Toga felt the ground crack under the feat of his own beast as he watched the dome and his child under it, as he watched his son struggle to regain control. A control he would have lost himself if Fuiasu had not his wrist still in her grasp.
His chest heaved as he struggled to draw breath when the magic stopped, when Kagome's chest took one last breath and sank. Rage, feral and unhindered by youth and lack of control, threatened to overwhelm him. And it was all directed at his mate. But even has he ripped his hand free of hers, he smothered the flames inside him with a dose of cold reality. He could still save the girl.
"You and I will have words, Mate, when this is done. Sooth our son."
So saying, he strode forward and scooped Kagome's crumpled form up into his arms and, curling the child against him to protect her body, launched himself straight through the roof of the palace, flew across the great expanse of the Citadel, and escaped to the forest as fast as he could manage.
By the time he reached the dense, quiet copse his heart was a wooden thud within his chest. Though her body was still warm, he could not bring himself to think about the soul no longer held within. Wherever she had come from, Kagome was as much his as Sesshoumaru was. And so he laid her out gently in the roots of the massive tree and knelt as he had not knelt once since becoming Lord.
"Bokusenou-sama."
For a moment, Toga did not think the great tree youkai would answer and he feared his promise to his mate, made out of grief as much as anger, might have been false.
"Inu no Tashio," came a voice from nowhere and everywhere, so ancient and quiet not even the birds napping in his branches fled as he spoke. "It is a rare sight indeed, when the great dog general kneels before a lesser youkai."
"You are no lesser youkai, Bokusenou-sama," he murmured, and bowed his head. "Please, I have come for your assistance. My child is dead—she died protecting us from her own power of purity in a…fight with Sesshoumaru. Please tell me how to save her. There must be a way."
Bokusenou, who had until this point chosen to remain faceless to the young demon Lord, showed himself to study the girl. Though this was the first he had scene of her, it was not the first he had heard of her. The Inu no Tashio was not the only Daiyoukai who found peace and reason in speaking to an ancient tree. He knew of the girl, and her future, and what her life meant for that of the male before him-and the land all around them. And so he drew the girl into his roots and buried her there inside his trunk, where the magic of his ancient wood could hide her precious soul from the grubby hands of the soul bearers.
"In the lands far to the East there lives a small noble family of modest wealth in a village falling to ruin. There is a daughter named after the Sixteenth Night. She will bare to you a tool which shall grant you the powers to retrieve the girl's soul from hell—where it has likely gone, if the dark magics surrounding her weary soul speak true."
o.O.o
Word Count – 567