CHAPTER 4: THE FOREST OF MENOS

Every day, the metal dome that dominated the horizon grew minutely; every night, they took turns in keeping watch and, when she slept, Rukia did not dream. During the hours that passed for daytime in this world of eternal night, they rode on the eel that Nel called Bawabawa, moving at a fairer pace than any they might have achieved on foot.

"Who is Rukia?" asked Nel one day. She was seated in Ichigo's lap, as was her habit nowadays, and Rukia was riding at the front of the snake-like demon. She didn't turn round as the little arrancar asked him: "Who is she to you?"

"We're friends," Ichigo said and Rukia glanced back over her shoulder at him then and smiled: good answer. Safe answer.

And then the world gave way.

The only warning they had was Bawabawa's howl as the ground in front of them crumbled and cascades of sand resolved themselves into the muscled torso of the same vast god that they had defeated four days previously. Except, it seemed, they had not defeated it. Rukia was on her feet:

"Mai, Sode no Shirayuki. Tsugi no mai. Hakuren." She touched the tip of the katana to the ground at her feet. Save, this time, it wasn't the ground.

"No!" screamed Nel. "You'll hurt Bawabawa!"

The serpent reared up. Rukia tried to find purchase on its smooth sides, staring in shock at the sword in her hand. Her zanpakuto had not answered the incantation.

Staring down over the side of the beast, she saw something even more troubling. They were being lifted. The ground was dropping away beneath them. But wait. No. She was wrong. They were not the ones who were rising. Instead, the desert, now hundreds of metres beneath them, was falling away. The sand-god grinned, its white teeth like grave-markers, as it observed their their fate.

Bawabawa's whole body began to tilt. Rukia resheathed her blade and clung on with both hands, checking behind her to be sure that everyone else was still there. They were, but she wished she'd not looked. A vortex had opened in the desert floor. The sands were spinning, drawing everything towards a maw at its centre. She could feel the spiritual currents that had whipped the landcape into motion. She tried to move, but even the slightest motion made her grip the more precarious and Bawabawa's body was undulating beneath her as the eel tried to wriggle back to safety, away from the expanding whirlpool. As its motions grew more frantic, so her hands began to slip:

"No, Bawabawa!" But the next powerful spasm shook her loose. And, all at once, there was no above and no below.

The sands pummelled her. This would be what it was to drown. Her nose and mouth filled with dust. As fast as she breathed, her throat became clogged again. A current of spiritual energy carved across her body, forcing her to bend double. Another struck her back and she was flung across an immeasurable space only to come up against some form of barrier, which forced her back again into the spiralling sands. One leg, then her arms, then her shoulders and her head, broke the surface. She took a desperate, rasping breath, and hung in space.

It was dark; it was vast. There was a wind at the back and, by the time she knew she was falling, it was already too late. Something struck her from behind, between the shoulder blades. There was pain, like a brief burst of sunlight. And then there was nothing more.

She was lying on her back. That much she knew. Her body ached and, although rocks and gravel were digging into her back and shoulders, she found the stone floor on which she lay to be unreasonably comfortable. In fact, she thought distantly, she had no inclination to move ever again. And she might have stayed there were the pain in the base of her skull not a single, ferocious star, forcing her out from the darkness. A cool, damp breeze blew across her face and she cracked open one eye to glance around. It was a cavern. Half-buried by sand and rubble, she appeared to be lying at the base of a vast stone column: one of many, stretching away into a blurred dark. Their tips seemed to be shrouded in a black, dusty substance that, against all the odds, hung in the air; their bases were flared like the roots of trees. A forest.

She tried to stand and her vision swam.

This was Hueco Mundo, wasn't it? As she picked her way precariously through the rubble, her memories began to surface, like cracks across a pane of black glass. She hadn't been alone: "Ichigo! Renji?" No-one answered her. At any other time, she could have sensed their reiatsu, but not now. Her head was pounding. She had a sense of the space around her closing in and hesitated in her meandering journey across the base of the cavern. Not alone. Not even slightly.

The first hollow came out of the shadows in front of her. She acted without thinking, ignoring the ache in her head and a new agony that coursed up her left arm as she drew the sword. The motions were no different from the hours she'd spent in training. Cut across. Cut down. The hollow eveaporated in a fountain of blue sparks that streamed towards the ceiling, briefly turning the hanging dust into a galaxy of spiralling stars. Another attacked from her right. She had the presence of mind to realise she couldn't use her left arm. The hollow gored itself on her blade. Another waited behind it. But there was no time to face that one. Holding the sword with just her right now, she whirled and slashed down through another that had come for her back. Before the demon disintegrated, her toes found purchase on its shoulder, and she finished off another behind it, then turned back to the one that had not yet attacked. Eyes glowed in the darkness. There were more. She couldn't count them and her head swum as she tried to turn and keep her attention everywhere at once.

"Sode no Shirayuki. Some no mai. Tsuki shiro." Please.

The white energy blazed within her and, for an instant, there was no pain; there was only a sense of her sword spirit all around her and an overwhelming relief as she stepped backwards, out of the circle she had drawn. The ground frosted. Within seconds, a column of ice consumed a half dozen hollows. She whirled and used the same technique to her right. Within the dance, at least, the pain was a distant thing. Tsuki shiro cleared a path ahead for her and, far away, on a black horizon, she could see light.

Moonlight. She started to sprint.

The cavern narrowed dramatically. Head down, she was running for her life, the ribbon of her released sword fluttering behind her. Were they following? She couldn't see. She knew only that she had finally reached the light. And it was not the moon.

