Warnings: None

Daughters of Destiny

Chapter 04:

"Voices in My Head"

Chalk it up to excitement, or maybe nerves, I guess—but it seemed like the wind in the trees whispered my name. I wanted to run into that forest and never look back…which was a terrible, terrible idea. I didn't need to feel Keiko's eyes drilling holes in my back to know that I'd likely pissed her off to the nth degree, and that this was an immensely bad decision.

But if this was such a bad decision…why was I so intent on making it? Why did running into this forest feel like an act engineered by destiny?

Meh, probably not worth thinking about. I was just being dramatic. As we trekked through the forest, following the tracks of the paper's sled, I tried to put the odd longing in my chest out of my head and concentrate on not falling and tripping and getting impaled on a root. That's a fucking stupid way to die. If I was going to die (again) I wanted to go down like a badass.

We followed the grooves in the ground for about ten minutes before Keiko spoke.

"We should turn back," she said. Tension radiated from her in waves. "We've gone too far already, Tigger."

That was a good idea, of course. Going out here alone, two young girls all by ourselves, with no powers to speak of—turning back before shit hit the fan was an excellent idea. Yes ma'am. It totally, totally was.

A breeze ruffled my hair, bringing the scent of loamy earth and blooming flowers to my nose. I inhaled deeply of that cotton candy sweetness. I closed my eyes. The sun dappled my skin with warmth as it filtered through the branches overhead. A leaf tickled at the back of my neck; shivers skated up my spine like trailing fingers, pleasurable and soft.

Sweet longing rose inside me, nostalgia surfacing from a place I couldn't name. There was so much world to see—so much life to savor, experience, to relish. I'd felt it since the minute I stepped foot in this world, and I'd felt it intensely when I heard paper had been stolen from the village. Chalked it up to feeling protective of the village I'd soon be spending a lot of time in. I hated seeing those people—my people—look upset at the theft. It broke my heart almost too thoroughly for comfort, considering it was just my first visit. Turning back was a good idea, but I'd be giving up so much if I listened to Keiko. I longed to keep feeling the sun on my skin, the wind in my hair, the taste of green things in my mouth, because it was so pure and good and lovely and it had been so long since I felt these things—

Wait.

'So long since I felt these things'?

Where the hell did that come from?

I shook my head and beamed at Keiko. "Sorry, sorry. You're right. We should go back to—"

The brush behind me rattled. Keiko's eyes flickered away from my face, over my shoulder. Then those eyes bugged out of her skull.

"What the fuck is that?" she said.

I turned.

A dozen feet ahead of us, yellow scales shiny and bright against the dirt, sat…a thing. A thing with a squat little slug body and a big, arrow-shaped head, two black eyes staring at us above two slitted nostrils and a slash of a mouth. Sort of snake-ish, maybe, but stubby, and with a bit of a potbelly? Would've been kind of cute had two flaps of scaly skin not snapped up on either side of its head like a cobra's hood when it saw us, but even then—

The thing chose that moment to talk.

"Eep! Humans!" it said. It scooted backward over the dirt with a wriggle of its legless body. "Humans, humans!"

Keiko's jaw dropped. "It talked."

"They saw me!" the thing warbled. Its high-pitched voice reminded me of my fifth grade math teacher. "Good heavens, I've been found! Filthy humans, they're here!"

If I thought talking was the weirdest thing this creature could do, I was swiftly proven totally fucking wrong. It hunkered down and then hopped in place, opening its mouth and swinging its thick tail forward. It bit down on the tail and proceeded to roll—roll like a friggin', goddamn hula-hoop—away from us and into the brush.

We stood there for a second.

"What the fuck?" Keiko muttered.

"Yeah. For real." A pulsing thrill of adrenaline streaked up my back. I pointed dramatically into the brush. "After it, Eeyore!"

"Tigger, wait—!"

But there could be no waiting. My legs moved as if of their own accord. I dove into the brush while Keiko screamed at me to slow down, to wait, to talk about this before rushing headlong into danger.

I tried to listen.

I couldn't.

There was only running, and the thrill of the chase pulsing hot inside my blood—and that longing from before, honeyed and undeniable.

We cornered the whatchamacallit mostly by luck. After ten more minutes of running, yellow scales flashing amidst the dark foliage, the creature got itself stuck between a rock and…well, not a hard place? More like a deep place. A deep ravine sat next to a huge boulder; the snake-thing rang into the V where they met, trapped between sheer rock and a ten-foot drop into a bramble patch below. Though the ravine was only five or six feet wide at the top, it was too far for the snake to jump over. Thing was short and stubby and probably not that acrobatic, aside from the whole rolling thing.

