Here it is, another chapter, just in time for Christmas! And Hannukah and Kwanza, too, although less precisely. And just a bit late for the winter solstice. And for my mom's birthday. And so….

Dedication: This chapter is for my dear mother, whose birthday was a few days ago. She liked the card very much, baf!

Aaand…Disclaimer: I forgot this last chapter. Possibly the chapter before as well. Do I haaaaave to say it? Do I? Can't we pretend Miroku and Sango and everyone are mine? v.v;; OK, OK…THEY'RE NOT MINE! THEY BELONG TO TAKAHASHI-SAN! THAT'S TAKAHASHI RUMIKO-SAN, NOT THE TAKAHASHI KAZUKI-SAN WHO WRITES MY BROTHER'S YU-GI-OH MANGA!

They had, once again, gotten started, after Inuyasha and Kagome had come back out of the trees. One might wonder why they were always starting and stopping, but then one is probably not walking all day in the wilderness with a lot of incompatible personalities, one of which is a put-upon hanyou in the habit of being a driven person. One might also wonder why, since (barring the sun having changed the direction of its movement several times without their noticing) they had been traveling in the same direction for a few days, they had not seen anything but trees and rocks and isolated enemies. Aerie did in fact mention this to Trisak. "I didn't know there was so much wilderness in Japan," she remarked quietly around two in the afternoon. "Actually, I didn't know there was so much Japan in Japan."

"This is an accommodating sort of world we're in here," he replied with a shrug. "It provides. We're probably in some sort of long belt of uncultivated land that has just happened to have been here all along."

"It provides?" Aerie asked. "Except for maybe you, being lost in the forest is the last thing any of us want."

He shrugged and flipped over to walk on his hands, craning his neck so he could still look at her. The loss of his wings did not seem to be heavily perturbing him. They were already growing back. "Did I say anything about what you want? That's Home, always very obliging. Nah, I get the sense that this is the sort of place that likes…stories. It's got story woven into the bedrock. The impossible probably happens all the time here, as long as it's narratively convenient." He grinned at her, then sprang right way up again.

Aerie thought about what she knew of this world, mostly in the way of Inuyasha and Kagome's life stories, and concurred. This was food for thought. She squirreled it away against lean times.

Trisak seemed to be trying to be conciliatory. He was being relatively quiet, except when he had taught everyone a walking song meant to be sung at the top of the lungs to which the chorus was mostly about food, which meant they ate lunch a lot earlier than usual because singing about bread and rice and meat made them all hungry.

He had made friends with Shippou, too, not that this was the hardest thing in the world to do, and was getting on pretty well with everyone else by now as well. He had zipped up and down the column for most of the morning seizing opportunities to walk and talk with members of the group. Even Kagome seemed to have gotten over her original stepped-upon-squeaky-toy reaction to his confession about what he had done to Inuyasha. In fact, the only person who still disliked him was Inuyasha.

Who had just stopped glowering at the ground and the air in front of him, replacing it with glowering at a spot to the right. Trisak cartwheeled down the slope they were making their way down under Inuyasha's leadership to land beside him. "What's wrong, Inuyasha-dono?" he asked, a miracle of manners since he usually reserved all honorifics, whatever the language, for people who had beaten him at something or people he really liked.

"Someone who's even more annoying than you are," Inuyasha muttered.

"Oh? Neat!" Trisak said. "I'll have to work hard to beat him now, I hope you understand. Who is it?"

The new arrival announced himself in a whirlwind of speed as he metaphorically screeched to a halt. It was Kouga, of course. "What are you doing here, fleabag?" Inuyasha demanded, stepping in front of the wolf as soon as he was visible.

"What else? I smelled your foul reek as I was passing and wanted to make sure you've been treating my Kagome right," Kouga replied, and with a rapid zip and small dusty cloud he was around Inuyasha and in front of Kagome. "Sure you won't change your mind and come with me, my beautiful one?" he asked, taking her hand.

Kagome shook her head. "No, Kouga. I'm afraid not, as always."

"What does that mean, 'you're afraid' not!" Inuyasha demanded again. He did a lot of demanding, Aerie had noticed.

"Well, muttface, obviously it means that she'd really like to come with me, but knows that you'd get your doggy butt killed without her, so her conscience won't let her leave," Kouga answered smoothly. "Isn't that right, Kagome?"

