Bards and dramatists would forever after refer to it as the final battle. Hah, what do bards know, anyway? Any old soldier could tell you that there is no such thing as a final battle, only a series of new campaigns. There is always a new enemy to fight, somewhere. Politicians, too, would scoff at the notion of a final battle. Battle implies troop movement, logistics, war, mass casualties. This, they would insist, was an assassination. No more a final battle than the murder of Lincoln was to be, many centuries later. Historians would laugh, and point out that more often than not, the final battle in a war was an accident; a chance encounter between a scouting force, long out of contact with HQ, and a straggling, lost remnant of the enemy army. They would point out that these final battles were trivial things, mere footnotes to be brushed under the carpet of the collective memory as embarrassments that occurred long after the peace treaties had been signed, fights that had no importance whatsoever in the outcome in the war.

And the thing is, all these detractors would be correct. The death of Naraku was not the final battle in the war against evil, greed, imperialism, stupidity. Those wars might never end. But for those who died, it was the final battle. Their final battle.

For many of the other involved parties, the final battle would come much much later. For Sango, the final battle came on the day her fifth child miscarried. Massive hemorrhage brought her down, where no demon could. For Miroku, the final battle was just one more skirmish in the war against old age, and a liver that could not tolerate any more years of hard drinking. Kouga's final battle was a glorious one defending his pack against marauding hordes of demon rats. Afterwards, they couldn't even find enough left of him for a suitable burial.

Inuyasha's final battle gave the victory to brash impulsivity. One stupid mistake against a foe he had scoffed at, complacent in his strength and title. Kagome fought a war against herself, and ended her days a victim of modern society, hit by a car as she crossed the street, lost in memories of what she'd left behind in the past.

No one knows what Sesshoumaru's final battle may have been, or even where it was fought. He disappeared from society after burying his foolish half-brother in an unmarked grave, and even the most determined of seekers has yet to find evidence of his remains.

So many little battles to fight, so many wars. So many trivial ways to die.

But those deaths were all in the future, and this was the Now.

Kikyo wondered, as she sat at the edge of Naraku's domain gathering her strength, if it counted as the end if you were already dead?

Perched in her aerie in the castle, Kagura watched scudding storm clouds overhead. She could almost taste the ozone, feel the wind rushing through her hair. What would it be like to know that freedom completely? She would never know. Kikyo, Naraku, and her; they could never be free. Not from each other.

Distantly, Kagura remembered that there were others involved; Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha and his pack, Kouga and his wolves. But somehow, they just didn't seem relevant, not now, not anymore, despite all the effort that Naraku always put into flummoxing their plans. No, the only ones that mattered were here now; Kikyo, Naraku, and her.

Kagura drew one last deep breath, pretending, if only for a second, that she could not smell her own taint on the wind, the reek of Naraku's blood that flowed through her veins. The time for daydreaming was over. Now was the time for action. Even now, she could sense Kikyo nearing the castle, her presence carefully masked by a series of misdirecting zephyrs Kagura sent her way to stir the miasma into a roil of confusion.

Carefully blanking her face into an approximation of Kikyo's expressionless mask, Kagura turned and descended the stairs to where Naraku awaited.

"There is treachery approaching." Onigumo giggled in the noisy chaos of his mind. 'Treachery for you, and treachery for me. Sweet the scent, and cold the taste. We burn, she is hard. Do you feel it? Blood pulsing, boom boom boom, it beats for you." His words were lost in the demon howls of his soul. Prisoners all of them, like a vast democracy gone wrong, the gibbering of a divided soul.

Naraku reclined on a throne in an empty room. He was bored. Bored with Kagura's disobedience, bored with his petty games with Inuyasha's crowd, bored with ruling an empty forest. It was time to marshal his forces and rampage across the countryside, to kill and maim and wreak bloody havoc until he could swim in the blood. Now that was something his gibbering soul could all agree on. For that was the only thing that really mattered, wasn't it? Suffering. His suffering, their suffering. The suffering of the world. Naraku lived on the pain of others, delighting in torments both petty and profound. Filth and slime and blasphemy. That was what it was all about. That, and, of course, Power.

