Balance

By Kracken L. W.

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of the affiliated characters. Only the sage is mine.

He sat alone in the tree, watching the darkness creep out from under the branches towards the village below. Miroku and Sango were away from the village; called by a neighboring community to help them destroy an unusually aggressive wind spirit. He could not bring himself to go with them. He had no heart for such things anymore. Not to mention that to see the newly-weds together at their old occupation was to rub salt in an all too fresh wound. He would not have been much use to them tonight anyway. Tonight was the new moon, and as soon as the dark circle rose, he would be human, human . . . and helpless. Eyes fixed on the horizon; he climbed higher into the relative safety of the canopy, and waited for moonrise.

Liu Chun, sage of the Yellow Dragon School, had traveled far from his home, and would probably never see the Middle Kingdome again. But this was a trivial matter to a Yellow Dragon; it was a consequence of their destiny. His home was where he chose to make it, provided only that he could find peace and solitude in nature. Cities were not for him, and this region, its sparse population scattered through out the mountains, woodlands, and fields, suited him well. There was a balance here that he had not seen in a long time. All of the elements were in harmony, with little or no conflict between the mortal and the spiritual worlds to disturb the opened mind.

This had not always been the case, for he was given to understand that only a few moons before his arrival a great rift in the energy flows had been settled, and a thousand year imbalance corrected. Wishing to learn more, for preservation of the past was one of his duties, he had been directed to one Kaede, a wise old priestess and guardian of a small village to the west of the mountains where he currently made his home. What little he knew of the story so far intrigued him; especially the tales of a half-breed demon. Such a being, perfectly balanced between the mortal and spiritual worlds, was a rare and valuable find. To be able to study such a one, to learn from it, perhaps even to teach . . .

He sighed. To teach, to pass on his knowledge of the past and the techniques for gathering understanding of the present, was the one thing he was absolutely sworn to do. However, the one thing this otherwise perfect habitat had not provided him with was a pupil. He desperately needed someone whose innate sense of the balance of things matched, or even surpassed, his own. He tossed off this melancholy train of thought with a shake of his head and a wry grin. Oh well, what could he expect of a place so recently in such turmoil? Perhaps given time, which he had plenty of, his disciple would be born. He chuckled at his own wandering thoughts and, resettling his pack, took a fresh grip on his ironclad staff and continued on into the twilight.