Scroll Five:
Rin; the girl who can not speak
For the first time in what seemed like an eternity to the little girl, Rin was happy. She was convinced she had found her fairy tale prince. The fact that her prince was a demon did not concern her. Of course he was a demon; but he was still her prince come to take her away from here horrible life of scavenging for food and being beaten for trying to survive.
It had been so long since her mother told her those stories before she tucked her into her futon; stories of courageous lords and evil demons, that she had forgotten that the prince was supposed to vanquish the demon instead of being the demon.
So she followed her lord Sesshomaru blindly, trusting that the great demon lord would do what was right for her. After all, he had saved her from those wolves.
She was not quite sure what had happened that night; she had been running from the wolves, panicked and exhausted, when she tripped. Things got hazy after that; she remembered snapping jaws, and pain, then nothing. The next thing she knew, her demon prince was standing over her, and not a wolf in sight.
And so, since the prince and the heroine were always supposed to live happily ever after, she had followed him. She only wished that he would stop trying to leave her behind.
"Child! You let me out of here this instance! This is no time to be fooling around!" the indignant squawking was coming from inside the suit of armor, which was currently shaking with Jaken's attempts to get out of the thing. If Rin could remember how to speak, she would have apologized for trapping him in there. Instead she clasped the two headed staff at her side and bowed politely from the waist. She had stolen the staff from him shortly before she had locked him up in the armor.
Rin did not like having to trap him in the samurai suit, but he would have stopped her from following lord Sesshomaru. She did not like staying in this stuffy palace either, and she couldn't understand why her lord would leave her alone here. Jaken was good company and made funny sounds, and he would be even better if he would stop insulting her, but no amount of indignant squawks wrenched from the toad-like being could replace the feeling of safety her demon prince inspired.
At first it had seemed wrong somehow that one so beautiful as her lord should have such a hideous servant, and so she had tried to chase Jaken away by hitting him over the head with a bamboo switch. But when Sesshomaru took the bamboo away from her she realized that Sesshomaru did not care what Jaken looked like, only that Jaken was a good servant. Of course Rin had not yet seen Sesshomaru kick Jaken across the room merely for talking too much, thus her head was filled with notions of a just and fair Sesshomaru.
Even if she were to discover this to be far from the truth, she would think no less of him, for one must always have faith in their prince. She could look into those strange golden eyes, eyes that were emotionless to others, and through some trick of the light or fancy of her childlike imagination, she could see that he would protect her. Just by looking into his eyes she knew he was her prince.
And though the child may only be imagining compassion in the icy depths of Sesshomaru's eyes, she was not wrong; for although he may not admit it to even himself, he would protect her with his life.
She left the two headed staff at the feet of the furiously quivering suit of armor and skipped off, trying to remember the words to a song her mother had taught her. And more importantly, trying to remember how to sing.
She remembered her mother singing, happy tunes as she gathered herbs, and she remembered singing those songs with her mother, she just couldn't remember how. Rin was sure she'd figure it out somehow. But for now she would just have to make do.
Even the last words her mother had spoken to her had seemed musical when she had told her to be silent so long ago. The four uncounted years since her mother died seemed like an eternity to little Rin; she was sure she couldn't be more than a gazillion years old by now, when, in fact she was only seven.
She tried to think of happier things as the memories of the raid crept back, but as with trying not to think of the little brown monkeys while stirring the cauldron to make gold, telling yourself not to think about something doesn't work.
She remembered when the first arrow flew in, taking her father in the throat.
"Mommy, why isn't daddy getting up?" Rin began to feel fear well up from the pits of her stomach, and her head buzzed strangely, making everything seem surreal.
"Daddy! Get up! Da-" Her mothers firm hand clamped over Rins mouth as she picked her up and whisked her inside their little house. Her mother hid her inside the chest they kept the futons in. Just before she closed the lid she kissed Rin on the forehead.
"Rin, be a good girl all right?" there was fear and grief in her mothers eyes, unshed tears warring with determination.
"Whatever you do Rin, stay in here and don't make a sound, okay? Not a word." Rin nodded dumbly. Her mother smoothed her hair and kissed her on the forehead one last time before grabbing her herb satchel and closing the lid of the chest, leaving Rin in the darkness with only the sound of her own breathing and the screams of the dying to keep her company.
Her breathing was hoarse and loud in her ears, she was sure somebody else would be able to hear it. She held her breath, trying to be absolutely silent as her mother had told her, but though she could hold her breath until she grew dizzy, she could not stop breathing, and each time the burning need for oxygen consumed her, her tortured breathing seemed louder and louder. She wanted to cry out in frustration that she could not do as her mother had instructed her, but did not.
Finally the gnawing worm of fear burrowing through her stomach clawed its way into her brain and distracted her from trying to control her breathing.
What was going on out there?
Where was mommy?
Why didn't daddy get up when she called him?
All these questions ran through her mind, dancing sickeningly across her imagination, her sightless eyes straining to see through the thick darkness inside the chest. And each time the questions ran through her head, the possible answers became progressively worse. As she cowered alone, and in the dark, her imaginings became worse and worse; her mother was ripped to bloody shreds by twenty foot monsters, the ground opened up with a great fiery maw and swallowed her daddy whole, while shadowy beasts with red eyes waited for her just out side the chest and would pounce and eat her insides if she so much as sneezed.
Of course, when she thought about sneezing she immediately had to. Her eyes wide with fear, she immediately brought her hands up to her nose and pinched it as hard as she could. She couldn't sneeze; if she made any noise at all terrible things would happen. In her minds eye the shadowy beasts became clearer, bright red eyes crazy with hunger, dank fur hanging in mats all around them, except were viscous spikes protruded, six inch fangs gleaming wetly as they salivated in anticipation of eating her insides, just waiting for her to sneeze. And she was back to sneezing; the itch was gone, she took her hands carefully from her nose, ready to clamp them back on should the itch even think of returning. She could almost smell the fell beasts horrid stench as they breathed on the chest, just waiting for her to make a noise. The smell was acrid, a burning scent that she was sure meant that the creatures breathed fire.
