Tapestry Ch4: Dinner and a Scandal
Alt text: In which I rewrite a chapter 3 times, miss a deadline, and still am huffy about how it turned out.
.
Inu no Taishō was an ancient being.
Thousands of years old now, though the exact number he was unsure of. Times didn't really—hadn't really—changed for him in the many years past. What did change were humans. Humans learned things, invented things, grew things, and though their lives were barely longer than the lives of the brute animals they tamed, it grew longer each year as strange medicines accounted for the genetic perfection they lacked. They passed on this knowledge though an obsession with tradition, in broad universal culture and in family units—and thought they were very small and finite, as a species, they grew.
They were obsessed with reproduction, with legacy. Mortality rates forced them to have many children and it was not much later until those children bore more, always rushing to keep up, their instinctual urge to continue their clan a strange imitation of the eternal divine.
They fascinated him.
He surpassed the humans in endless ways. He was stronger, faster, had heightened senses and near indefinite life. He didn't get sick like they did, he didn't spend a fourth his life dependant on others to survive. Many things he simply knew, instinctually, naturally, where humans had to struggle and stretch and bend to learn the simplest necessities. They were fragile things that needed the right food in the right amounts and at the right time—and sleep in spades, every night nearly, their lives a repeating pattern. These habits were vital to them, so much that one small disruption in any field left them as good as dead.
And through every difference and every death, through war and peace and rise and fall the Demon Lord had watched them.
Because they fascinated him.
Because although he knew—he felt—a much greater connection with fellow yōkai, he found something unique in them. Something small and often buried, hard to grasp, impossible to name. He found something in them that every limb, fiber and muscle of his body told him was precious, something worth protection, despite countless flaws.
And besides all that, they were quite amusing.
Perhaps it was pride, but watching the old men sweat as he sat in their midst, he could barely hold back a grin observing the state. The smell of fear was so strong it would have been suffocating had it not been for the tangy smell of excitement that coiled next to him.
Strange girl, that she smelt equal parts terrified and thrilled. Strange and beautiful and so, so young. Little more feisty then other woman of her state—due to her age in part, he surmised—but there was a certain…quirk to her that was very distinctly a part of her. At this point, he admitted to himself, it was hard to see past that face, but as he sat there biting back a smile as the nervous girl looked everywhere but him, he did feel like a devil, for he wanted nothing more than to keep watching her squirm.
Her father's voice broke the silence that misted about them. It felt loud in the tension filled space, as if he should have instead whispered, or better yet, kept quiet all together.
Inu no Taishō tore his eyes away from the fair face to meet with the speaking man in, from what he observed from the slight cringe he received, an intimidating stare.
"Again you grace us, Lord General." The Hayashi head croaked.
As the statement was just that, a statement, the Demon Lord stayed mute.
In the resounding silence he could have heard a fly's heartbeat. Luckily enough, no such creature was about the room. Instead, a small swarm of dragonflies with gossamer wings of watercolor beat frantically, hidden by the paper screen behind the girl sitting next to him. These he did hear. They matched the Kimono she had worn the day he met her, the dark tones paling her face into an ethereal beauty.
The Hayashi head cleared his throat. "But today you're unaccompanied?"
At that he had to laugh. When he finished his eyes met stiff forms and the refreshed smell of prickling fear. He left Futoshi for good reason. He felt generous enough to share the reason.
"My companion would have easily misconstrued taking part in a human feast." He said through a grin. His eyes caught a stare in particular and glanced to his right to see that the girl had finally amassed enough courage to look at him again.
It didn't last long. After he met her stare she quickly tried to hide behind the clay urn of rice wine she held. Why this shy attitude of hers amused him so much he wasn't sure. Perhaps because it felt so alien to her. In her impertinent youth she paid little heed to others she encountered, but to him she would hide her face and squirm. He felt a smile curling at his lips and leaned over, forcing himself back into her view.
She squeaked and tried to hide further.
He really was a devil of the highest caliber.
He invaded her space more, eventually pulling an incommodious whine from her that he instantly needed to hear more of. Having hidden in her hands he reached out to pull them from her face.
"Lord General!"
Oh right. They were still here.
Two pairs of eyes snapped to the head of family, one lidded gold reluctant and bothered at the interruption, the other dark eyes wide and expectant.
"You're…troubling my daughter."
Inu no Taishō returned his gaze to the girl next to him.
"Do I frighten you?"
She matched his gaze and responded without thinking.
"Yes!"
The General pulled his hand away at the bold admittance.
"IZAYOI!" the voice of her father condemned, rattling tableware as his hands met the surface in front of him.
As if just realizing what she said, Izayoi met her father's glare, raising her hand to a face painted in surprise.
"Oh," she fluttered, looking back and forth between the guest and to her father.
"Forgive her, my Lord, she is young and untamed with want for a husband, she is mistaken in her mind," The head continued to ramble, but Inu no Taishō was much more concerned with the pale embarrassment draining the face next to him.
"I…I should go. I-I'm sorry, excuse me," She muttered, standing to leave.
