hum that her body provided. Her eyes darted around, not frantically, but quickly, seeking something to define the landscape about her.
A sound, possibly faint in the natural world, cracks the silence around her, sending sparks and slashes of light from its origin, and she raises a hand to defend her eyes from the onslaught. The streaks of white leave as quickly as they appear, her eyes burning in their wake. The night closes around her again, but this time there is a break in the cocoon, a faintly circular flatness standing out commandingly against the black ground that she can, now, just faintly see. She shuffles forward as quickly as the darkness will allow, falling to her knees at the edge of the opening. Her hands graze over tufts of unseen grass, her fingertips fluttering gingerly at the edge of the flatness, dampness staining them.
Stars reflect up at her from the water, its still surface a picture of what the world should have been. The moon, a pregnant circle of opaque light, laid across its center, the stars fanning outward in a mosaic of old cequince.
Leaning over the side of the pool, she gazed at her reflection, wondering.
A girl gazed back at her, her eyes bright in the natural light. Her hair shimmered faintly, its waves rolling over rounded shoulders, locks of it hanging precariously over the water, flirting with its surface. She seemed to be in awe of whatever she saw in the pool, and, belatedly, Kagome recognized this girl as herself. But… there was something off about her reflection, a tilt to the other Kagome's head, a shine in her aura. Maybe it was the colors that were off, the faint honey glow that emitted from her counterpart's eyes, the depth of the black that stained her hair, the –
- floor meeting her face with a distinctly unkind hardness.
Blackness swam faintly before her eyes, the semi-distinct sounds of life filtering through her sleep haze. The echo of voices, the smell of something - fish? - cooking, a gentle creaking as the house shifted in its foundation. Normal sounds. Comforting sounds. Distantly, her sleep-addled mind registered that it was oddly cold for - she glanced at the clock on her dresser - 10:32 in the morning, and the soft ptat-atatof rain fall finally reached her ears. Groaning with exertion - and the fact that the throbbing pain from landing on her floor had finally hit her - Kagome pushed herself into a sitting position and glared blearily at the window.
Tiny hailstones beat against the glass, their a backdrop a pleasently agressive looking grey-purple.
Sighing in aggravation at the turn of the weather, she lumbered to her feet and gave her room a decisive once over before plodding out of her room and down the stairs to the kitchen, the enticing smell of yakizakana and oden creeping up the stair well.
"... no, no! That does not go there, you bumbling fools! That is a priceless artifact from the Heian era. It's older than your great grandmothers great grandmother!" The outraged voice of her grandfather reached her ears before she could be totally absorbed by the smell of oden, and she continued past the kitchen to the living room, down the second hall to the storage room, where her grandfather was directing the movers on where to put a rather large cardboard box.
"To the left more. The left! Where are you looking? No, don't touch that, put that there!" After much harassment and a few good thwacks (by a fan which he had procured for the vary purpose of directing movers) the box was situated 'adiquately' against one wall of the room and the movers where directed out of the house by her aggrieved grandfather.
With a huff and a view choice words in the movers general direction, he returned to the room, where Kagome had moved to observe the box and speculate as to it's contents. A hearty chuckle rolled from behind her and she tilted her head to her right to glance back at her grandfather. "You'll never be able to figure out what's in that box, dear. It's far too old to have been seen recently, and it's size does not equate to what it is." He waved her aside with the fan, and, with a flourish, extracted an exacto-blade from his sleeves.
"I'll leave you the honors of opening it, seeing as you are so curious." He mused, presenting her the blade handle first. His surprising lack of a lecture on 'the importance and history of this sacred object blah blah blah' left her suspicious, but she took the blade anyway. With a few quick slices the front of the cardboard fell away, and the back half was extracted.
A mass of packing bubbles and tape mocked her in the rooms florescent light, and she growled. "Now I know why you didn't want to open it, you old codger! This could take hours!" She grumbled at him, sending daggers at the unnameable object in front of her. He laughed and pushed his hands into his sleeves, sitting on a stool he had brought in solely for the purpose of sorting and appraising their many 'valuable' objects (Kagome thought, though she kept it to herself, that he came into the room to sleep without disturbance. He was getting on in years, after all).