Anyway.

"I got you now," I declared, panting, when I ran up behind the snake. "Nowhere to run, snake-monster!"

It backed up against the boulder, letting go of its tail with a pop of suction. I whipped the scarf off my head and pounced. The creature fought back with slaps of its muscular body (damn, that thing was short but powerful), but I was bigger. I used the scarf like a makeshift bag and trapped the thing inside. Keiko ran up behind me a few seconds later, sandals clacking against the rocky ground.

"Holy—you caught it?" she said.

I grinned, holding the bag aloft. Creature didn't weigh too much, thankfully. "Yup!"

She moved forward step by step, eyes on the bag. "It's a demon. Isn't it?"

The thing in the bag slapped outward with its tail, fabric tenting from the inside.

"Yes," came its wheedling voice, "and a demon of great import, at that! You had best release me from this prison before I lose my temper!" More rustling and lashing and thrashing about; I held the bag as far away from me as it could go. "I shall smite thee with all the power of the great tsuchinoko clan!

"Tsuchinoko?" I said.

"Wait. Like the Japanese cryptid?" Keiko asked. Leave it to Keiko to have heard of this thing before.

"Cryp-what?" the creature cried. "I sense you have insulted me, and for that, I shall show you no quarter!"

"Whatever it is, it's not very big. Probably not very strong, either," I said.

Despite my assertions, Keiko looked worried—far more worried than she needed to be. I was with her, after all. I'd seen and bested stronger demons in my life—wait, no, that wasn't true.

What the hell was up with these intrusive thoughts?

I guess my grip on the scarf had gone a bit slack, because the creature flailed around some more and managed to poke its little yellow head out of a slit in the fabric. A forked tongue flickered from its mouth with a sound like blowing a raspberry.

"You…you're not afraid of me?" it asked. Round, dark eyes narrowed. "You don't cower in fear at the sight of a demon like most humans."

Keiko snorted, worried lines morphing into a glare even I found intimidating. "You don't scare me. I know demons far stronger than you."

Not a bluff. She was telling the truth. Even the tsuchinoko could tell. It shivered and dove back into the back with a frightened "Eep!"

I poked at the creature through the scarf; it squirmed away from my finger. I asked, "Hey. Did you take the paper from the village? Huh? Huh?"

"Um," came its muffled response.

"Answer her, ugly," Keiko said in a quiet, deadly voice. "Or we won't play nice."

The bag undulated as the creature fidgeted. "Yes, yes, we took the paper!" it admitted. "We took it, now please, let me out of here!"

Keiko's eyes narrowed. "We?" she asked.

The thing in the bag stilled.

Then, very quietly, it said: "…I have committed a tactical error."

"Not very strong and not very smart," I said with a giggle. "You're batting a thousand."

"Batting a what?" It poked just its snout out of the bag and glared. "Never mind your pointless human drivel. Let me go at once, or my master shall dispose of you posthaste!"

"Your master?" I asked. "And who might that be?"

The tsuchinoko's chin lifted. "A demon of great power. You won't have heard of him, but you soon will, for he is mighty and shall rule the western lands!"

"Don't the western lands already have a ruler?" Keiko asked, tone arid.

"Oh, yes," said the tsuchinoko. Its reptilian mouth lifted in a fuckin' creeptastic smile. "But demons such as we tire of the smell of dog."

Keiko's lips thinned as she stared at the tsuchinoko—but then she let out a startled 'oof' and lurched forward, sprawling face first on the ground. I leapt back and shrieked as a yellow thing, another tsuchinoko, looked up at me from between Keiko's shoulder blades. The shriek cut short when the bagged tsuchinoko writhed and bucked below my fist. Its tail connected with my wrist; I let go of the bag, and the creature bounced out of the scarf with a cackle.

"Attack, brothers!" it screeched. "Attack!"

A shadow fell over me. I looked up, moving like the air had been replaced by molasses. A dozen—no, two dozen yellow-bodied snake-things flew from the top of the boulder above my head. Most of them leapt onto Keiko, dog-piling her like exuberant puppies, but she shoved up to her hands and knees and batted them off with wild swings of her fists. A few of them tangled with her feet, though, and the next thing I knew she'd stumbled backward.

Backward, and into the ravine.

I caught a single glimpse of her terrified face before it disappeared over the edge. A moment later I heard a crash as she landed somewhere far below.

