Oh Rose, this painted Rose
Is not the whole
Who paints the flower
Paints not its fragrant soul....
-Goliards
Chapter 2- They Shall Sleep Until The Spell Is
Broken
It took some time to work their way up to the main donjon of the castle, the mulit-leveled tower that overlooked the plains below the hill it had been built on. It became more and more apparent that the city, whenever it had fallen asleep, was still under construction, gaps left between houses that seemed ready for the raising of buildings. Concentric in design, growing larger as the rings of streets expanded outward, a small, decorative forest of pine trees rose behind one of the defendable, rough cut walls, adding what must have seemed like a peaceful, serene air to the place, visible to the owners of the homes that had been built, of greater size and worth than the ones closer to the plaza area they entered. These were richer homes, closer to the castle and to the daimyo who ruled there, the living spaces of retainers, vassals, and the wealthy.
They passed over a wooden bridge, leading up to the hill the castle rested on, and found their way immediately barred by a crooked set of gateways, fortunately left open during that day, and another sign that no attack was expected from outside. Had the gates been locked, Kagome got the feeling Inuyasha would just break down the gateway to get them inside, now that they had decided on some course of action for the rest of the day. It felt almost sacrilegious to break or ruin anything of the place. The sleeping people gave her eerie the feeling it was a tomb, and to destroy something would be a desecration to the dead. She reminded herself they were not, and that now they were going to try to help them wake up. The fact that a soldier could be seen half dangling over one of the stone walls ringing the upper passageway didn't help settle her unease. He'd dropped his bow and arrows, and they lay on the hard dirt a good way below him. Had they been invaders, his vantage point would have made them easy targets, trapped inside the twin gates.
They passed into the castle's outermost ward, and there they found many more people than on the path up to it. Men and women in sturdy worker's clothing were sprawled around, obviously in the midst of working on the castle's daily chores. The vines of roses still swarmed through the place, thicker here than in the outskirts of the town, and they picked their way through it, Miroku steadying himself with his shakujou while Kirara leapt from one thick vine to another, avoiding the more deadly looking thorns. This taking too long to just cross a courtyard, Inuyasha took out Tetsusaiga and slashed apart the thickest roots, carving a path they all quickly fell into. Unlike the outer wall, these did not grow back instantly, though rustling noises below suggested that they were either moving, or that mice had nested in the undergrowth, now upset with Inuyasha's disruption.
After that came more gates, rimmed with heavy wooden doors banded in iron. The stone walls above them loomed heavily, and more men could be seen half on them, half sliding off from their defensive positions, the daily guard knocked out. As the geometric, curving rings of defense grew smaller, they finally emerged into the innermost ward of the castle, a three storied donjon rising high above them. Roses, buds now tightly closed as all the other blooms in the castle were, climbed the outer walls of the tower, dark green leaves unfurled in the afternoon sunlight. If it hadn't seemed so out of place, it would have looked beautiful, the rampaging flora cloaking the true color of the plastered donjon walls.
"I guess the next step is to go in," Kagome decided, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking up at the tower's winged roofs. Sliding wooden doors slid slowly on dirt clogged slats as they pushed the front doors open, revealing the slumbering space inside as they stepped within.
Silence hung as heavily as the curling rose vines, clinging to the roofbeams and slithering up the doorposts. Windows were speared through with age, creating dusky shafts of light that played across silently sleeping faces. Here, within the main castle, those they found reposing with closed eyes and bowed heads wore richer clothes, woven more finely and with more detail. Vibrant green leaves lay across the woven ones on the robes of the women, twisting colorfully into their long black hair. Men knelt still at low tables, ink and bamboo brushes laying across stark white paper, their fingers smudged black from their writing while heads were bowed in slumber.
The soft sounds of the intruders footsteps and the ringing of the shakujou interrupted the quiet of decades. A thick layer of dust lay across the exposed surfaces of the wood, a part of the scenery but not truly belonging there.