With an aggression born of frustration - and a particularly decided hate for packing tape - Kagome tore into the well constructed bubble monster with a vengeance.
After fifteen minutes of vicious hacking - and a fare amount of muttered oaths - the dreaded bubble wrap lay in shreds on the floor around the mystery item, Kagome at it's center. She, however, was too shocked to notice her little tornado of distruction about her, her mind so focused on the object before her that she barely noticed when the blade slipped from her fingers, hitting the floor with a gentle clatter.
It was a mirror.
A grand, wrought iron mirror, easily as tall as she was, and just as wide.
Something pricked at her memory - a break in the darkness, an opening, reflecting - and then was gone, her wonder at the item overriding the whispers of false (haunting) memories.
The mirror itself was perfectly round, reflecting everything back without blemish or fingerprint. It was possibly the clearest glass she had ever seen, excluding actual window glass. But that was not even the tip of the iceberg of peculiarity about it. It's edges, the part that connected to its frame, were tinted red, easily an inch in. The fading was so perfect that the only way to see the true color was at the vary verge of the mirror and its frame. The frame itself was a masterpiece of metalmade up of a series of entwining vines and stars, leaves and full petaled flowers, the filigree so delicate in some parts it looked thin enough to break, in other places thick enough to be a weapon if broken off from its mother work. At the top of the mirror rested a double-hand sized crescent moon, tinted faintly purple in the light. At the two directional corners of East and West, tiny swords had been cast, their trailing hilt wraps linking them to the vines. At the bottom of the mirror were the profiles of two women's faces, back to back, although at her angle Kagome could not tell the difference between them.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Her grandfather murmured, barely audible in the silence.
"It... It's amazing. Where did you get it?" She asked, reaching a tentative finger out to the mirrors frame, delicately tracing a vine on its twisting path.
"An archaeologist friend of the family found it while working in the mountains. Said it had been found in the ruins of a castle in a cave of all places." He elaborated, gazing at the mirror with a critical eye. "There are four other pieces that were found with it, and they'll be shipped here at intervals later in the month." He grinned suddenly, and Kagome, watching him in the mirror, frowned at him. "Legend says they belonged to a warlord and his princess, and that he had a castle made for her at some unknown location, but, due to some great danger of the time, he had a second castle built within the mountain, and that these things were part of the wealth he moved to the second castle." He nodded sagely, his fingers stroking his beard, eyes narrowed in thought. "The castle really is built into the mountain, though. It's vary walls are the mountains face. The craftsmanship on the walls, the vary structure of it, however, suggests magic or some great tool lost to us now." He laughed and patted Kagome's shoulder, his face crinkling with lines of mirth. "Some even believe it to be aliens!"
She snorted, her eyes darting back to the mirror, her finger alighting on the Eastward sword.
Tokijin, her mind whispered, and she jerked her finger back, the faint edge to the swords blade nicking her finger. She grimaced at the cut, a tiny bead of blood welling up from the little slice. The swords blade seemed to flicker minutely as the blood she left behind on it trickled down its length, but the drop, and the distortion, was gone just as quickly.
"Ch. I have to get going Grandpa, Inuyasha will be mad if I'm later than I already am." She said, pressing her finger against her thigh to staunch the minute bleeding. With a tired grin she turned and left the room, her grandfather trailing behind her, humming in understanding.
After they had been gone some time - long enough for Kagome to pack and jump into the well - the mirror seemed to shift slightly, as though gathering it's awareness into one place. It pulsed, glowed a faint red at it's edges, and the moon at its head shined a brighter purple than before.
Just slightly.
I'm pretty sure everyone has dissected my little plot-stew. You'll see what I'm talking about soon enough. Don't expect a whole bunch of awesome here. It's just a bowl of ideas I shook up and forced into one. Makes my life interesting. 1,868 words. Lets hope for consistency.