My chest froze like Han Solo in carbonite.

"Eeyore!" I shrieked. "Eeyore, no!"

I started forward, trying to get to her, but the tsuchinokos intertwined with my legs and feet and sent me sprawling just like they'd sent Keiko. I hit the dirt as a tidal wave of tsuchinokos surged forward, washing over me in a scaly mass as they ran for the fucking hills.

I couldn't blame them. From within the ravine Keiko had started shouting—and she sounded pissed the fuck off.

"Why you—I'm going to murder all you little assholes!" she bellowed. "I'm going to turn you inside out and make you eat your own fucking hides, you disgusting little—!"

"Only if you can catch us first!" one of the tsuchinokos yodeled at her.

"Yes, yes, only if you catch us!" the rest agreed.

Dust filled my mouth and eyes; I coughed and sneezed, the weight of the tsuchinokos cresting over my back and neck and legs like a scaly hailstorm. As soon as the tide of cryptids thinned, I scrambled up crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the ravine. A few tsuchinokos watched, snickering from the edge of the woods as I looked over the precipice. Keiko stood at the bottom with her hair full of leaves and face streaked with mud. She looked fine, thankfully. No broken bones or concussions I could see. The ice inside me thawed somewhat at that, a slushie instead of the arctic tundra.

"Tigger, Tigger!" Keiko said. She grabbed at the wall of the ravine and tried to climb up it, but the slick dirt couldn't hold her weight. She slid back down to the bottom with an ooze of mud. "Help me out of here!"

"Are you OK?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fucking peachy." She did not, in fact, look fucking peachy. "Go back to the village and find a rope!"

Yes, of course. That was the most logical, smartest idea at this point. Good thinking, Eeyore. It was time to go back. We'd have more than enough adventure for one day.

Her brow furrowed. "Actually, no," she said. "Maybe don't? I don't want us getting separated, but—"

Oh. That was also perfectly logical. That was my Eeyore, thinking of everything. Gosh, I was lucky to have her, wasn't I? So lucky. I needed to get her out of this hole ASAP. I needed to reach down and grab for her hand, or find something to throw her.

I didn't move.

My hand did not reach for her.

"Are there vines up there?" she asked. "Any long roots you could toss me, maybe tie to something? You're too small to hoist me up yourself—"

Yeah, a root or a vine! Good thinking! I needed to look for one. I definitely, definitely needed to look for one and get her the hell out of that stupid ravine, for sure.

I needed to do that.

So why wasn't I moving?

Behind me, somebody sniggered. The tsuchinokos had gathered in a knot, laughing in a writhing pool of yellow scales.

"Stupid humans!" one of them chortled. "Stupid, stinky humans, falling into holes like that!"

From the depths of hole Keiko shrieked, "You pushed me, you assholes!"

"That's what you get!" said a snake-thing.

"Yes, that's what you get!" said another.

"For your crimes, we punished you!"

"The tsuchinokos shall never be defeated by the likes of mere humans!"

Contempt dripped from every syllable they spoke. Each word struck inside my chest like a gong. They rang outward, vibrating inside me until my limbs trembled in response—trembled with energy and emotion too hot to look at without squinting.

When one of them laughed, my teeth clenched, and I realized with a start what I was feeling: I felt anger. Or maybe rage. Fury, even, filling me to absolute bursting.

But why?

These things were so small, so silly, even if they had knocked Kagome down a hole. They were taunting us, but pitifully, and I wanted to roll my eyes and shrug it off—but instead more anger bubbled up, hot and bright and terrifying.

What the hell was this? This wasn't me!

Below my perch, Keiko growled. She dug her hands into the ravine wall but the dirt crumbled under her weight. Brown eyes blazed with righteous indignation. She said, "Get me the hell out of here so I can fucking murder those little jerks, Tigger!"

I didn't move.

The tsuchinokos laughed.

The fire in me burned hotter.

"Sorry, Keiko," I said.

Wait. 'Keiko'? I never called her 'Keiko'!

"Sorry, Keiko, but you'll have to wait," my mouth said. "I can't let them get away with this."

She froze, fingers still lodged in the wall. "Wait…what?"

"You'll be fine." The words coming from my mouth were not my own. I tried to tell her with my eyes that something was wrong—that something was fundamentally, deeply wrong—but I couldn't change my expression. I stared at her with wooden features as I said, "I'll be right back."

