Goshinboku
ごしんぼく
Ancient as the dawn of time, I tower, enormous, over the shrine that I guard. I can call to mind a time before, when other leafy trees rustled in the wind, sharing their news with the tiny birds that flitted from branch to branch and made us their homes. I remember the forest, hunters trampling the underbrush as they searched for food, and peaceful animals prancing lightly through the sunlit clearing before me, some dwarfed in the tall grass.
I recall a boy, pinned against my rough, uncomfortable, brown bark for many years, an arrow through his chest keeping him alive…and asleep. I saw the way the light filtered down when the girl-from-another-time came and freed my inadvertent prisoner. I watched as the one who shot the boy, long dead, returned to life and caused strife between them. I sensed as they joined others to battle a great foe, a dark menace whose rancid aura swept over the land. I was there as they defeated him and under the luxurious shade of my branches was where the boy and the girl-from-another-time shared their first kiss.
Many decades later, though it seemed so much less to me, I witnessed the building of the shrine that surrounds me and was given my current name: the Goshinboku, the Sacred God Tree. I have watched over the shrine for many years now.
I remember the birth of the girl-from-another-time, though now she was in her own era. I was there for her brother's birth, her father's death, all of her first days of school, there to see her dressed up for festivals, and finally there to see her disappear back into the stream of time to find me and my prisoner in the past again.
I am the Goshinboku, the Sacred God Tree. I am the beginning, the middle, and the end of this myth, and I will stand through all of time
おわり
Owari
So, I hope you guys liked it! This is probably the shortest piece I've ever written... I actually wrote it for my creative writing class... we've explained to my teacher five times what a fanfiction is, but she just doesn't get it... oh well! I think the Goshinboku is an under appreciated bit of the InuYasha story, just because it's so central, but at the same time, so... not... I mean... it's a tree. It can't talk or fight Naraku or anything...