Kagome was saved answering by having to sit Inuyasha as he launched himself at Kouga at rocketship speed. The wolf-youkai turned to cast an eye over what was either a troop (soldiers) or a troupe (clowns); it was sometimes hard to tell. "You've got some new friends, mutt," he said, apparently ignoring the fact that Inuyasha had just done a violent face-plant.

"Not my friends," he muttered, spitting out a mouthful of dirt and weeds.

Aerie opened her mouth to say Owch, Inuyasha, that smarts, and after we've saved each other, too,and closed it again. It wasn't as if that would make him like her any better, especially in front of Kouga.

At that moment, Ginta and Hakkaku arrived, panting. "Kouga, why'd you disappear like that…? Oh," Ginta said. "Hi, Sister Kagome."

"Hello, Ginta," Kagome replied. Kouga was still holding her hand.

"You worried us, Kouga. We thought something was wrong," said Hakkaku.

"Nothing that Kagome couldn't fix in an instant if she would come away with me," the prince replied.

Hakkaku fidgeted. "We-ell, actually…"

Kouga frowned. "Spit it out."

It was Ginta who answered. "The pack – the wolves. I mean, there's a fight. You know how you've been picking up packs as you went? The heads are fighting it out now, to see who's to rule this giant pack you've made of them. We couldn't – stop them."

"What!" Kouga cried. "The nerve…the absolute nerve…why didn't you tell me right away!" He turned to Kagome. "Yet again, sadly, circumstance draws me from your side. But do not fear, I will return to you!" And he was off again in his whirlwind. With hurried farewells, Ginta and Hakkaku wheeled around to start after him. They still hadn't caught their breath.

Trisak whistled as Inuyasha muttered curses that would have turned the air blue in an even more obliging world with a literal bent. "You know," Trisak remarked, "I'm not even going to bother trying. That was annoying."

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It had been a full day since the first stage of Yanagi's plans for Naraku's sub-basement had gone off without a hitch. Between them, Kagura and Yanagi had dug and concealed a tunnel leading from Naraku's basement to the nearest dungeon. It was not large enough for a grown man to pass without slithering, but Yanagi fitted very well. It had been almost fun to dig, although Kagura had wound up doing most of the work since she was both larger and much stronger. She'd tried to make the work go faster with her winds and all but collapsed the thing on Yanagi's head. The girl had given her a chewing-out about it which, although it had had the appearance of a robin scolding a hawk, had been quite effective due to its well-chosen words. Kagura had found, however, that Yanagi was difficult to resent. It was a talent. Kagura filed that thought away.

Now Kagura felt suspicious eyes on her, as Yanagi's pack gathered to meet in one of the bedrooms that had belonged to people who were dead. There was a thick layer of dust over everything. No one said anything, however, until they were seated on their heels in a circle that filled most of the room. Kagura counted silently. Twelve.

Yanagi raised one hand in the air, drawing the few bits of attention that hadn't been focused on her anyway. "Alright, everyone. I felt we needed to meet as a group at least once, for the sharing of information and for morale. Firstly, Kagura reports that the Dog's squad has moved into one of the safest safe zones in the country, so we can not move on bringing them in as yet, but that will be our next order of business. The slave-fighter Lelentaeli -" -she had been practicing saying the name or she'd never have made it through all of those l's- "-appears to be less than fully conditioned, which we may be able to use in future. I've already taken reports, but is there anything anyone would like to discuss?"

"We-ell," said Myaki, who was an earnest young man with a monkeyish face, who had he lived in another age might have had bumper stickers saying things like the tried and true 'What if they gave a war and nobody came?' "Yes. It's about her." He pointed to Kagura, who was sitting on Yanagi's left.

"What about her?" Yanagi asked, her tone betraying nothing of her opinion.

"Well, she's a demon, isn't she? One of his hellspawn, too. No offense meant, but this is just like letting a worm into our heart."

"Kagura is not to blame for her birth," Yanagi replied primly, "nor is she likely to betray us. She wants her freedom from Naraku as much as we do. And we need her. She is scout, spy, and if need be soldiery."

"Miss…she'll break," said Erisu. "She's his through and through. She'll tell him what we're doing, and that'll be the end of us."