Bending down to one of the worker's tables, Miroku pushed back some of the briars scattered over a writing man and the paper he held, pinning it down. Carefully, he drew it free from the light hand placed on it, scanning the neat print on the page and ignoring the spilled pools of ink on the sheet's lower portion. The parchment was yellowed with age, curling at the ends, and he held it gingerly. "Orders for supplies, it looks like," he informed the others, who had begun to spread out themselves, picking their way among the sleepers. Shippou peered into the different sleeping faces, looking for something to do. "This looks like an order to armorers, for new helmets for whatever standing army that was being built here."
"More of the same over here," Sango added, shuffling through some sheaves of paper she had drawn out from under a tangle of brambles on the floor. "Most of it looks military," she continued, hesitating as she came across another sheet as a startled look crossed her face for a moment. "Artists' commissions? It looks like the daimyo was hiring artists as well."
"Were they decorating?" Shippou asked, edging his way closer to Kagome, who was tentatively testing out the wooden steps that led upstairs. They creaked under the light pressing of her foot, but remained firm. "Would they paint it?"
Sango shrugged, filing through the papers again and sending an apologetic thought toward the nearest unconscious person. It felt almost like she was rifling through someone else's things without permission.
After a moment, the creaking of the steps grew louder, as Kagome began to work her way up the steps, utilizing the vines to her advantage and using them as a makeshift railing to pull herself up. "Kagome! Wait!" he called, not wanting to be left behind while mincing his way over the last of the budding plants, Shippou caught himself on the wall beside the steps before heading up after the schoolgirl, who was making good time up the stairs now that she had gotten the hang of the steep steps.
With a sigh, Inuyasha tailed the two of them,
adding his weight to the old stairwell and listening to the wooden boards
creak in protest with the unaccustomed weight of two adults and the child.
There wasn't much for him to do on the main floor, so he may as well explore
and keep an eye on Kagome too. If any of these freaky plants suddenly came
alive and tried attacking, the two running off would need a rescue anyway.
Common sense, of course. Feh.
He found himself emerging into what appeared to be the daimyo's quarters, or at least his study. The floor was varnished and smooth, though dusty, and there were fewer vines that had worked their way up here. Still, the woven curtains over the windows had been torn through the years, and looked tattered. Partitions sectioned away the different areas, though there seemed to be more organization to the haphazard way people had dozed off and fallen to the floor. A line of differently aged men lay across the ground, all seeming to be headed towards a middle aged man behind a table at the room's far end, all of them holding multiple sheets of paper.
"I think we found the daimyo," Inuyasha commented from behind, half startling Kagome, who had not heard him come up behind her. He jerked his chin toward the middle aged man at the line's end, wearing richer clothes a tall black cap on his head. A young man in armor had fallen just behind him, apparently a guard. "They all look like they're trying to talk to him."
"They look so creepy this way," Kagome murmured quietly as Inuyasha stepped up beside her, frowning at the mess at his feet. "They couldn't have expected anything if they look like this...just like they were going about their business."
Shippou had been creeping his way among the fallen, glancing at the papers they held. These were not decorated with words, but with drawings, and he slowly reached out and withdrew one, keeping an eye on the elderly man holding it, wary in case he should wake up at the disruption. With a quick lunge, he snatched it out of the man's hands, leaping back as though burned. When nothing happened, he sighed in relief, looking at the picture painted there more carefully.
It was a simple sketch, surrounded in further sketches. All were of flowers, many petaled and delicate, rendered carefully and with skill on the page. From several different angles, the black and white portrait was of a chrysanthemum, the drawings attempting to capture the perfection of the subject. And it was a portrait, Shippou noticed after a moment, because in one of the smaller pictures on the page, the tiny face and bust of a woman appeared within the bloom of the petals, eyes downcast and distant, though she held a delicate and dainty beauty that was entrancing, even in the simple sketch.
"Did you find something, Shippou-chan?" Kagome asked as she peered over Shippou's shoulder to see what caught his attention. She scanned the page for a moment, then noticed what Shippou was puzzling over. "It looks almost like fantasy art or something."