Power was something Naraku understood. He did not, however understand the behavior of his recalcitrant offspring, Kagura. He knew she was powerless against him, she was too much in love with life to die, no matter how much she hated her servitude. It was ingrained in what passed as her soul. It was the way she was built. Kagura could no more defy him, than she could endure the cleansing fire of human holiness.

Yet, here she came now, back straight and stiff, every fold of her kimono so perfectly in place, all rigidity and angles, as if to reject the notion that she could ever be as flexible or biddable as the wind she commanded. Kagura, with a face like ice, and eyes like redly glimmering coals. She didn't much look biddable. She looked like Kikyo again, that stone cold bitch. At least until she spoke, and then she sounded like no one but herself.

"You worthless squid." She began, knowing that Naraku could hardly stand the comparison. "You miserable excuse for a Half-demon. You could have been a god, but here you sit mouldering away in an empty castle like a toad. Where is your web, O great spider? Where is the prey dancing under your strings? Where is your power? Where are your servants? What has happened to your domain?"

Naraku could hardly believe his ears. How dared she? She belonged to him, she was a part of him, her existence rested in his claws, yet Kagura spoke like this? She'd never before graced him with her snarled curses, Nay, she'd led him to believe that her words were a weapon of the wind that she'd reserved for foes not worthy of her more physical arsenal. Words were easy, words were cheap. Words were designed by humans. She rarely let them sully her perfect demon lips.

The double insult was not lost on him, and Naraku stretched out his hand to grasp her heart, to stop the words, to force her to learn her place once and for all. But he could not. Onigumo would not let them. He wanted to hear what his offspring had to say.

"Let her speak," he urged himselves, "only then might we know the most suitable punishments." And in his mind, blood glittered blackly, bones snapped with the sound of dry twigs, the music of screams, the wind whistling through a flute of bone. How pretty the music of pain could be.

Kagura had not paused her tirade for Naraku's inner musings, right now, she would not stop for all the pain in creation. She was on a roll, giving free vent to her hatred and her loathing. "Oh Father," she sneered, "Oh my creator. Have you looked around you recently? While you were playing god, making and breaking your spawn, your rule has crumbled. Your servants have fled, your slaves are dead. Outside these walls, no one knows your name, save for one rag-tag band of misfits and outcasts. Are you proud of what you've achieved, that a lowly fox child hates your name? That one pathetic Buddhist monk will die young? That a dead priestess seeks your demise? Strong work that. But where are your minions? Where is the fear? What happened to your power?

"I can tell you where it went, why you lurk here alone in the dark. You squandered your power on tricks and toys. Did you forget, O great god and master, from what you are created? I long wondered, but I have heard the story too, and now I know. A horde of lesser demons, mindless in their hunger and their malice, and one broken, criminal, insane human. Faugh! The dross of the earth. Oh sure, you've assimilated a few greater demons here and there, taken the most shiny, most impressive-seeming aspects of their being, but you miscalculated in your hubris and your folly.

"That's what comes from being a lesser demon, daddy, didn't you know? Mindless craving for power, not much brains. You thought you were being clever, didn't you, when you shuffled your guts around and cobbled us together, me and Kanna both. Thought you were being clever when you spewed us out like pieces of undigested crap. But did you ever think just what it cost to make such beings as us? We're not as simple as some of your other lesser spawn, you know, the ones that mutt and his pack dispatched with such contemptible ease. Kanna and I, we were full demons, not a shred of humanity in us, something you can never match. And what's more, we're not mere lesser demons like the majority of those that comprise you, oh great squid, we're greater demons. It's a miracle that one as lowly as you could ever produce beings as powerful as we are, an elemental and a spirit demon. Who could have guessed you were capable of it?

"It amazes me to this day that not one of your enemies realized how much we weakened you. Kanna's kind is among the most powerful ever to have existed, though with only such training as you in your ignorance could provide, she never lived to her full potential and remained a stunted shell for her short life. I know how much jyaki it must have taken to birth her from your putrid womb.

"Yet you sit here and pretend that you are still strong, when really, you've wasted your strength. True, Kanna had potential, but she's dead now."

Naraku's fists were clenching barely restrained fury by now, great black curls of miasma streaming from his flesh. Kagura was amazed his temper had held this long. Even she could not understand what held him back. She would not have tolerated such disrespect if she were in his place. Still. She was thankful. She could sense Kikyo in the back of her mind, stealthily approaching the great hall, and the time was almost nigh. A few more seconds was all she needed for the final blow to fall.