Kagura's hands were clenched very tight, her nails biting into her palms. She would not have thought that it would bother her. It was just a lot of humans whose good opinions she wouldn't give half a moldy banana for. But the unfriendly eyes and the accusations of being no more, and having no potential to be more, than a servant to Naraku, they stung. She longed to make a biting, sarcastic retort, but knew that it would get her nowhere except possibly lynched.

Yanagi brought her fists down on the floor with a thump. Everyone jumped. It was the kind of thump that left you surprised that there wasn't a splintery crater in the floor, although there wasn't, of course. "That is quite enough of that," she declared. "I tell you we may trust her, we must trust her. We cannot succeed without her. Kagura, would you like to say anything?" She had known this would be a hurdle. Her pack had good reason to distrust Kagura, even to hate her. But she had to convince them to work together anyway. If she pulled this off, she would feel herself well-qualified to conduct negotiations for a permanent peace treaty between cats and dogs.

Kagura shook her head. "You have already said everything I might say," she answered dryly, "and they believe it more from you."

"But of course we do," put in Kagami, whose bumper sticker would say, 'I brake for scholars, priests, small mammals, and no particular reason.' "She is our wise and glorious leader. Truth drips like honey from her tongue."

"Eww, Kagami!" Kyoko protested. "That's disgusting. Who wants to eat honey that dripped off a tongue?"

Yanagi sat back. For now, at least, the river was crossed. She shared a glance with Kagura. They were getting to understand one another very well.

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"Do we have to go in?" Kagome asked about forty minutes later, looking nervously into the gloom of the cave they had discovered.

Inuyasha rolled his eyes. "No, Kagome. You can stay here; I'll go in. I can smell Naraku's stink in there, and that makes me curious."

Kagome tapped a foot. "But it could be a trap, right? It's probably a trap."

"So?" Inuyasha retorted.

"I'm coming too," Aerie declared, shifting her new stave from hand to hand. It wasn't as good as a sword, but Sango had flat out sworn never to let Aerie touch her blade again. When Lelentaeli had knocked her across the battlefield it had been dropped in a puddle, and Sango was still annoyed about it.

"And me," added Trisak. "This looks interesting."

"I'll stay here and look after Kagome and Shippou," volunteered Sango wearily. That was always her job. Just once she'd like to be in the front lines.

"And I will stay and look after these lovely ladies," announced Miroku, with his best saintly expression.

Inuyasha grabbed his shoulder with a scowl and yanked him toward the cave. "You're coming with me."

By the time Aerie, Trisak, Miroku, and Inuyasha had gone forty yards, it was pitch black. "OK, on second thought," came a voice out of the darkness, in the aftermath of three stubbed toes, a calamitous collision of girl and priest, and two Trisak-engineered trippings of Inuyasha, "this was kind of dumb."

"What was?" asked another voice with just the degree of good cheer that is bloody annoying without seeming faked.

"Your existence," commented a third with disgust.

"I believe Aerie was referring to venturing in here without a light," supplied a fourth.

"And bringing dear Trisak along into a dark place, yes," agreed the first.

"Oh, come now! You malign me!"

"You abrade Inuyasha's face, through contact with the floor."

"He has an aversion to abrasions?"

"There's nothing wrong with my face!"

"You got a scrape. You said so."

"Nobody thought my alliteration was funny, did they?"

"So, I got a scrape. So what?"

"Abrasion," said the voice with cutting patience, "means 'scrape.'"

"I knew that!"

"Uh-huh."

"I did!"

"You know, I have this suspicion that I'm being ignored."

"Hsh!" said Miroku. A moment later bump, thump, whack, the other three discovered, by the simple expedient of walking into it, that he had made his staff into a sort of fence by holding it horizontally. There was a prompt order of ceasing to move forward, with a side of expletives. The monk ignored the cursing. "Did anyone else hear that? Inuyasha?"

"Hear what?" asked Aerie.

"Listen."

They listened. Presently they heard what Miroku had noticed, while the other three had been too busy talking. Footsteps. They weren't alone.

"Who's there?" ventured Miroku.

Shwik, said a sword leaving its sheath. "Naraku," Inuyasha growled. "I smell 'im."

"Hey! Watch where you point that pigsticker!" yelped Trisak's voice.

"How?" growled Inuyasha's in reply.

"Good point," Trisak allowed, and blue light flowered in the darkness.