"Stop." Inu no Taishō commanded. Dishes had been spilled and men on either side of the table had stood, springing into conversation while others remained frozen in panic but now the room stilled, a storm of movement freezing at his demand. Even the air hovered unmoving as they held their breath.
"You aim to remove the first of the Hayashi clan that has shown me honesty? I forbid it!" there was a spark in his eyes that didn't reach his lips.
The first to move was Izayoi and she crumbled back to her knees in an exasperated huff. As if flagged, the room was again abuzz.
"I apologize for my rudeness—and ignorance—in these matters." Izayoi spoke softly amongst the din, but the General ignored all others and talked to her.
"Ignorance?"
"Yes." She glanced up at him only to break the stare again, turning back to her lap where nervous hands had picked the dry skin of her cuticles raw. The metallic sent of her blood that flowered up form the mess was tangy and sweet. "I'm unsure of why you are involved with my family…what business you have with such meager nobles, if we can retain such a name at all."
"What business?" His voice was suddenly low and though it was quiet, the din around him petered auspiciously into quite as he continued. "What business I have with the Hayashi? Dear girl, do you not know the own history of your house?"
She stared at him blankly, dumbfounded at the transformation into seriousness that had overcome him.
A smile quirked a corner of his lips. The look didn't reach his eyes. The coldness remained as he relaxed away from her, leaning his jaw against curled claws.
"Do you know where Inugami come from, my Lady?"
A chill ran up between her shoulder blades to disperse dizzily against the back of her head. Lady. She was my lady now, no longer dear girl.
Her father began to speak but one look from the Demon Lord was enough to silence him, and this time there was real threat there behind molten eyes.
Realizing he was waiting for a response, Izayoi tried to speak. When that didn't work, she managed to shake her head.
"Inugami are different from all other demons as dogs are to all other animals." He waited after this statement, gauging her enlightenment. After seeing none, he continued.
"You breed them."
Izayoi heart beat loudly. She had no doubt he could hear every thump.
"The same way you tailored canines to you needs, Inugami did not come from the wild, as you might say. Inugami were forged."
"Kitsune. Tanuki. Tengu. They are as the fox, raccoon, and crow are, granted to the world by nature. But man created dog. And so he did Inugami." He paused at this. Izayoi took a breath and felt the sin of it in the air.
"Do you know how this is done?"
Izayoi could not manage to shake her head now. She felt dizzy, as if she had been awake for years, like she was pulling oxygen from water. It was as if he was showing her a fresh battlefield, with jagged lines gorged in the land over acres, pointing to each lonely corpse staked amongst its brothers and telling her what soul it had once held.
"First you need a dog. The more loyal, the better."
Her father interrupted, and Izayoi gasped. Not at her father—not at his foolhardiness is testing the General—but at the snarl that ripped through the air. For a moment the amber of the yōkai's eyes were gone, replaced by a deep blood red. His face was contorted inhumanly in anger, his nose more a muzzle in the features of his rage.
And just like that it was gone, hidden by a splayed hand as he presumably composed himself. When he looked back up to lock eyes with her once again there was no trace of the episode anywhere on his face. Though it seemed impossible, his voice was lower now, deathly calm.
"You bury this dog in a hole up to its neck so it can't move. Just out of reach of it you place food, and you wait. The dog starves, and after days of surviving with the resilience bred into it, taunted by the unattainable food, you cut off its head. The spirit left over after such a ritual is an Inugami."
"Human families did this, ingeniously so, to harness the power of yōkai for their own use. The same way dogs served them in life these sprits would serve them in death, so loyal were the creatures. But like all else humans seem to craft, there was a flaw. A great flaw in this marvelous human accomplishment, the Inugami. They had a tendency to go mad."
"Not right away, not even in one human lifetime or perhaps even two or ten. But eventually, the tortured spirits would lose to the vengeance that formed them. By the time humans discovered this, of course, dozens of Inugami-mochi had already formed, with an army of Inugami already created—a militia of powder kegs with their fuses already lit. Yours is one such family. I am here because the last of the Hayashi Inugami has fallen, and I am interested in the pieces he came from. And so a scandal walks among you."
Through debilitating fear that left her shivering stone, through suffocating silence that made her gasp for air, up a cliff of slick mud and sharp rock, Izayoi clamored, surfacing at last to speak the word that peaked her curiosity beyond all rational before the skeletal hands of reason pulled her back into stunned stillness.
"Scandal?" she questioned.
The acid smile on his face finally seemed to reach his eyes. She didn't look away now, held captive through his speech.
"Oh yes. For you see, I was not made." Spoke the first born of the Inugami.
.
Sorry I missed last Friday! to make up for it I'm posting ch5 tomorrow. Sesshomaru shows ups, so it's BOUND to be fun!
IMPORTANT: The makeup of this story is going to change drastically VERY SOON. After a chapter or two more, the lovely little chronological story will BE NO MORE and I will be posting shorts from all over Izayoi time line. It will start reading like a bunch of short stories or pieces of a tapestry *mic drop* so prepare yourself.
As always, please REVIEW!