Chapter VI.
The Lady of All Flowers

Sesshoumaru took care of business first. He hoisted Hosenki from the water and placed him on his side next to Tsubaki. He scouted further upstream for demons lying in wit and found only faded animal tracks from many days ago. Outside the mouth of the cavern, bones and offal lay in reeking piles; the witch lived alone, or so it appeared. It was a wonder that in all these years she hadn't been smoked out of the woods by the villagers and burned.

He looked to the grotto again. Presumably, that was the witch's home. The witch nursed something within it, drawing out the souls of young girls, girls like Tsubaki, like Kagome. With each step toward the mouth of the grotto, the jewel pulsed near his flesh. As he approached, dreading entry, he felt it grow hotter to the touch. When he stood knee-deep in the water, peering into the darkness, he realized the darkness smelled nothing like he was expecting.

Flowers rotting in the damp, not blood. Another smell too, tracing a slightly sulfuric dance under the flowers, that grew as the wind pushed strands of his long silver hair into the cave.

Inside, the cave was dim, lined with a florescent growth that scaled the walls and hung like moss from ledges along the sides. The creek came to an end in a pool that deepened into a sunken pool, but someone had taken the effort to etch a clumsy set of stairs up onto the dry areas from the edge of the entrance. The sun, angled precisely for a few minutes as it fell into the horizon, suddenly flared the inside of the cave with tangerine-bright light, mottled as it came through a veil of trees. The spotty gleam stretched back to the farthest wall, a giant pillar inside the grotto, at whose base rested a single straw mat. And on the straw mat, a long sinuous body.

Sesshoumaru felt his throat close.

He took care to be methodical, coming up into the bumpy terrain, each foot treading silently in front of the other. His hand hovered around the hilt of his sword as he rapidly surveyed the inside of the grotto, while he could still see. The surface of the pool glinted, threateningly opaque, and the only signs of life were the remnants of the old woman's own sleeping mat and her sundry magical tools: a long hound's tooth, a pewter bowl, three bottles of indeterminate things stopped up with pieces of bone.

Again, at his waist, the Shikon flared with heat. He paused, lightheaded, thinking each step seemed to feel more unsturdy than the next, and yet he nonetheless pressed on toward the unmoving body, as if it had some irrevocable draw on him. Once he had gotten close enough to see the weave of the blanket that covered the shape of the body but left the small, even toes in plain view, Sesshoumaru could no longer evaluate the prudence of his actions.

He reached out, a pulse of dread pressing against his ribs, lifted the blanket.

Under the blanket lay a golem, made of earth and clay and decorated here and there with woven flower garlands. Thin strips of willow served for long black hair, flat blue stones set as eyes in an unevenly carved face. Underneath the rest of the blanket, a naked, almost sordidly voluptuous woman's body, as if the witch could only form an exaggerated imitation of a feminine shape. He reached out two fingers to its long, vulnerable neck; though the golem was not alive, it was lukewarm and moist to the touch. Kept together by the souls of young women, he realized suddenly. The witch had stolen the deaths of village girls to keep the golem cemented in one piece.

By now the burn of the Shikon was almost too much to bear. He felt it like a blaze burning him, his layers of clothing doing nothing to keep it from searing his skin. Sesshoumaru wrested his sash off, taking with it the pearly jewel. It took one uncharacteristically clumsy shift from his right hand to his left for the Jewel to slip and land right in the fragile meshed epidermis of the golem, gently denting the area under its solar plexis.

The clay body blinked. Convulsed once, like passing a shiver running from its forehead to its heels.

And then smiled.

The last orange dregs of light evaporated as the sun sank behind the mountains; Sesshoumaru and the dead creature were cast into darkness.

"Milord, she's awake!" Miroku called, cradling Kagome in his arms. "She's awake!"

Sesshoumaru rose out of the water, trousers soaked. His sash he had retied, but it trailed sodden with lakewater. His swords still hung gleaming at his side.

But the Shikon had disappeared.

When he could see again, so had the golem.

He scrutinized the grotto up and down for signs of the jewel and for signs of the unholy thing. There were no exits in the back, or in the ceiling, and the water was too deep to search. He nonetheless tried anyway, but under the surface he was practically blind, the water too green and murky to see beyond his own body.

The two were gone, completely.

Smarting from frustration, he exited the grotto to find the moon rising in the sky, and Miroku shouting with joy. Sesshoumaru frowned and squinted. There was something strange about Kagome. The air about her shifted, like it was expanding from heat.

When it sparked as she opened her eyes, he realized he was seeing her aura.