Everyone had to blink for a moment as their eyes adjusted, but then they could see. Trisak balanced a dancing palmful of tall flames, a shade paler than the Blue Screen of Death. Inuyasha opened his mouth to demand why Trisak hadn't done that before, then rounded on the baboon-skin-covered form to the left, which had begun to emit a low, evil chuckle.

"You are not going to leave here alive," it said.

Aerie's mind filled in the dramatic background music. She shifted her grip on her staff again. This was of no practical use, and if she had been watching herself she might have said something like 'either just hold the stick or use it,' but among other considerations holding her back from attacking there were the facts that it was just a stick and she was only human, after all, and anyway it wasn't her prerogative to attack Naraku, especially when Inuyasha, who had a sort of karma-protected right to attack Naraku, was standing right there. Dun-dun-dundun, and all that.

Trisak raised his hand, the one that wasn't full of fire. "Uhm, probably a bad time to ask, but do you say these things because you think they sound impressive?" And there went the mood, like a balloon at a party where somebody who has had far too much punch has just said 'look what I can do!' and started throwing darts in non-traditional places.

"…" said what was of course not really Naraku, because Naraku had never been inclined to field work that he could avoid. It continued to say this for just a bit too long. What it was thinking, since it was a good deal less bright than the actual Naraku, was something like: He reminds me entirely too much of the redheaded one. I have no idea where he came from. I don't like him. He'll have to die. He had to die anyway, but now he has to die more.

The kugutsu did not notice that this did not make sense. It was not equipt to notice things like that.

It realized it had not replied yet. "It won't make any difference to you in a moment," it said, which had the right sort of impending-doom tone to it, and then it pulled the string.

It was the first thing to be crushed by falling stone. But then, it wasn't equipt to think about things like that.

By the time the string was pulled, the four adventurers were already running pell-mell back the way they'd come, and picking up velocity with every step. Halfway through the 'won't,' Trisak had turned Miroku and Aerie around and started them running. Inuyasha, showing a rare streak of good sense in the face of however many tons of rock were on top of them and soon to be seeking a closer relationship, had come as well. Trisak, who had the shortest legs, was somehow managing to keep ahead of them all. Inuyasha, impatient to be not-squished, broke into his normal bounding run and promptly cracked his head on the ceiling.

Aerie and Miroku caught him. Or at least they broke his fall. If Miroku had belonged to a particular order, his abbot would probably have made him do penance for the word he said when one and a quarter hundred pounds of hanyou fell on his head while he was trying to run. If Buddhist monasteries had precisely abbots or were into doing penance, of course.

And then, with a somewhat delayed reaction to the Pulling of the String, and just as Trisak looked over his shoulder almost at the entrance to discover that the other three were not on his heels, there was a great grinding of stone, and the ceiling said hello.

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Kagome and Shippou had been playing with Kagome's markers when a sound from Sango made them look up. They saw Trisak framed in the mouth of the cave for a moment, then watched in horror as the whole side of the mountain gave a bit of a slump and the cave vanished. Huge rocks tumbled toward them. Sango promptly pulled Kagome and Shippou three meters backward and to the right, seconds before a boulder crushed the markers they had left behind.

As soon as the biggest rocks had mostly stopped moving, they ran forward as a unit, washing up the slope to wage war against the stone. Sango, in her fighter's fashion, had her shoulder against the biggest rock she could see and was heaving away at it, Kirara and Shippou were throwing gravel and pebbles away behind them with a frantic scrabbling sound, and Kagome was picking up stones about the size of her head and carrying them one by one, with much straining of muscles and joints, to the bottom of the pile, like a sort of demented ant which had dedicated itself to un-building the anthill.

When Sango's stone rolled away, she also came to her senses. She had heaved for three minutes and shifted half a ton of stone, and if she hadn't done it herself she wouldn't have known the difference. They had made hardly a dent, and Shippou, Kagome, and Kirara's debris was already building up again at the bottom. By the time they had any kind of excavation halfway up the rockslide where they were, they would have added another layer to the hill below them.

She went to Kagome, who was bent double and she dragged a particularly heavy stone laboriously to where she could give it a push and let it roll the rest of the way, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "It's no good," she said gently. "We'll kill ourselves before we can do them any good."

