How often has he asked this question? She wondered absent mindedly, with mild amusement. Even he seems bored with the ritual question and answer.
How surprised he'll be to learn the ritual ends tonight.
"You've been, for the most part, patient with me. Tonight your patience pays off." Surprise and excitement had him standing straighter. "You wish to know of my death, and that which keeps me bound to this living realm long after my body should have been given to the land." She gave a curt nod to his eager one. Closing her eyes she began borrowing the energies of the surrounding foliage and a few of the lingering spirits, manipulating it to give her a more solid form
Sometimes visuals were necessary.
Eyes open she waited until his eyes stopped roaming and met hers. "Watch carefully Shinobu for I'll only do this once." A sound, like the sound of a twig snapping accompanied her words and suddenly her left arm hung limply, vaguely disfigured. "Naraku had the jewel- nearly complete, pulsing as his heart. The malice the hatred. I could feel it, taste, hear it. I had to get the seducing jewel away from him. So I let him grab me." Blood and bruises bloomed across her skin, easily seen due to the summer time school uniform she had died in. "Fleshy limbs grabbed at me, tore at me, squeezed me." The final word was accompanied by another snap as she drew her arm over abdomen, to indicate breaking ribs. "But my right arm was free, and he didn't notice, like an adrenaline rush, the jewel numbed him to the pain. And then… I had it and he tossed me away broken and bleeding." Her head snapped back and suddenly her temple started bleeding and her breath came in labored gasps. "The fall punctured a lung."
"He'd tossed me near Kikyou, I held out my hand to give her the jewel and the single shard I'd managed to keep. Words unneeded she took it, and made it whole once more."
"But Naraku was not done with me and physical battering was certainly was not enough to satisfy him. So he attempted an attack on Shippo… my son. I don't know how, I do not remember but I was on my feet running, and suddenly there, too late to put up a barrier I used myself instead." A hole about two inches in diameter appeared in her stomach, bleeding profusely. "It would not have been a quick death." She finished with a whisper, as she allowed him to take his fill of her visage before releasing the borrowed energies become ghostly and whole once more. "I was numb to the pain, all of the pain, and it was not until I was fully drawn from my body that I realized that Kikyou was attempting to assimilate me. With no physical limitations severing my connection to her was simple."
"After that it wasn't long until Naraku was utterly destroyed, and with my corrections in the past done, the jewel complete and Naraku dead, my body was sent back to the future. And now my soul attempts to play catch up."
"Why tell me all this now?" He spoke after a few moments of utter silence.
"Just a warning Shinobu, for I have noticed your growing affections for her." Her face hardened. "Should you attempt, and succeed to convince my living counterpart not to return to the past before the final encounter, I and I can guarantee she will never forgive you should anything happen to my son!"