"Fanta...what?" Shippou blinked and looked up at Kagome as she accepted the picture from him. "It looks like a youkai flower or something."
"A youkai flower?" Kagome repeated, then tilted the picture to the side for Inuyasha to see, pointing it out. With a thoughtful frown, she asked him, "How dangerous could one be?"
He shrugged nonchalantly as he answered. "Depends. They don't normally cause humans much trouble. Usually they leave them alone, unless some stupid ones start messing with them. They don't fight much, since they're just plants. A lot can be poisonous though."
Shippou was pulling more sketches now that he felt more confident that his 'stealing' wouldn't cause the owner to wake up and yell at him for it. He collected a handful before flipping through them and exclaiming, "Look at all the drawings!"
More pictures of chrysanthemums were produced, though no others with the thumb sized body inserted into the bloom. All were attempting to capture some aesthetic beauty of the flower. Some were in full blossom, others half opened as though dozing, some tightly closed in nightly sleep. Passing them on to Kagome, she showed them to Inuyasha, who was feigning disinterest in the pictures.
The creak on the stairs behind them gave a warning before Miroku and then Sango's heads emerged into the second tier of the donjon. Kirara hopped up onto the second level as well, following Sango. "It's mostly just orders for supplies and other official work down there," Miroku told them as he reached the floor. "Nothing that seemed out of the ordinary."
Noticing the three clustered around a sheaf of papers in Kagome's hands, Sango asked, "Did you three have any luck?"
"Shippou found your artists," Inuyasha intoned with a bit of boredom, backing away as the other two joined the sudden spree of Show and Tell. "They're looking at pictures."
Again, the drawings were shared, and Inuyasha edged his way towards the next set of steps leading to the donjon's highest level. When the sound of ancient wood bending again echoed in the large room, several heads lifted in time to see a streak of red vanish to the uppermost rooms.
"Inuyasha?" Kagome called curiously after.
A moment later, his disembodied voice echoed back down, "It's just a bunch of guards and shit up here. More plants," he finished as he dropped back to the second floor. "Just weaponry, some more sleeping guards. A couple at the windows, probably lookouts, but the others looked like they were cleaning swords or some shit like that." He folded his arms again. "I'm not seeing how going through this old crap is getting us anywhere."
"We still have a lot to look through," Kagome defended, straightening the delicate yellow edges of the papers into a neat pile with her hands. "There's still more the castle complex, the grounds, the turrets, all kinds of places to look through...there has to be something here Naraku wanted if he put everyone to sleep."
"Making people sleep doesn't exactly sound like Naraku's style," Inuyasha snorted, earning himself a deathly glare from Kagome. Getting the feeling he was dangerously close to an osuwari, he spluttered, "What? It's not!"
"Maybe not," Miroku added, lifting his rosary covered hand on the shakujou ever so slightly, "but there still is more ground to cover. Even my grandfather had to upset Naraku before he laid a curse on his line. These people must have instigated Naraku in some way if he is the cause all this."
Inuyasha was making a barely perceptible growling noise in the back of his throat, still disliking the situation. "I said we would leave tomorrow if we didn't find anything. If you want to waste the rest of the day here, go ahead."
And so they did.
~o~O~o~
Far away, or perhaps not so far, a figure sat in a darkened room, watching the events of the day unfold in the perfectly round reflection of a mirror. Tiny white hands held it lightly so that he may observe, their paleness standing in stark, glowing contrast to the blackness around her. If Kanna had the inclination to lift her eyes and meet the face of her 'father' of sorts, she would have seen a barely perceptible smile tracing his lips.
All Kanna knew was that she was there to let
him observe this newly unfolding little drama, and that Kagura had left
their castle that morning. These things she did know, and it was enough
for her to understand that Naraku had set certain events into motion again.
~o~O~o~o~O~o~o~O~o~o~O~o~
Hm, I know, not much happening in the second
chapter, though it should be fairly clear now as to what one of the fairy
tales is...there will be more. ^_^
Until next chapter.
~Queen
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