A sudden sense of depth made her skid to a halt. Loose stones careened away from her into a tumultuous space ahead. She had emerged from a tunnel and was on a ledge in an even greater cavern than before. The scale of this place, which had seemed immeasurable, now defied all conception. A long dark fell away from her: sheer black, only inches from where she had stopped. Another emptiness. She looked up at the light and it looked back at her from the eyes of hundreds upon hundreds of menos grande. Products of a naïve mind, their bodies were simple black cylinders surmounted by hollow masks, child-like in their simplicity. There was something about their sharp noses and those mouths, open in eternal expressions of surprise, that made them more disturbing than the fierce beast-like masks of the adjuchas. Still more of the tall ghosts glided into view. The light came from their eyes, which burned yellow. And now, as they turned towards her, there was no mistaking the sickening whine as, en masse, they gathered their spiritual pressures. "Cero," she whispered. As she turned to run back the way she had come, the fragile ledge on which she had stood crumbled. She fell. The last thing she saw was the red light of their reiatsu, coalescing into a crimson sphere.

And then someone caught her.

Initially, she was too shocked and relieved to pay too much heed to who or what had plucked her from her fate. She was having difficulty sensing their reiatsu, but, right now, anything more than staying conscious felt like an indulgence. His grip on her was awkward though. One arm passed across her chest and he was crushing her against his side. It was true that not everyone could be as adept at carrying women under one arm as Ichigo, but this felt almost like a restraint. Her left arm was causing her considerable discomfort; it was all she could do to hold on to Sode no Shirayuki with the other. The sword's ribbon was fluttering wildly in the air behind them like an unruly pennant. As they flew from one vast stone tree to the next, Rukia tried desperately to fix her still muddy thoughts on what was happening to her.

From what she could glimpse of her saviour, he looked like a cross between a shinigami and a hollow. Yet she could see his feet if she tilted her head to the right, and they were human. Human feet; a black shihakusho. She glanced upwards: a mane of matted brown fur, and a long-snouted mask for a face. None of these things frightened her. This creature had saved her life. "Excuse me?" she asked politely. It continued to spring from stone branch to stone branch, no doubt using reiatsu to achieve something like flight. "Sir?" A little experimental wriggling confirmed that it wasn't about to give up its prize without a struggle. "Who are you?" she demanded, putting a little more force behind her voice: "What's your rank? What's your division?"

When there was still no reaction, she waited until they reached the next branch, then, with what was left of her strength, cut towards the stranger with Sode no Shirayuki. It was forced to drop her or risk losing an arm. A human arm, she noticed. Was it possible then that all the rest of its get up was no more than a costume?

Not that it mattered now, she thought, because it had vanished, leaving her crouched on a stone branch hundreds of metres above the cavern flaw. "We're done," she told Sode No Shirayuki and she felt the sword return to its usual form before she resheathed it, wincing as she held the saya with her left hand. She was almost certain now that she'd broken that arm in the fall. "Thanks," she said, wondering if her rescuer could hear her: "I appreciate what you did for me, but, from here on out, I think I'm going to do this alone."

She cried out with shock and pain as something heavy barrelled into her from behind and, once again, lifted her off her feet. Crushed again between the body and arm of her would-be kidnapper, she realised, with chagrin, that he had learnt from his mistakes and was no longer affording her the use of her arms. She might not have minded so much save that the sudden pressure on her injuries was enough to make her whimper: "Where are you taking me?" she cried, letting the pain thicken her voice: "Answer me!"

It let her go.

She collapsed forwards onto her knees on a plane of stone. Dark clouds of colour swam before her eyes. A bad time to pass out, she thought to herself, but several deep breaths seems to pull her back into the present. She was on another ledge, not the branch of a tree, but a path cut into the side of a cliff-face, and, directly ahead of her, carved out of the rock: a doorway. Her kidnapper ducked inside.

She could try to run away, but he was faster than her and stronger too, so, after a moment, she stood up and followed him into the cave.

The floor was flat. The walls had been chiselled until they were smooth and, to one side, a stone niche covered in blankets and furs looked as if it served as a bed of sorts. A pale green light burned merrily on the ceiling. It was, she realised with some surprise, a home. Not a dungeon or a lair.

Somebody's home.

She crossed to the centre of the room and gazed up at the light, while her kidnapper untied the fur cape from his shoulders and dropped it onto the bed. He suddenly looked much more like a shinigami. She could see the white juban beneath his kimono and even the strap that held the hollow mask over his face. Then there was that light: "Is this kido?" she asked. He didn't answer. "Who are you? Which division do you belong to?" She could feel her patience starting to wane: "Did you leave your division? Are you the kind of scum who deserts their own men?"

"My name is Ashido Kano. What's yours?"

"Kuchiki Rukia."

"Prepare yourself then, Kuchiki Rukia." He drew his blade and lunged at her.

She grunted as his first blow struck Shirayuki, almost knocking the zanpakuto from her hand. She didn't recall drawing, but, mercifully, her reflexes were faster than her mind. His next blow was swift and heavy and she staggered. Fighting one-handed was not her forte:

"Did you just bring me here to kill me?" she stammered. She tried to duck under his arm, but he was too fast. Unable to catch her, he slammed the hilt into her belly with such force that it knocked her the length of the room. And she lay, gagging, as he crossed slowly towards her:

"Are you finished already, Kuchiki Rukia?"