"You're weak. O Naraku, O my father, god, and master. You're weak, you're scum, you're the mud beneath my feet, not fit to be my own servant, my own chattel slave. You're weak, and you know it. What's more, I know it. I know that you long to kill me, that you crave the feel of my heart pulping in your fist, the end to the beating of my strong pulse. But you and I both know you can't afford to do it. I am all that makes you strong. All that gives you power as you cower in your castle, protected by your toxic body odor. Afraid of the world outside, afraid that they will see the true you.

"Well, It's too late. I see the true you. And I will not serve anymore. You cannot afford to kill me, and I finally realized it. You can no longer cage the wind. For I will be free!"

She spoke the last words exultantly, triumphantly, certain that the end was nigh. And she proudly turned her back on the brooding, tentacled mass that was her progenitor. She did not quake, she did not tremble as she took the first step away from him, a step that she knew was naught but a mere gesture. She knew what was coming, hell, she could see it through Kikyo's eyes, the sudden eruption of tentacles and miasma, streaming across the room towards her retreating back, as Naraku too, realized what he had to do.

"Foolish child." Naraku crooned, as might a mother to her babe, "to think that you might disrespect me so. Did you forget that you still remain a part of me? Did you forget that what I gave to you, I might reclaim? If it was death you sought, it will not be death you find. Rather, I return you to the womb, and sentence your soul to an eternity of suffering and damnation."

Even as his tentacles enveloped her, Kagura struck out. A pawn she might be, her ultimate destiny already ordained. Still she would not go without a fight. A bloodthirsty snarl erupted from her throat, her eyes flaming scarlet, her fangs bared in a hungry grin she leapt into Naraku's cold embrace. Finally to sink her blades into his flesh, to feel his blood flowing as he had so often bathed in hers. An epiphany of hate, a glory of destruction. The lovely sound of rending flesh, the pulpy tearing of tentacles, the warm caress of blood spray against her face, the stickiness congealing on the cool stone floor.

It was not to last long, for in this at least, Naraku retained the upper hand, being large of form and physically stronger than Kagura, easily able to restrain her, that her wind weapons were useless. Moreover, he had one advantage she did not: He possessed her heart. And while his goal was to absorb his recalcitrant child, Naraku had no qualms about disabling her long enough to achieve his goal. Without further ado, he sank his teeth into the bulging wall of her heart. Feeling the muscle tear beneath his fangs, glorying in the look of shock and pain that spasmed across Kagura's face as her blood stopped flowing in its veins.

Not long now, she only need live long enough that he reabsorb her before her energies dissipated into the void.

Not long now, Kagura prayed as Kikyo advanced, unnoticed as father and spawn fought their private duel.

Not long indeed, for Kagura struggled on, though she felt her limbs growing heavier as her blood stagnated, as Naraku drew more of her into him. It was like some twisted kind of reverse rape. Instead of penetrating her, she was penetrating deeper into him.

Something's not right. Naraku could taste it in her. Kagura tasted wrong, her essence hinting faintly at secrets deeply hidden, a source not of himself. Yet still, it drew him on, he craved it like addiction.

Onigumo could have told him. He recognized the taint as only a jilted lover could. He'd obsessed over Kikyo so long and so thoroughly, lost in his own dark insanity, that he could not help but know the taste of her soul. Clever, clever Kagura, He mused in the darkness, Pretty, sneaking, scheming, beautiful Kagura to bring his love his life his hunger his heart the source of him the cause of him the death of him to him.

Onigumo would not have told the rest of himself if his existence depended on it. (Which of course it did). If his demons couldn't recognize the danger, if they were not as smart as they claimed in their collective insanity, then he and they would surely get what was coming for them. Kikyo. His Kikyo. She was coming. For him.

In the raving depths of his mind, Naraku sensed the part of him that was Onigumo; the hunger and the malice, the raw, unbridled sense of triumph.

