Far across the waters from where Inutaishou's prey fell, another crow made its way that afternoon, winging swiftly with a small note tied to its left foreleg. Had it known, it might have mourned its brethren's death, but only in passing---for the lives of birds are fleeting and their affections even more so. It might have noted the deceased was two-eyed, much larger, and not blood relation, wondered what killed it, and left before chancing to find out. But this particular crow would not live to set foot upon the lands the raven had died in, and thus the question remains unanswered.
It was not a very happy creature, as messengers went, but it did its jobs without complaint and ate the food given to it. Sometimes, in its more coherent moments it contemplated escape to find some wild female and dart through the hydrangea singing a more cheerful tune, but thankfully those moments were brief. There were big healthy females with big healthy males to fight for them, and hunters lurked in the dying hydrangea to snap up the first idiot singing a song.
It was during one of those moments of idle, bestial daydreaming that the Thing began following it.
At first, the crow didn't notice, despite the superior peripheral vision from its third eye. It was easy enough to mistake stray shadows for cloud-shadows, and a flash of bright light for the sun glinting off a pond. It wasn't until the Thing got close enough to make noise that the three-eyed messenger began to wonder, and by then it was too late.
Big, distended pools of purple loomed up like a crazy bad dream; blueberry nightmares bulging in the sky to the right. Eyes. For a moment, the crow remembered a plum it had stolen from the housekeeper's garden; then the impression was gone, leaving sheer panic in its wake. Its every instinct told it to flee, but its training mandated exactly the opposite.
And it was a very well trained animal.
Hissing bravely, the creature dived directly at the monstrous apparition's purple eyes, hoping to gouge them and deter pursuit, but the purple-eyes twisted and easily avoided. Disproportionally long limbs reached out, faster than lightning, and slashed at the bird-beast, raking it casually along the left side. The crow demon screeched, but did not falter; the scratch was not really deep enough. However, it could smell its blood leaving a scent-trail, broadcasting their position, and it knew only one procedure left.
Abort mission. Destroy message. Return to Base.
The crow scratched at its cargo desperately, but its legs were already beginning to freeze.
"My Lady waits
Among the pine trees.
How much longer must her husband take
To climb the mountain?"
It would have been a suitable love poem, Mei Lai decided, if it had not been intended for an army.
The young demon spread the paper out on her veranda floor, carefully checking for any other information. The paper yielded few secrets though, and she puffed her cheeks in irritation. Probably a foregone arrangement, the purple-eyed girl considered, with this as a less formal proposal for action? It made sense, given the circumstances of the neighboring territories. The only question was, who was the "lady" awaiting her army? And what was her objective?
Well, it's certainly not to play at romance.
The message's hapless carrier hissed as harshly as it could manage through locked jaws, and the murderous, stupidly baleful haze in its eye left her no illusions about its intention. I could have killed you it spat crazily, I would have slashed those eyes out and torn that shapely face, if you'd only had the grace to announce your coming. Mei Lai grinned slightly, a lopsided look that seemed out of place on her delicate features, before turning away uninterested. The crow minion continued struggling, but her poisons were strong and already freezing the animal into a strange, waxed-statue parody of life. If the bird had possessed lips, they would have already curled into a rigor-mortis snarl. It would be unconscious soon.
The characters were simple enough, but the handwriting was haphazard and irregular- highly unusual for a note of such importance. Possibly a third or fourth-class scribe had written it, Mei Lai decided---unless the document's writer had anticipated an interloper and purposefully altered his style. That Lord Wu had sent it was undeniable- his own thumbprint was affixed as a seal, and unless she was mistaken three-eyed crows were Lord Xiao's domain. It made sense; she'd been expecting those two to make a move sometime soon. Although Baron Chang had been known to use them, from time to time...either way, such allegiances could only bode ill for her household. Especially since, if she took the "waiting lady" and her "pine trees" correctly, one or both parties was arranging a transfer of troops...
