Author's Corner

WOW! It's been so long. I didn't expect to get back to this yet, but here I am. Probably the influence of seeing the new anime. That, and all the encouraging messages and reviews I have received over the years and even until very recently. Thank you so much, and I am glad you all enjoy the story as much as you do. I started this story when I was 17, and it's been 16 years since, and some of my dearest readers have grown older together with me and still retained that same passion and love for the Characters of Sesshoumaru and Kikyo. Thank you for staying after all this time. I hope everyone is healthy, happy and wiser.

Long story short, I moved to another country and adulting and life and responsibilities happened. I'm still crazy busy with my career, but after reading your thoughtful messages and the excitement in your reviews, I felt I'd at least try to get this moving, instead of waiting till a time when I felt I could complete it for sure in one go.

I haven't even read my own story in so long and I forget many details. My story writing skills, as amateurish as they are, are rusty too. I'll slowly get back into it. Forgive any misrepresentations or inaccuracies as I try to go over all the details; I will go back and edit as necessary. Not to worry though, the core of the story is firmly in my mind, and I cannot forget.

To finish off, "Sorry", and "Thank You", for waiting for me.

Enjoy!

(-) "Sesshoumaru" – 'The Path to Destiny' (-)

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Chapter 100 : Descent into Darkness

Summer sunlight, amidst fading spring scents, surrounded the Lady of the West where she stood in the middle of a plain full of switch-grass. Attached to her hip was a three-year-old and chubby Sesshoumaru who was holding onto her with all his might with his feeble claws. Intent on getting a better view the pup had decided he would scale the height of his mother's body to get to her shoulders. Of course the way up was long and hard. Add to that his mother was not helping him any. She was only staring at him with an amused look on her face, curious as to how far he thought he could get. Sesshoumaru scowled, trying his best to imitate his father's expression when he was displeased about something. His mother dared challenge him? Hmph! He would show her!

Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull himself up beyond her waist by grabbing onto her haori. It was proving to be a more difficult task than he had anticipated. For some reason his arms were not capable of pulling his weight. That was strange. He had seen plenty of others his age who could easily lift themselves up using only the strength in their arms. So why couldn't he? Why were his arms so weak? Maybe he was not doing it right?

"Ghurh," he yipped as he tried to hoist himself up once more but failed. The strain of the effort caused him to lose his grip on the silken material of his mother's top and he began to slide down along her leg and towards the ground.

Just before his feet hit the earth however he felt his mother's much stronger arms wrap themselves completely around his tiny little body and catch him in an embrace before lifting him back up and settling his bottom on her hip once again with an arm underneath it.

She laughed mirthfully at his failed attempt and Sesshoumaru could not hide the red that tinged his cheeks as his embarrassment slipped to the surface. He scowled at her. Then he reached for her free hand with his two small ones… and bit the side of her palm!

Well, at least he tried. His teeth were not sharp enough to strike utter terror and his jaws were not powerful enough to cause any damage. He growled, like only a puppy could and shook her palm in his mouth in a feeble attempt to cease her laughter. His actions only served to have the opposite effect, making her laugh even harder. Letting go of her palm he stared at her as she continued to chuckle. His mother sure was strange, he thought. She was always amused by the things he did, apparently. He doubted he did things that were any different than other demon young.

Sesshoumaru's eyes widened when his mother's own suddenly snapped open to reveal that look she had when she was about to get revenge.

"Nwoooh..!" Sesshoumaru managed to mule out before uncontrollable laughter erupted from him as his mother repeatedly rubbed her nose against the base of his neck and under his chin. One of his legs started jerking in spasms as a reaction to the devastating attack inflicted on his body. "Mwother.. nhoo shtop it!"

Eventually his mother ceased her evil attack and rubbed his back slowly as he attempted to regain his breath.

"The Prince of the West defeated by a mere tickle attack…" his mother shook her head in mock disappointment, unable to hide her amusement.

Sesshoumaru glowered fiercely. "Itchs no fair to use my beaknech!"

His mother managed to calm herself before giving him a semi-serious look. "You can't expect your foes to play fair my little one. Of course, they will go for your weaknesses first. You have to be prepared for that."

Sesshoumaru crossed his arms over his chest in a huff and said, "Sesshoumaru doesn't want to!"

"Hmm…" his mother mused. "Well I suppose you still have some growing up to do so it's alright for now."

Suspicious of how easily she was letting this go he turned his head to look at her with a look of childish disbelief. His snow white bangs danced over his forehead at whose centre was a large purple sphere, while his eyebrows knitted together in suspicious doubt below it.