"What have you done!" He screamed into his mind, searching himself, trying to figure out what had got his human soul so riled up, parsing the conflicting howlings of a hundred hundred demon fragments for that elusive truth. Chased, and found, but too late. Kagura was almost fully absorbed, still struggling, her teeth tearing at his flesh, even as it became her own, even as she began to feel the pain of her claws tearing at Naraku's tentacles, even as his blood became her own, flowing through her veins, pulsing where her own heart could not. And her mind was melting, was slipping away, in rending searing agony, as Naraku's conscious tried to draw her into the murk from whence she'd sprung.

This was so much worse than the melding she and Kikyo had shared, this was like a flensing as the flesh was pulled off her bones, and all that made her unique sucked from her mind. All that held her together was Kikyo's iron will, refusing to let her go. All that kept some spark of the individual alive as the last remnants of the body that had been Kagura's was reabsorbed into Naraku's primordial ooze.

And there she hovered for an eternal instant in the brink between life and death, a wisp of energy like a candle about to be snuffed. No longer conscious, already succumbing to the gibbering chaos within.

And in that Moment, when Naraku realized his folly, and tried to quell that last spark of her soul, that is when Kikyo reached out with her mind, joining fully with the demoness that had sacrificed herself for this moment. The contact exploded outwards the spark becoming a fire, the fire a nova, a cleaning inferno of purity. Holy purity and Demon taint could not coexist like this, not without a strong will, a stronger need. Kagura's need, Kikyo's will, had allowed their unnatural bonding. But Naraku had no such need. Kikyo's will forced itself down his maw, followed the neural pathways that had been Kagura's, willing conduits to the core. Searing fire flashed like acetone through his brain. Naraku felt himself burning apart as Kikyo forced her soul upon him.

"You BITCH!" He screamed his outrage to an empty room, no one to witness it save for a crumbled pile of clay in the corner, bereft of its motive force.

And even as Naraku screamed his defeat, Onigumo screamed his elation, his human heart free at last to glory in the consuming fire once more, the sense of being surrounded by the woman he craved, no longer icy cold, no longer distant, but so close so close inside his mind, and so hot he was dying again by fire, and he would have her forever.

The darkness was receding, and Onigumo reveled in the searing light, as Kikyo prayed a silent thanks for victory, and let her soul dissolve into the jyaki that surrounded her.

Victory tastes like Ice.

Cold and clear and bright and hard.

Purity and jyaki mix like matter and antimatter.

For the teeniest fraction of a nanosecond, there they were Kikyo, Kagura, Onigumo Naraku all part of the same. United. Together, Complete.

And then there was none but a burning corpse on the floor. Empty of soul, empty of life.

No one would discover the bodies for weeks, although Kagome had felt Kikyo's destruction at the instant it happened, sharp as a knife through her skull. Miroku too, felt Naraku's passing as a burning tingle in his hand spreading up his arm towards his heart. He'd thought it was the end of him, that his hand vacuum was swallowing him up.

Hard to believe then, that it was the end. The end of the nemesis, the archenemy.

Not the end of the quest. It would be another two years before Kagome and her incompetent escort pieced together the last of the Shikon jewel. Two more years of tromping through Japan, battling demons, and camping out. Two more years, before they all went their separate ways, their time together at an end.

They never knew what had happened. How the battle had been fought. How the battle had been won.

They built a monument to Kikyo. A flimsy wooden thing that some villagers pulled down and used for firewood one cold winter. They mourned her redeath as well as they could, and that was something.

No one built a monument to Kagura, No one mourned her dearth.

And isn't that always the way? The true heroes, unsung, unknown, unremembered.

But she wouldn't have cared. She who'd been a wind demon. She'd have been happy to know that in death she was forgotten, her name blown away on the wind. Free in the wind.

Was the world a better place, free from Naraku's ambition? Ask those who live in it still. Is it a freer place without his darkness? Ask those who stumble through life in their own miasmas of hate or lust ambition. Naraku is dead, Kikyo is dead. Somehow it all balanced out in the end.

Bards would sing of it as a love story. Poets would declaim the tragedy. Dramatists recount the epic battles.

Bards and Poets and Dramatists are fools.

It was what it was, a story of life, a story of death.

And now it is over.

Think of it what you will.

The End

--- Yes, the gratuitously large number of runon sentences is deliberate.

Questions, comments, flames? You think you want answers? Email: Curdled(dot)milk(at)gmail(dot)com . ------