For the next several hours, Mei Lai practiced copying the characters in verbatim, experimenting with the best of her brushes before finally deciding on the proper combination. Once she thought she had suitably captured the angle of her "lover's note" (she had come to think of it with such affection), she delved into her own collection of correspondence papers. The most important factor, even more than the color, was the grain---too much, and her techniques wouldn't work easily. Too little, and the paper would be eaten alive.
Mei Lai selected a medium-grade white, as close to the original as possible. A simple knife severed the thumbprint seal from the message body, leaving a rough edge. Brushing the original text aside, Mei Lai lay the seal piece flush against the edge of her blank sheet. The grains did match up, she noted with approval, wondering idly if Lord Wu's house met the same paper-seller that her father did. Concentrating as hard as she could, the woman stretched her right hand and drove the poison into her claw-tips.
She didn't know how she made it work, how she could concentrate and summon up such a specific poison from deep within her blood, but it was tiring when done wrong and exhausting when done right. Somewhere deep inside, Mei Lai could feel a tingling that meant her toxic glands were busy at work; she took a deep breath and focused on the paper.
Just a very little of her poison essence surfaced at the tip of her index finger, beading and running down the side. This particular secretion was clear, all the better for its most useful task. Carefully, Mei Lai lowered the oozing claw to the overlapped edges of the paper. There was an acrid smell, as always, and then the fibers began dissolving and reforming together; literally melting away the rift between the papers. They were joining well - almost too quickly - so she pulled back a little with a careful flex of her fingers.
Almost as soon as she finished sliding her claws across the paper edges, Mei Lai began smoothing the paper with her left hand, oozing small amounts of counter-toxin to halt the melting. The seam was too smooth, unnatural even to the untrained eye, but in hazy candlelight late at night it was unlikely to be discovered. Better still, she could make it part of the fold (those always have strange textures) and...
You're grasping at straws here. She chided herself ruefully. Besides, if her handiwork was discovered - no one could trace it back to her. It was the only comfort she had with her correspondences anymore. She might have found it sad, had she not been so intent on her project.
Once the poisons had suitably worked themselves out, the demon leaned back to reach for her brushes and made short work of penning a new message above the thumbprint seal, mimicking the style used in the original. She wasn't sure if the imagery was important to the receiver, so she left it in - but changed the meaning entirely.
"My Lady waits in the grove
But the pine trees are evergreen.
Her husband need not climb the mountain yet."
An outright refusal would be too outlandish, and the receiver would know the bird had been intercepted. To merely say the troops were not needed yet...
Mei Lai scowled. If she had her way, the troops would never BE needed.
The crow demon shuddered weakly as she lifted its left limb again but could do little more than gape at her audacity. Folding the replacement note carefully, she rebound the parchment as carefully as she had first seen it, right down to the knot. It would only be a short time before the crow was up and about, but first she would rest.
Finally finished, the young demon lay back to contemplate the fall.
The loss of their ancestral lands was imminent in the winter, but no one felt it as painfully as Mei Lai (by her reckoning). She could feel it in her bones, in her claw-tips-in every drop of blood splashed recklessly over the old, hallowed grounds. The boundaries were changing again, new forces growing to the northwest, and she could feel control draining away from her as steadily as the weeds advanced on her once well-tended garden. She could no more halt their advance with her little notes than remove the Moon (may she live forever) from the sky.
What do you do, when everything is ending?
It must have seemed the same to her ancestors, who lived through even darker times, but Mei Lai was still a young demon - still too new at living to believe in hope at the end of the tunnel. And from her pessimistic standpoint, there was no evidence it ever had. Her family had survived, this past six hundred years, but only that - her older siblings hadn't been the ones to drive the wild-haired barbarians back; they had only retreated into increasingly smaller fortresses. Cowardly. Necessary. The family had survived, and Mei herself was born-- but into a shadow of the former empire. They had prayed so hard for her manhood that nobody noticed once she proved female, and consequently the youngest child was free to see what everyone else had missed: how decrepit the compounds were despite the cheery decorum, how the borders were violated everyday by no-name interlopers. How her sisters were whored out, one by one, to hold a failing position in local politics - bride prices bought far too cheap for the wrong reasons. How truces that should be binding were slashed and violated, each in turn, until even close neighbors could not be trusted.
