A/N: I own nothing. I am not, nor will I ever be, Rumiko Takahashi. This story is not meant to make any money. Please also be aware that I will not respond to reviews via Fanfiction, but e-mail, and that you may find it on my userpage.
Warning: somewhat dark; liable to not make any sense at first. Mucho violence ahead.
I enjoy flames. In fact, I bask in them.
Sesshomaru's hurried steps were easily distinguishable in the silence of the forest. At any other point in time, he would have been silent, deadly and watchful, but his tension outweighed any possibility of grace.
Tonight, it was a different kind of grace.
He fell to his knees in the denseness of the thicket and clutched the air as another wave of pain shot through his gut. An almost childlike whimper gurgled at the back of his throat, but he ignored it for the time being.
His exhausted rest was broken by four consecutive 'THUK's. Sesshomaru scrambled violently to his feet, and desperately launched himself forward again, allowing a fair bit of distance between himself and IT, for IT had come again.
And this time, IT would not leave him alone.
What had he sold his soul for? What was this thing that haunted him like a murderous shadow? For what purpose did it crave for his sanity- this sanity which was all he had left to show after that disgusting night of something...
And even as he thought of it, he could not help but moan. That night... that night he could not remember, and yet he knew it with a great and heaving revulsion...
Oh God... what was it?
He heard the silence, and launched himself to the right, just as IT tore into the place he had been moments before. Sesshomaru feebly attempted to fool the creature by circling sharply and re-emerging on the path he had just tried to escape from, but IT had seen his folly, and lashed out at him again.
He had barely moved aside quickly enough to avoid being impaled, but the creature's harm did not go unwasted. IT had torn a new wound in the already-wounded Sesshomaru, and now the great Lord of the West was no more powerful than a half-drowned kitten.
Whimpering slightly, he lurched to his feet and charged forward as fast as his treacherous body would allow. His movements were devoid of the honor he had once possessed- gone and replaced with a wild instinct to survive; an instinct which, he noted, was no more honorable than a human's.
Sesshomaru tried to listen to the forest- to anything, actually, but there was no sound. The creature did not breathe. It did not speak, nor think, nor possess a heartbeat, and everything around it was somehow silenced into the same deafening tone. Try as he might to ignore it, the demon lord somehow could not avoid the hideous fact. He passed a waterfall within a second, and though the water tumbled and churned on the sharp rocks in a manner which would have assumed much noise, there was dead silence. So, too, did he run briefly with a wolf pack, whose heavy snorts and howls might have conveyed an exhaustion of a hunt, but their movements contained no noise.
Perhaps, in essence, this thing was his punishment. His worst fear.
Silence.
Sesshomaru hissed as his wounds raged. He wanted to stumble- to fall and never get back up, but something inhibited him from doing so.
The creature-?
No. Not IT. That thing could understand nothing but fear and pain. This was his doing. His will. The one pro to his con, and suddenly he knew that the only way to stop IT was through this gift.
Summoning his last reserves of strength, Sesshomaru gave a mighty lunge, and felt the force of his demonic aura giving him this last attempt at escape. He plunged so quickly through the forest that he could see almost nothing; blinded by his pain as he raked against trees, unable to control which way he ran until the last of it dwindled away.
Then, almost as quickly as he had begun it, he stopped. His demonic aura was gone, and replaced with an agony that was nearly indescribable. Sesshomaru screamed at the top of his lungs as he fell helplessly to the ground; feeling like he was burning alive, and writhing uselessly.
Just before his vision faded, he saw his hand.
His claws were gone.
I'm assuming we'll all know about this by the third chapter.
(Insert witty comment here)