The Bride Chapter 2
Shortly before Kagome's sixteenth birthday, she had realized that the village girls were keeping their distance. Since she had never really been close to most of them this didn't bother her. It wasn't until the three girls, Eri, Ayumi, and Yuka, whom she had considered friends started to avoid her she took notice. They had played together as children, studied together as they grew, and shared many secrets. The distancing was gradual. It went from friendly greetings to waves then they just acknowledged her on her trips to the shrine. Now, if anything, they did their best to avoid her outright. This hurt her feelings.
One day, after the village girls all but ran from her, Kagome cornered Eri near a market stall and asked about the avoidance.
"I should think, after what you are, you'd have the courtesy not to pretend to ask." Kagome was confused, "And what am I?" "What? What? You've got IT around you, people can feel it now. People have noticed!" With that, Eri fled, but Kagome understood.
She knew that Eri could feel the aura she gave off. But she had no control of it. How could anyone accuse her of doing anything wrong, especially her friends? Do they think she liked giving people the heebie-jeebies? Why would she want people to feel her presence before they saw her? What good would that do for her? It's not like she asked for this power. She hadn't asked for any of this! She couldn't turn it off and Lady Kaede said it would continue to get worse until she learned how to channel it properly. And channeling was taking more effort than she'd like to admit.
The avoidance didn't stop in the village, it had followed her home. Kagome could hardly even do the things that once brought her joy. Recently her father had told her to keep away from the animals as now even the half-demon had been avoiding her as of late, complaining that being near her made him sick. This saddened for multiple reasons. She loved playing with the animals, it was her favorite part of the day, and he had taken that from her. What made it worse was that she was trying so hard to befriend him, and he just kept pushing her away. If that half-demon thought this would stop her though, he was wrong. This only made her want to try harder. With each lunch now, she left him notes.
Have a nice day.
Don't work too hard.
Make sure you take enough breaks.
Stay hydrated.
Throughout her sixteenth year, the avoidance gave way to more powerful people bothering her, trying to size her up, to determine her potential.
"Kagome, do you feel this? Do you think evil is coming?"
"I think not, Lady Kaede keeps the village safe."
"But if evil did come?"
"I suppose Kaded would exterminate it."
"You think you're too good to help people in need?"
"No, I just don't think evil will come."
At night people would bring their cursed objects, their ill family members, and anything else that might seem remotely in need of a miko and wait outside her window. Sometimes, those close enough to her window might feel the healing aura.
She could hear them whisper, and talk of her. She mostly ignored them, but when the whispers got loud and disrupted her training or studies the half-demon would handle them. It really only took one look at him for them to scatter, but should one prove to be stubborn he had no issue thrashing them. Kagome made sure to thank him every time this would happen, it was really the only interaction she had with the half-demon. He had stopped glaring at her whenever she was near, but he did his best to keep his distance. Still, she would approach him and thank him with a smile. He would only every answer with "Keh."
It was midway through her sixteenth year when Kagome began taking her training seriously. She hated the attention she was getting, hated that she wasn't allowed near HER animals, hated that the half-demon refused to even look in her direction, and she would much rather it all just stop. She had also noticed Kaede was slowing down and unable to train her for extended periods of time. This worried her, how much longer would she be able to train for? Would she be able to take over for Kaede when the time came? She wasn't sure she could. Kagome wasn't a perfect student by far. She managed to learn to heal minor wounds, charge her bows with power, and sometimes when she was scared, she could manifest her powers into her hands causing whatever she touched to soar backwards. It had only happened a handful of times and she honestly couldn't figure out how to make it work on command. This vexed her.
More than power manifestation, there was one thing that antagonized Kagome to no end, channeling her aura. Despite the hours she put into this particular skill, she could barely manage. Kaede channeled her aura into the ground, it helped to keep the soil of the village rich and pure and also hid her powers from those without what Kaede called The Sight. Kagome understood what Kaede was doing on an intellectual level, but on a physical level, she could only force a portion of her powers into the ground. It felt to her almost as if the ground was rejecting her. Kaede had assured her that she would find a proper way to channel it and until then she could shrink the size of her aura by forcing at least some of it into the soil. This made it so people weren't able to feel her without being relatively close. And for now, that would have to do.
On the day of her seventeenth birthday, Kagome was walking to town to meet with Lady Kaede when a man in a carriage stopped. She was certain he, like everyone else, had felt the aura she was trying so hard to suppress. He was still there when she passed by again on her way home, watching her. She paid him no mind, and the man alone wasn't an important one. But the man himself marked a very dramatic change in her life. Other more powerful men would go out of their way to cut through her village to see for themselves the extent of the aura she gave off, as the first man had. The importance of this was that he was the first retainer that had bothered to do so. And it was this man, whose name was lost to antiquity, who mentioned Kagome to an even more influential retainer, Count Naraku.