And most of all, how the city women laughed.
Mei Lai's cheeks flared and she hissed involuntarily. The crow minion shifted awkwardly beside her, stirred by her distress, and she turned her head just enough to look straight into its foggy eye. It was coming around but still far from mobile, caught in the throes of something it couldn't see, or sense, or fight.
We aren't so different, little one...Mei Lai thought as her claws lit with a counter-toxin to the paralyzing agent she'd used earlier. It hissed again, glaring as defiantly as one could through wide, dialated eyes. Did it even understand it was trapped? Somehow, that thought made the situation even more perverse.
The beast squawked only faintly as she slipped her longest finger behind its head, searching for a useful vein. She concentrated briefly to add a slight stupor-inducing toxin into the antidote already flowing through her veins. Crow minions were excellent homing animals, but their short-term memories could be disrupted easily. With any luck, she could fog its mind just enough to let it forget its training, and eventually it should return on its journey very little the wiser. And if it remembered, and destroyed the message...
It doesn't matter. Mei Lai considered, restraining the creature under one arm as she pierced its veins. They'll send another.
The crow began reviving almost instantly, cramped muscles relaxing into taut but workable shapes once again. It was indeed angry, but its struggles seemed unfocused...as if it couldn't quite decide whether to bite the arm cradling it or the air. One crazed, reddened eye blinked up at her, and she winked back.
"Go little one. Remember your mission, and do not fail to return to your master once your task is completed." She urged, noting the jerky way it dipped its head: a clumsy, but obedient, nod.
"Mei?" A grating voice wavered into her apartments.
Mei Lai hastily shoved the bird off the veranda, watching impatiently as it teetered about on the ground...then jumped awkwardly...then flew.
Heading west to Lord Xiao, if the shadows were correct.
Her thin lips curved into a proud smile.
"Mei? Daughter?" More insistent this time.
"Coming, Father!"
Repressing her discontent, Mei Lai shoved her other correspondences aside, leaving a large note unopened on top. A slight breeze nipped at its edges, teasing it open, but only a passing rat ever saw its contents.
Mainly, it sat there.
Author's Notes:
*phew* That was a hard chapter to write! I hope it wasn't too brief of an introduction, setting this whole fic up has proved to take more talent than I fear I have. Don't worry, I won't give up--I've got too much of the later stuff planned out for that ^_~ I'll post chapter 4 fairly soon after (before Friday) and use the weekend to get ahead so I can actually update once a week (shock!)
Response to Reviews:
Dark Kitsune:
*blush* Thanks so much for your kind comments! You certainly guilt-tripped me into updating faster ^_~
Thunk:
Great name, huh? Well, the credit goes to Takahashi-sensei for that one - I seem to recall somewhere at the beginning Myouga mentions his lord's name was Inutaishou (literally, "dog general") ^_~ But I'm glad you liked him-I was worried he would come off as too violent, since there's so many happy-waffy backplot scenarios out there ;/ The way I figure, he'd have to have some amount of violence in him to maintain the Western Lands...and to have kids like Sesshoumaru and Inuyasha ^_^ Hope you continue enjoying this (and when can we expect more from you?)
Kylara:
Once again, I am flattered to have such an observant reader. Looking back, I realize that my grammar just completely fell on its face in that fic...thanks for noticing. Do you beta read, by any chance? *grin* As for the crow/raven distinction, thanks for catching that...I didn't know there was a species difference, my bad. I was thinking of my first impression of Japanese "crows"-unlike American crows, those beasties are s-c-a-r-y. Those beaks look like they could crunch through concrete, and they really are menacing...add that to the oversized spiders and centipedes, and suddenly all those animal-demons make so much more sense! Finally, mad props to you for pointing out the "white demon" line. Although his coloration did play a large role in the descriptions, I was actually considering the white/black connections...I love it when I can make something violent/evil pure white ^_^ I can't believe somebody noticed! *gives Kylara a kudos bar*