His mother grinned at his look of skepticism before lifting him up into the air above her head. "Just remember Sesshoumaru, you must grow up to be the strength of those around you, and never their weakness."

Sesshoumaru was not sure he understood what his wise mother meant by those words and he was about to ask her when a stream of dark murky water suddenly roared into appearance behind her. Before he could shout out a warning to his parent the water crashed into them with enough force to rip him from his mother's grasp… The water rushed into his mouth and he suddenly found himself drowning as the sky turned to black above him!

~)~~

Wheezing, Sesshoumaru regained consciousness, forcefully pulled out of a past memory that seeped away into the present, and coughed hard as his body tried to expel something from his throat. He spat out water he did not know he had swallowed and cringed as he felt a sharp pain in his leg. Disoriented, he blinked several times as his eyes adjusted to the mysterious light that illuminated the darkness around him. Where was he? What was going on?

Within moments the memories came rushing back and he felt himself out of breath as the surge of emotions drained him of what little strength he had left. Mother! His mother! Where was his mother!? He raised his head to call out to her but only saw the dark roof of the forest and nothing beyond it. The cry he was ready to unleash died in his chest before it ever made it out past his lips. 'Haha-ue'.

A sudden chill alerted him to the fact that he was surrounded by water for the most part with only his upper body beached on the dry river bank. He realized it had to have been the rushing sound of the river that he had heard as he fell. Having been dropped into the raging current in his severely weakened state, it was a miracle that he managed to survive. He must have been carried along the river for who knows how long before being deposited at this bend.

He heard his heartbeat pound through his chest and a natural instinct told him he needed to calm down in order to avoid detection from any potential threats. His body shook from the strain of merely trying to sit up and a numbing pain once again shot through his body. He gently dragged himself out of the water and found the source of the pain to be what was left of the spear that the monk had impaled his thigh with. A length of it had broken off, probably during his fall or while being carried by the river, but a good part remained pierced through his flesh. The wood still sparked with the monk's holy power and reacted violently, almost burning his hand as he reached out and touched it in an effort to pull it out.

There was enough holy power in it to eventually kill him and by all accounts he should be dead already, but somehow the demonic cells in his leg were keeping it from eating into his body. He recalled his mother forcefully pumping some of her demonic energy into his body when she had pushed him over the ledge. Even though demonic power and nature were different and unique for each individual demon, having inherited and being born of his mother, his body was not rejecting her stipend of energy. While it did not accept it into itself and could not absorb it as a source of power, his body was somehow using the energy his mother had left him to temporarily hold back the corrosive holy energy -at least along the outer surface. He knew it would not last too much longer though. He could feel his mother's aura, reflected in her energy that surrounded his wound, slowly disappearing. He had to find a way to get the remaining piece of wood out of his leg and he had to do it quickly. If he didn't, the holy power would eventually break through, his leg would start to rot before the other parts of his body did and finally he would be purified. The only other option was to cut off his leg! He could not be tied down here. He had to return -return to his mother!

A haggard breath escaped him and he suddenly wondered how he could analyse his own situation with such calm. He did not know he was capable of it in such circumstances. No! -No! No! No! No! He did not want to be calm and collected and be self-analyzing! He did not want to deal with all this! He wanted to go back home! He wanted to be in his mother's embrace once again where he would be safe from everything. He did not want to be alone and lost like this. He… he just wanted his mother to come save him!

And then the pain turned to anger. He cursed the humans who took his mother away from him and put him in this situation. Those lowly, conniving, ungrateful bastards! He knew weaklings were not be trusted because of the way they bent to the wills of everyone around them so long as they survived. Weaklings! Those weaklings! They would pay! They would pay for what they did to his mother! He would have his vengeance if it was the last thing he did.

Almost frothing with anger he grit his teeth and slammed his fist into the sandy earth as his slender body trembled with rage. Where was his father at a time like this? If he had not insisted on sticking up for those wretched humans, then none of this would have happened! Damn him and damn the humans! Damn all of them!

His body was wracked with pain again as the holy energy sparked from the wood impaling his thigh as his feeble demonic power surged in response to his anger. Sesshoumaru gasped from the agony and squeezed his eyes shut as he forced himself to not scream out. But then something strange happened. Something he had never experienced before.

Everything around him became unbearably loud! He started picking up noises he had never heard or paid attention to before. His fatigued breathing, the water rushing by him, the eerie wind that passed by him without sparing him a glance; these were sounds he could understand and was accustomed to. But then there were the other sounds. The sound of a drop of blood hitting the grains of sand as it slipped out of his wound and fell onto the earth. The sound of leaves being dragged across the ground as they were pulled along by the whispers of the wind. The sound of the flapping of an insect's wings. The sound of a praying mantis biting into its unfortunate victim. The sound of an ant burrowing down into the earth. He could hear them all! They were as loud as the sound of his mother's voice calling out to him as she usually did. And he found he could focus in on each one. But there were so many. There were too many different noises.

