Chapter 1: New Moon Part 1
"Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls."
Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said."
-Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
Our story starts, like these stories often do, with a young girl who has nothing. Nothing except the bell ringing in her name. That bell has been silent for the longest time. She is running through a forest, following a star that was falling in the middle of the day. It must have woken too early, she decides, and tripped because it was still sleepy. She makes a wish on it anyway.
She comes to a sudden stop when she sees something beneath a tree. She starts to cry because, like all the things she has treasured in her life, her wish is dead.
All she wants is a small piece of a fairy tale, something to take her away from the horror of everyday life. Life in the village was brown. Brown like the dirt on her face and hands, brown like the colour of the worn dresses the women wore. Brown like the stinking mud in the market place, brown like the tired sunburnt faces of the men. Brown like her blood when it dried after a beating.
White was the rarest of colours. She has spent hours watching clouds, marvelling at the newness, the purity of the unreachable puffs of white. Sometimes, even though she knew she would never be able to touch them, she would stretch out her hand to the sky and hold her breath in anticipation.
Her wish-creature was blindingly white. It had even torn off a long strip of cloud as it fell. She neared it slowly, images of her mother, her father, her brothers flashing in front of her eyes. Dead. All dead like the beautiful white corpse in front of her.
She wipes her nose on a dirty sleeve and she swallows the scream stuck in her throat. She is terribly sorry that she killed it by wanting it. She did not mean for it to die. She reaches out towards its strange white hair. It flows through her fingers like water, unlike her own tangled mass of everyday black. She can give him nothing but her tears as an apology so she sheds them in abundance. By the time she stops her handful of hair is wet from her crying.
She leaves the dead wish stained with her tears reluctantly. It feels like leaving a plucked flower in the field. To her it is a terrible sin. But she is hungry and it will not do to be out in the forest after dark.
She does not find much to eat. She never seems to find enough and the emptiness in her belly has become as familiar as the aching, hollow place in her heart where her family used to be.
On her way home she finds herself back at the clearing. She had not meant to return to this place. So when her wish springs to life with all the suddenness of a lock clinking shut on its chain she is too surprised to be scared of its demonic red eyes and the growl issuing from its throat.
Dear Reader
What do you think so far? Do you like Rin's idea of how Sesshomaru ended up beneath that tree?
This fic will be divided into 5 parts (new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous and lastly full moon). Each part is divided into 4 chapters, representing the number of days each phase lasts. Each chapter will probably be about 500 words long.