Keiko gasped. The pain, the hurt, the betrayal in her eyes cut me like a slashing blade. She reached for me, hand shaking. "Tigger, no, wait—"

I turned away.

I didn't want to turn away. I knew I shouldn't. My feet moved of their own accord, toward the tsuchinokos, who squealed and bit their tails and rolled away into the brush. I screamed inside my head that this was wrong, that this wasn't right, that leaving Keiko was a terrible fucking idea and what the hell was wrong with me—

My feet didn't listen.

One foot lifted. Then the other moved. Soon I was running, unable to stop.

Step by step, my traitorous legs lead me back into the forest, toward a goal I did not want to seek.

It felt like being in a video game cutscene, to be honest—but like a cutscene from a first-person point of view game, where you can't choose your character's actions until some mysterious blip of programming gives you back the controls after the plot had progressed to a certain point. Fucking disorienting, lemme tell ya. I didn't enjoy it one bit. My legs kept moving after the tsuchinokos even as I chanted in my head, this is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid…

Right about the time my body stopped vibrating with that out-of-nowhere rage, a branch whipped me in the face and made me stumble. I careened to a halt at that point, curse slipping past my lips—oh, hey! That curse was mine! Seemed the cutscene had come to an end at last. I stood up and grinned (ah, so my face finally belonged to me again, too) but there was no one around to see it.

The tsuchinokos had taken advantage of my stumble and disappeared…into the cave in front of me, I suspected.

Man, these things weren't very good at hiding at all, were they? They'd left those weird squiggling track marks in the dirt here, just like they had back in the village, and the tracks lead out of the trees and into the clearing right in front of me. There was a bit of a cliff, a bluff, on the other side of the clearing; looks like we'd traveled to the foot of some diminutive mountain. A pile of boulders at the cliff's base barely disguised the mouth of a small cave. Obviously that had to be their hiding place.

What the hell had those fuckers done to me, anyway?

Because that had to be the explanation, right? For why I'd gone all automaton back there, I mean. Those little creeps had to have done something to me, and I needed to know exactly what—so it wouldn't happen again. So I wouldn't abandon Keiko again.

I marched forward, which was probably not very smart of me, and walked right up to the cave mouth. It was basically a crack in the cliff face; nothing fancy or whatever, only five or so feet across at its widest. I stood in the middle of it and squinted into the darkness within.

Yup. There they were. The tsuchinokos had gathered in the middle of a large cavern, whispering to each other like kids stuck in a library. In their middle sat a wooden crate on sled runners. Sweet. Looks like I'd found the stupid paper!

"Fee, figh, foe, fum," I sang. "I smell the blood of a bunch of little shits!"

A ripple passed through the gaggle of gasping demons. "Eep! The human found us!" one said, and in a wave of yellow scales they surged over and around the cart to hide in its shadow. Their eyes gleamed orange in the dark as they stared at me, limning the cart in umber light. "What do we do? What do we do?!"

"You can start by telling me what you did to me back there!" I said. "Tell me that, and hand over the paper while you're at it, or so help me, I'll—"

"You'll what, little human girl?"

That voice…it didn't belong to the tsuchinokos.

It came from behind me, for one thing, and for another, it was too deep and velvety and pretty to belong to a silly little thing like a tsuchinoko. It caressed its way up my spine and into my ears like silk made audible—but when I shivered at the sound, it wasn't because I enjoyed the voice.

Far fucking from it, people.

A cold shadow fell across my back. I turned like I was underwater, hackles rising, skin peppering with gooseflesh. I blinked up at the towering figure (silhouetted by the sun as it was), but could only barely make out a cascade of silvery hair and—

"Oh," I said in a small voice. "Oh. Oh shit."

The silver-haired, golden-eyed demon smiled at me.

It was the single most terrifying smile I had ever seen—and in that moment, an image flashed clear across my mind.

It was an image of Eeyore.

In it, she was saying "I told you so."

NOTES

You have three guesses as to who that is, and the first two don't count.

More important than this character reveal is the stuff going on in Kagome's head. "Voices in my head," indeed. I know y'all got a bit mad at her after last chapter, but please understand there's more going on than meets the eye.

Thanks to Kaiser Snek on Tumblr for introducing me to tsuchinokos. They love booze and telling lies and I think they're funny.

MANY THANKS to everyone reading this! You're the best: xenocanaan, Kaiya Azure, ballet022, Shesshomarus'Luvr, ahyeon, Miqila, sriachacha, CrystalVixen93, wennifer-lynn, sousie, HikariYamino, giant salamander, Vixeona.