Disclaimer: This piece is based on 'Inuyasha', owned by Rumiko Takahashi. No copyright infringement intended or implied.

Author's Note: This is a re-write of last year's "Someone To Protect." The one-shot has been expanded here into two sections (prolog and chapter 1), with some details changed. This story will hopefully continue to be worked on in 2010. (Additional note - though the story uses the anime version of the Inu no Taisho's death as the branching point for this AU story, there is no S'ounga in this story.)

White To Black

Prolog: Legend's Fall

He was the Inu no Taisho. Leader of the dogs, power over the Western Lands. He took what he would and feared nothing. He was ancient, yet those who thought his strength might be fading dared no more than to whisper it.

Until the ningen. The woman. Until he dared to touch a mortal brew. Until he forged his strength into a blade to protect a butterfly's life, and then a second for reasons almost no one knew. Until he melded his blood with hers, that she should bear a hanyo son.

The world of the higher youkai shook in rage and disgust. Not that youkai did not meddle in human affairs, did not at times find themselves drawn to dally with the short-lived people whose dreams and emotions were, after all, the stuff of intoxication and, indeed, how little even the wise would admit, were the progenitor and sustainer of much youkai life itself. But for a taiyoukai to go where even most lesser youkai would never dare; to dare to make a new life that would swirl with the mingled potential, both for good, and for ill, of both life kinds …

The dragons, ancient and rigid in their perception of right being, howled the worst. Ryukotsusei challenged the inu lord, threatening to sear the Musashi plains clean of mortal life if he did not respond. True form to true form they fought, dragon and giant dog, shaking the land as their youki clashed and raged. The dragon prevailed, or so it seemed, his claws slashing through the white dog's ribs and foreleg with terrible effect. But, the dog refused to go down. Howling, he rose on his hind legs, a massive cloud of youki gathering around his right forepaw. As the dragon gathered himself to strike once more, the dog moved first, slamming into the long, snaky form with his extended paw. A claw landed above the dragon's heart, and the invoked spell drove it deep. The dragon tried to gasp, all four eyes going wide. But, the spell took his breath, as it shoved him into the rock. The claw found the dragon's heart, and stilled it, as the terrible spell twisted the dragon's youki and made it its own, sealing the beast, perhaps for all time.

The dog pulled away, leaving his claw, his youki nearly spent, his blood pouring from his wounds. Dwindling to his human form, the Inu no Taisho made his way to a nearby beach. The two swords at his waist pulsed and trembled, sensing the state of their creator. They were part of him, part of his soul, and his physical need drew them. Had he drawn their combined power back to him, he could have healed himself and lived.

But, he had no intention of doing so. Either by ill chance or evil intent, the battle had come on the very eve when his ningen lover would give birth. He had tried to make her safe, but as his senses cleared from the haze of battle, he knew that she had been betrayed to the man her father had wanted her to marry. While he had fought the dragon, that man had brought his forces against the secluded manor, butchering the humans who had accepted a taiyoukai's offer of refuge. The man might hesitate, briefly, to enter a woman's domain during a birthing, but the hesitation would not last long.

He intended to go to them. He intended to save them. He knew it would be at the cost of his remaining physical life, but he did not care. He had supped a heady brew, since that first meeting with what had then been no more than a slip of a mortal girl. She had taught him that even the weak could be unafraid. She had taught him that courage was less a matter of physical strength than of will. She had taught him passion and compassion; far beyond anything the rest of his long youkai life had taught him. He had promised to protect her and her son, and counted the end of his long life as well worth the cost, if woman and child lived.

But he made a mistake. He turned his back on his pure-youkai son, who yearned for the one sword, but who was taken aback by the question of whether he had someone to protect. He assumed his son's mother was too distracted by the items he had recently left at her palace, to have taken any note of the dragon's challenge or battle.

He did not expect his son to take him down from behind, before he could transform into dog form. He did not expect his one-time mate to streak down from the sky at her son's howl, or to have her bind his senses and his mind before he even realized she was near. They took him down, bound him, removed him to her palace, and worked to heal him.

While in the distant manor, a man slew the woman and fired the building, destroying her and the barely born babe, burying their burning bodies under the collapsing roof.

When the former Inu no Taisho awoke, bound with his mate's strongest spells and his swords vanished; he knew what had happened. Knew that his vow to protect the ningen and their hanyo son was broken, their bodies reduced to bone and ash, beyond all recovery.

He went mad, then. Shattering the bonds placed on him, he turned ravening eyes and jaws towards blood-kin and the one he had once mated. They escaped his wrath, but the palace he had built to woo her did not survive. Howling, driven by the insane need to match the wreckage of his heart with physical destruction, the massive dog stormed away from the ruins and into the wider world.

How much havoc he caused in his rampage he never knew, though neither youkai nor humans were safe. Rage until all the lands and all the peoples united against him he might have done, had not his oldest friend's voice somehow reached him on the winds. Soothed and calmed, he found himself on a peak near his friend's forest, howling with the grief of his shattered heart. Howled until the lands shuddered with tremors so violent that they shook down temples and ancient trees alike. Howled, the myths would later say, from one new moon to the next, until the kami themselves took note and silenced his voice, and pushed him from the mountain-top, so that he fell. Fell transforming, to be caught by the branches of his oldest friend, to be settled gently against the trunk of the ancient magnolia.

And there, he slept. Slept while years, then decades, tiptoed away. Slept while the world went on in more chaos and pain than might have happened, had he not lost and raged. Slept while his betrayers fruitlessly struggled to control the swords they had hidden from him. Slept while the ancient friend whispered its lulling spells. The tree could not understand its friend's grief, or the cause of his wild rage. But, it knew that it could, in some fashion, at least, repay an ancient debt. And so, in its way, it whispered calmness to the wild spirit, and wove its spells slowly, gently, around the turbulent soul. Like rootlets finding the tiniest cracks in the rocks, the tree wove its spells into the youkai's very being. It could not heal. But, it could bind the grief, and the pain, and the memories, and it did.

But that very binding, in the end, proved the fatal flaw. The tree would have bound his friend for eternity, to free him of pain and madness. But, the binding depended upon the friendship the two very disparate beings had forged untold years before.

It could not bind what had forgotten.

The youkai woke from his slumbers, and remembered--nothing.

And without knowledge of friendship and good intent, knowing only that the tree was whispering spells intended to make him sleep, the youkai fled.

Fled into a world he didn't recognize. Fled into a world where he had no memory of himself, lacking even a name. Fled into a world that was haunted with inchoate ghosts and frequent pain, where too many things either attacked or fled on sight. If attacked, he responded with vicious strength, his claws flashing eldritch knives of destructive force. He sometimes sensed that there was much more to his power: watching youkai shape-changers, somehow he knew that he had a different form, that he should be far more than the average youkai which held human-like form. But reaching for that power or that form brought him nothing but pain, or a tsunami of whispers that tried to bury his mind in sleep. Persistence brought him nothing else, and so, eventually, he stopped trying.

Bereft of memory and bereft of a past, and so of a future, he wandered the lands, nothing more than a white-haired seeming of a man, but with dulled, yellow youkai eyes and youkai ears and youkai claws, his clothes as faded as his eyes...