His head was starting to hurt and he quickly covered his ears with his palms. He focused only on his rapid heartbeat which slowly began to calm as he made himself deaf to the sounds of the world around him. But then a different kind of assault fell upon him as he took long breaths to dispel his anxiety. A storm of smells battered his olfactory sensory neurons. It was an even more powerful awakening of his senses. The smell of the corpse of the fish further down river. The smell of honey in a tree on the other side of the river bank. The smell of his blood. And even the smell, or rather the scent of, a small demon mongoose on the other side of the river, all came rushing to him. He reflexively whimpered as he held his breath so that he would not inhale these scents that were muddling his brain. There was simply too much information all at once and he was finding it nearly impossible to process them all.

But the changes were not done. There was another coming. As he hid his face in his arms, he caught sight of his reflection in the water near him. There was a strange glow coming from his face. To be more accurate, it was coming from his eyes. Distracted by this strange phenomenon, he moved closer to the water and peered intently at his reflection. His eyes were indeed glowing! The honey gold that he was used to was disappearing under a stern, sharp and powerful yellow like the mid-morning sun. As he watched himself his vision began to blur. And then it would become clear. But then it would blur again. But each time it became clear his vision improved drastically. Improved as in, it became better than it had ever been. All those things he could hear and smell before, he could now see! He could see the grains of sand that were flung into the air as his blood and water dripped down onto the bank. He could see each individual flap of the insect's wings. He could even see the mongoose hidden in the darkness of the shrubs as it silently peered at him.

The throbbing that had started in his head was slowly disappearing and clarity flooded his brain. He was being granted access to those sensory powers that he should have had since birth that were genetically inherited from the long line of Inu. His sense of smell and hearing were especially strong and he realized these were the powers that all who were born of his clan naturally possessed. He was a dog demon after all. As he was at the point of death, and his very survival was on the line, his body was forcing itself to evolve. It was forcing itself to acquire the abilities it was always meant to have. The speed at which he was evolving did raise some questions however. Did his mother do this too? Was her demonic energy not just protecting him from the monk's power but also forcing his body to enter into a …growth spurt? Into an accelerated state of awareness? No. that couldn't be all that there was to this. There was something else going on. If his mother really had the ability to speed up his growth or enhance him somehow she would have done it sooner. That's not what she had done. She had done something else to him.

Before he could ponder any further on this, the hair at the back of his neck stood up on end. All his senses went into overdrive and his body began to shake. He felt his blood begin to rush through his body as his heart began to beat faster. The muscles in his legs tightened and felt himself lower his posture instinctively. His gut tightened and he realized he was inhaling a lot of air to support the sudden and unexpected increase in pace of his body functions. What was going on, he wondered in confusion. He wanted to sit up but his body would not let him. Something subconsciously held him down. He was startled when the image of water beneath him began to morph into a strange smoke that had an even stranger color and physical appearance to it. It trailed through the air and disappeared behind and over his shoulder. When his fingers began to dig into the earth as if stabilizing himself, he noticed on his thumb that was still on the surface of the sand -a sharp claw. One look at it and he knew it was different from the finger nails he had had up until then. This was sharp and strong. It was fragile no longer.

When another shiver ran down the length of his spine, it dawned on him that this might be his survival instincts kicking into full effect. He had heard and learnt about this and had always wondered what it would be like to have animalistic instincts that heightened one's awareness to the point that his body reacted to danger before his mind even processed the fact. But if this is what it was, then the strange smoke like apparition… it had to be emanating from the source of what was warning him of danger. Danger? Danger? DANGER!

That was it! He was in danger! That's why his body was reacting like this. It was entering a fight or flight mode and he wasn't even aware of it till now as he had not perceived that he was in danger. But his senses and his instincts had!

The smoky trail lead up and behind over his shoulder, which meant whatever danger there was, it was already behind him, in his blind spot.

The young pup gulped as his body lowered even further, trying to get as much of a stable position as possible for quick action. His leg throbbed once again as remains of the monk's spear sparked with holy energy. But that was the least of his worries…

Behind Sesshoumaru, among the shadows of the trees, a large pair of white eyes watched its weak prey shivering in fright near the water. A sticky white liquid dripped out of what must have been its mouth where sharp fangs were hidden in the darkness of night. The liquid hissed as it touched the grass on the ground. Its mouth was watering.

Oh, what tasty looking prey!