On and on it went, the darkness feeding her imagination like dry scrub in a wildfire, the adrenaline and fear coursing through her frantically pounding heart exhausting her, until finally she became lost in a delirium of shadows and blood.
Sometime after that, the clash of metal and screams of men and animals faded, to be replaced with the moans of the dying and the smell of charred flesh. She reasoned she must have been in that chest for more than a hundred years by now. She waited another hundred years in cramped exhaustion for her mother to return with words of soothing comfort: 'Of course I'm all right Rin, I'll always be here for you.' or 'Your fathers fine Rin, he only tripped.' But no words ever came, nor did her mother. She cried herself silently to sleep.
When she awoke, it was to the grim knell of the ravens call. She cracked the lid of the chest open. Sunlight fell through motes of soot and dust; making the air appear to swirl murkily. The timbers of one wall where charred, and the wooden screen over the doorway was completely gone. Her stomach growled, and she told it silently to be quiet.
She climbed out of the chest, hoping that her mother wouldn't scold her for coming out. She crossed the blackened dirt floor to the doorway, her eyes widened with shock at what she saw.
Bodies, everywhere. A few stunned villagers moved among the wreckage, picking through the rubble or crying out piteously for loved ones, but other than the ravens and a single unblinking cat, nothing moved.
She jumped as the charred framework of the house across the path collapsed, crumbling to dust before her eyes and peppering her with cold ashes. She closed her eyes and tried to rub the soot out of them, but she only made them sting worse. Silent tears tracked runnels through the dirt on her cheeks.
She looked to her side, to the place were she had seen her father fall. She saw a seething mass of black ravens cawing raucously and jostling one another, an arrow shaft protruded up out of the mass, its feathered shaft pointing skyward toward a sun that was much too bright. As she approached, many of the ravens flew off calling out rudely, nearby the cat flicked its tail.
At first she didn't realize what she was looking at, when she did, her mind was scarred forever.
His eyes were gone, nothing left but bloody sockets oozing jelly. Something squished under her feet and she realized she was standing in a pool of blood and intestines, his stomach lay some twenty feet away, dragged there by some scavenging animal, his various other organs stretched out in a crazy path from her fathers body to his stomach. His exposed flesh was pocked with scratches and flies buzzed around his open mouth.
Her own mouth opened in a silent scream of horror, and she stumbled away clumsily, biting the insides of her cheeks to keep from making a noise, she couldn't make a noise, her mother had told her not to. She bit down harder and harder, fighting the urge to scream, she bit down until she tasted blood, and still she wanted to scream.
She turned and fled into the woods, it was probably for the best that she never found her mothers body.
As she forced herself out of the memory, Rin realized she had come to a stop in the middle of a palace hallway. She was trembling with remembered grief and trying furiously not to let the unshed tears in her eyes slip out. After all, she had found her prince; she had no reason to be unhappy.
She wiped her eyes with her kimono sleeve and forced herself to keep moving, her feet trudging along, scuffing the immaculately polished wood of the floor.
She continued in this manner for several long minutes, until she reached the great double doors of the entrance hall and saw a rainbow wisp of light waiting for her. Then, in one of the sudden mercurial shifts of mood children are prone to, she remembered the red headed Nirakumi and a smile split her face from ear to ear. She remembered the flying woman's words from the previous night: 'now Rin, your prince Sesshomaru is going to try to leave you behind when he leaves tomorrow. He thinks it is the best thing for you, but what he doesn't know is that he is going to need your help. So I want you to wait until noon tomorrow then follow this.' Nirakumi demonstrated, she waved her fingers through the air and a rainbow hued wisp of light issued forth from her fingertips. 'this will guide you to Sesshomaru, but only you will be able to see it, so don't tell any body about it, alright?' Rin remembered nodding, and thinking that Nirakumis' last comment was strange; if she couldn't even remember how to talk, how could Rin tell anybody about a wisp of light only she could see?
Nirakumi was even better than Jaken, when it came to amusement value; not only did Nirakumi make funny comments all the time, she could fly!
Rin recalled the exhilarating rush she had felt when Nirakumi had picked her up and flown right to the top of the palace, then sat back and hovered in midair, the view of the stars from the roof had been awe inspiring to the little girl, and as Nirakumi spoke quietly of how she needed to trust Sesshomaru no matter what, Rin had tried to count the them. She fell asleep like that, wondering what it was like to touch one.
And so it was that when she woke in the morning she was puzzled to find herself on a futon in a chamber adjacent to Sesshomaru's room, wondering if it had been a dream.
The ribbon of light was right here in front of her, though, and she was pleased that it had not been a dream, and that she had not just locked Jaken in a samurai suit for nothing.
Thus the intrepid girls' adventure began; with no idea where she would go, what she would do when she got there, and following a wisp of light that only she could see. But that's just how life is, isn't it?
And so the chapter ends with the scintillating questions;
Is Rin insane?
Is this story ever going to end?
Will I be able to keep my PG rating?
Tune in next time for another ridiculously short addition of Golden Eyes!
Authors note: I certainly hope my story doesn't get deleted for that scene with her father. But it had to be done; something that would scare a child baldly enough as to make her forget how to speak has to be pretty bad.
Also, thank you to Anna's Pastime for your support, up until now nobody has seemed interested in my story. I suppose I can attribute it to the sheer number of fics in the Inuyasha category, but still, your reviews mean a lot to me.