The dream began as it always did, with the angry hiss of leaping flames and the stench of burning bodies. Then came the sea of people, screaming, shoving each other, trampling the fallen. Kikyo's eyes widened in horror and she turned to run, only to be thrown to the ground as the crush of people overtook her. Tears stung her eyes as a heavy boot crushed her hand. Even above the roar of the crowd she could hear delicate bones snap and grind into each other. She tried to stand, to pull herself free of the human riptide, but before she took her second step a hard shove from behind sent her sprawling. Her forehead struck the ground so hard that her vision went blurry. She blinked, noticing the blood streaming down her face only as a harsh sting in her eyes.. She began to cry, but everyone ignored her in their race to get away.

Kikyo curled into a tight ball, trying to protect herself until the crowd passed by. Twice her ribs were stomped cruelly and each time her breath was driven from her chest in an anguished sob, but she didn't dare move. In the dream she was no battle-hardened priestess but instead merely a scared little girl. In the dream, she was in hell, and all she could do was cover her eyes and wait.

Suddenly she was alone. The street was empty, and there was nothing around her but smoke swirling through the canyon of steel and glass. Slowly, cautiously, Kikyo rose to her feet, cradling her tiny broken hand against her chest. With stomach churning horror she realized that all of the buildings surrounding her were ablaze. The crackling flames seemed to laugh at her from their lofty perches on the rooftops. Underneath her, the ground heaved and a sound like thunder echoed in the distance. Then it came again. And again. Even though Kikyo had endured the dream enough times to know exactly what would happen next, she could do nothing to quell the swooning horror that came as she realized, for the hundredth night, that the cacophonous sounds were approaching footsteps. She spun on her heels, ready to run, but the ground seemed to leap up beneath her and she fell gracelessly to her knees.

Never once in the many times she had the dream did Kikyo want to turn around, to look back and see just what it was that she had been running from, but she always did. Blackened buildings rose like giant grave markers, stabbing upwards toward the churning black skies. Behind the buildings burned the perpetual sunset of a city ablaze, and acrid columns of smoke stretched up to support the falling storm clouds that swirled above. She stood up slowly, her legs quaking uncooperatively, and swallowed dryly, trying to force her heart back down into her chest. The clouds of smoke were becoming thicker, and they reached out their tendrils to claw her reddened eyes. The darkness seemed to close in around her.

Then, above the buildings, she could see its head. It was black, difficult to make out against the backdrop of the sky, but its mouth was set in a cold smile of dirty fangs. Its eyes, blank, dead eyes without pupils, burned with an evil light, cutting twin paths through the gloom. The monster's head turned slowly, as if scanning the horizon behind her, and Kikyo stood as still as she could, hoping that perhaps, just perhaps, it would overlook her. It let loose a guttural growl that Kikyo felt as much as heard . Though she couldn't be sure from a distance, she thought she could see the air in front of its face rippling with heat as it exhaled.

Kikyo must have made some small noise, just enough to attract the creature's attention, because it snapped its head downwards, fixing its hateful, empty eyes on her. Her stomach turned to ice. The monster stared at her for what felt like an eternity, and Kikyo's realized in queasy terror that it wasn't just seeing her like an animal, it was looking at her, a malign intelligence burning behind its ghostly white eyes. Then it threw its head back, and Kikyo could see the powerful muscles in its throat working as it roared. It was a sound unlike anything she'd ever heard, a bellow of the purest rage and hatred echoing maddeningly off of the few buildings that still stood.

And then she could hear nothing, not even the sound of the building crumbling as the monster began to step through it, tearing at steel and mortar with its claws as though it was cutting through a paper door. She didn't know why, but Kikyo took a step forward. Her body kept going long after her feet stopped moving, and in the back of her mind she knew she was falling, but somehow it didn't seem important. Even as the street rushed at her from the front, a darker blackness came hurtling towards her from behind. Kikyo's vision began to dim.

Strong arms circled around her small waist, catching her and lifting her away from the street. As she was hefted up onto a friendly shoulder she caught a final glimpse of the monster, its head blocking out the sky. Its jaws began to open, and its maw was filled with leaping blue flames…

Kikyo suddenly found herself staring into the quiet night sky. Crickets chirped all around her in a delicate chorus that sounded throughout the forest. She was standing in the field west of the village, her feet wet from the dewy grass. Two of her soul collectors circled her lazily, their bodies dancing through the air like serpentine ribbons. Kikyo shut her eyes until the last traces of the dream finally disappeared from her sight. She was bathed in sweat despite the chill night air, her silken hair clinging to her face in strings. For a long moment she stood there with her eyes closed, hugging her arms across her chest. A cool breeze danced across her face.

The dream only came to her once when she was alive, shortly after she and Inuyasha had begun courting. She never told him about it. She was too ashamed at how much it had shaken her. Looking back, Kikyo thought that she would have told him eventually, that in time she would have revealed to him that small vulnerability as they began to more fully share themselves with one another. She let a small smile creep across her lips at the thought of the intimacy they might have shared, but it was short-lived.

I died before I could tell him.

Kikyo's smile was gone before it had fully formed. She had been killed, and the life that once stretched out before her and her paramour ended on a funeral pyre.

And now…now there is only this, Kikyo thought, aware as ever of the stolen souls that rippled and swam through her counterfeit body. They constantly moved within her, and she felt them as spots of warmth in her perpetually cool body of transmuted clay and grave dirt.

The dream had begun to come more and more frequently after her resurrection. Even now, changed as she was from the woman she had once been, she was terrified by the dream in a way she didn't understand. And, just as before, it shamed her to be frightened by such a thing. She had struck down too many demons to be afraid of her nightmares, but still it came, each night more vivid and with more terrible intensity. Many times she had watched the sunrise only because the dream continued to burn in her mind long after she awoke, the monster's luminous eyes shining in the darkness whenever she closed her eyes.

Kikyo frowned at herself, once again disappointed by her own inability to ignore something so trite as a simple bad dream. As she turned to walk towards the village, she found herself thinking of Inuyasha. She wondered if the spell had run its course yet, if he had realized in one of his more and more infrequent periods of lucidity all the savagery he had wrought. She knew well enough of Inuyasha's pride, how he considered himself superior to the more barbaric of his kind. Sooner or later the horrors he committed in his feral state would overwhelm him, and then, with no ties left to this world, he would return to her. She would take his life, along with her own, and rest with him for eternity in the afterworld.

Then, she thought wistfully, perhaps I shall tell him about the dream.

"Lady Sango."

The small voice was so faint that Sango almost brushed it aside as her imagination. She had been astride Kirara for hours, circling high above the forest canopy in search of Inuyasha, and it wasn't remotely beyond the realm of possibility that her mind was playing tricks on her. She still couldn't put the image of Inuyasha's milky, sick eyes out of her mind, and that alone had lead her to press on long after both she and Kirara were exhausted. After the day's events, hearing voices seemed like the least of her worries.

"Lady Sango, I must speak with you," the tiny voice insisted, and this time Sango recognized it as Myoga the flea. She looked down to find him peering at her from the fur on the back of Kirara's head.

Now where did he come from?

"I don't have time for you now, Myoga," she replied, hardly paying him a second glance. She gave Kirara a gentle squeeze with her legs, signaling the demon to descend closer to the treetops. By this point she had abandoned strategy in favor of the hope that Kirara would, by some force of luck or miracles, catch Inuyasha's scent on the breeze and manage to follow it to its source.

"I must speak with you about Lord Inuyasha," Myoga implored, and this finally got her attention.