Kagome looked up at her angrily. The taijiya met her eyes. After a moment Kagome let the rock obey gravity's imperative and sink the last inch to the ground. She straightened slowly, as if its weight had been transferred to her back. "But…" she said.

Shippou had stopped digging t watch with mouth agape. "Inuyasha and Aerie and Miroku are under there!" he protested. "And Trisak! We can't just leave!"

"We need to find someone to help us dig this out," Sango explained, still in the same gentle voice she had used with Kagome. "We can't do it all all by ourselves. There's too much."

"They could starve while we're gone!" the kitsune protested, his mind steadfastly refusing to even consider the idea that there was nothing left to starve.

Sango sighed and rubbed her forehead. She was worried, too. Miroku, if you aren't alive under there I will skewer you! She thought furiously, missing the logical fallacy here. (i.e., skewering him while he was not-alive would seem to be more a matter of preparing him to become a shish-kebab and be roasted for dinner.) "They could starve while we're digging, too," she pointed out. "We're going to find Kouga and see if we can get him to help. He can't have gone far with all the wolves he had with him. Right, Kagome?"

Kagome nodded, her thoughts obviously elsewhere; somewhere under a few thousand pounds of rock, for example.

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"Aaargh!" said Aerie meanwhile, kicking a rock.

"Careful," warned Miroku, "if we move the wrong stone we could bring the whole place down on our heads."

"So what do you suggest, monk?" Inuyasha growled. "We sit around here forever?"

"I said 'careful,' I didn't say, 'leave the rocks alone,'" Miroku responded serenely. "It is best not to be rash."

"Rash, smash," Aerie retorted.

"Precisely," said Miroku. Aerie muttered something incoherent and flopped down with her back against a larger piece of their prison. She wondered if Trisak was alright. She hoped he was. No, she knew he was. He was very accomplished at staying alive. He practically had a PhD in it.

"If I just had Tetsusaiga…" Inuyasha grumbled.

"If you had Tetsusaiga, we would all be flat," Miroku pointed out. "Let us see if there is some way to escape that is a bit less direct than you attempting to pulverize all this stone before it crushes us to death."

"You could suck it into your wind tunnel," Aerie suggested. Miroku looked doubtful. He glanced up at his staff and Tetsusaiga, wedged where they had been since two lucky jabs in the roaring dark of the collapsing cave had turned them into roof supports. Aerie's stave, being only wood, had splintered. "OK, maybe not," the girl admitted. "Although it might be better to be alive without your weapons than dead with them."

"I am not letting the monk suck up my Tetsusaiga!" Inuyasha protested loudly. Something above them shifted with a loud, stony moan, and everyone froze. When it became clear that they weren't going to be flattened yet, they relaxed again.

Aerie's stomach growled loudly, reminding her that dinner had been aeons ago. "This is all very well," she said, "well, no it isn't, but you know what I mean. But what are we going to eat in here?"

"We could always eat Miroku," Inuyasha suggested acidly.

"Or you could not," Miroku put in.

And there you have it::victorious fanfare: Another chapter! Merry Christmas! Did that make a nice present? I hope it has made some of my beloved reviewers come back again. Has it? Huh? Huh?

Sango: Is it just me, or am I getting to be the sanest person around an awful lot in this fic?

Aerie: You're a reliable, levelheaded person, that's all!

Sango: Well, I can certainly see how that could be useful around here.

Trisak: (:from offstage:) Sasquatch!

Sango:My point exactly.

Miroku: Why were there two references to my being eaten in this chapter? I hope this isn't foreshadowing….

Kileb: I wasn't in this chapter!

TrisakA: Uhmm…I'm sorry?

Kileb: I don't think you are.

TrisakA: Sure I am!

Kileb: Prove it!

TrisakA: No!

Trisak: Sasquatch!

baf: Sure she is!

Kileb: You think so?

Sango: Of course she is; you allow her to torture people.

Lelentaeli: .

Sango: ?

Kileb: He doesn't talk anymore unless I tell him to.

Trisak: SASQUATCH! (:runs into room with a sasquatch in hot pursuit.:)

Sasquatch: (:enters, looks around, picks up everyone, and walks away with them:)

Aerie: (:hanging upside down in the sasquatch's arms:) What is a sasquatch, anyway?

Trisak: Something like Bigfoot, I believe.