From her bed, Kagome Higurashi shrunk from the tower of untouched schoolbooks piled on her desk, their spines a splash of color in the moonlight against the darkness. She turned from them, curling into her pillow, and pulling the covers tighter around her. She sunk deeper into the warm cocoon, but it did little to ease the chill that chased her these past few weeks. Since her fall in the wellhouse, nothing had been the same.

She first felt it when the house had grown quiet, finally emptied of the frantic men and women whom had arrived in the ambulance and had determined that she didn't need a trip to the hospital. A concussion, perhaps, and a few scrapes – the worst of which had been dealt by Buyo in his frantic attempt to escape her.

She hadn't told a single soul about what she had seen...what she thought she had seen. And they didn't ask. Perhaps, she contemplated, Buyo had startled her, and she fell and hit her head, and had imagined the whole thing. But once she was out of the dark wellhouse and in the full sunlight, her mother had taken one look and gasped, falling backwards into the gravel and shaking so violently Kagome feared that something terrible had happened to her face she could not feel. She grabbed her cheeks, her forehead. Everything was there, she didn't feel any cuts.

"Mom, what-"

'Your eyes!' Her voice had wavered with fear, a shaking hand raised to her chest. Kagome had blinked and rubbed at them. They hadn't felt different, but when her mother took her hand and walked her into the house to a mirror, Kagome paled at the sight of herself. Unbelievably, her brown eyes appeared as blue as the sky beyond her window.

After that first look over by the paramedics, she was taken to her older-than-dirt family doctor, who brushed it off with barely a glance. That, perhaps it was hormones, even had the gall to insinuate her eyes were always such and they had just never seen her in the correct light. He offered no further explanation, and they were sent on their way.

But it wasn't just her eyes, she came to realize. There were other changes, too. From the constant, distracted, fuzziness of her thoughts to everyday interactions – the world was cast in shadow, muted to her. Her food tasted bland and dissolved in her mouth like ash. She was always acutely hungry, and thirsty – yet nothing she ate eased that faint gnawing.

She went back to school. There were lessons, and assignments, but her pen sat on the paper, bleeding ink into sheet after sheet until the bell rang and then she would do it all again in her next class. She couldn't bear to look at herself in the mirror, she had too many questions for that blue-eyed stranger.

Sota would chatter to her as she walked with him from the train from school, but his voice barely reached her. The sounds of the street barely reached her. Even the stinging wind brought no feeling to her face. She felt disconnected from sensations, she realized. Kagome had even cut her finger at lunch one day and had not noticed it, bleeding all over the cafeteria table. Eri had shrieked at the sight, pulling Kagome from her daydream, but she just watched as the deep red trickled down her knuckles. Eri helped her to the nurse and as the blood washed into the sink's basin and swirled down the drain; that same thought crept through her mind.

Down. Down.

Then that exchange with the nurse...

'Kagome, are you alright?' Kagome could see concern in the young nurse's eyes.

'Yes, Ma'am. I'm sorry, I'm ok. I just need a note to get back to class.' She looked down at her bandaged hand. What had she even cut herself on? As she tried to remember, the nurses voice startled her from her thoughts; not the sweet, kind voice she had used just moments before, but a raspy whisper.

'You can't go back anymore, Kagome. You need to go back to the well.'

Kagome felt the blood drain from her as she pushed herself back and away from the woman, knocking over the sitting room chair. 'What...what did you just say?' She had lost control her voice; she may have been yelling or whispering. Either way, the woman across from her appeared shocked.

The nurse blanched, visibly startled at her reaction. She swallowed and nodded before repeating herself slowly, as if she was terrified of how Kagome would react, 'I said, I should call your mother, you aren't looking well.'

And so, after some phone calls and a few awkward exchanges, Kagome went home with that raspy voice trailing her the entire way.

'Back to the well...you can't go back...go back to the well."

That wasn't the only time she had heard things, odd things. Scary things. But rest, she thought, rest would stop these voices. This...haze. And tonight, like the night before and the night before that, she waited for that fall. Waited to slip down into the comfortable darkness of sleep; despite knowing that for all the chasing of it she would attempt when she reached it – it was fleeting. Empty.

She knew her tests would be there tomorrow. Her friends would be waiting. Her life would be waiting. But she couldn't bring herself to feel any urgency to try for another fruitless night of empty sleep. She didn't feel anything – except wrong.

She felt wrong.

The world was spinning around her, a blur of laughter and joy and color. But the colors didn't reach her, wherever she was. She was awash in grey and still falling, falling into that well.

And tonight, like every night since that day, the wind outside her bedroom howled at her, screamed at her to get up. To come out. To find what she left behind there in that wellhouse.

Finally, Kagome listened.

She didn't leave a note. She couldn't think to. What would she even say? sThe trees around her swayed with the wind, their shadows beckoning her closer to that wooden building. The adrenaline turned her stomach, but she was not afraid. Only eager. Anxious.

As she walked the path dancing with the shadows of the trees swathed in moonlight, a part of her, the logical part of her, tried to convince her to turn around. The warnings collided with the thoughts crowding her already buzzing head. Reason would tell her that this was insanity, that only a crazy person would jump in an old dried out well in the middle of the night. How deep could it go? And what if she was wrong, and she was just jumping to her death. Or perhaps she would shatter her legs, and no one would hear her cries for help from that musty old well. Despite all logic, something told her that at the bottom of that well she would not find the hard packed, aged earth; but freedom from whatever it was that was leeching the life from her. It was like a piece of her was calling out to her from beyond the earth, beyond the soil and darkness where that thing had appeared.

Down, down.

The doorway came into view, and in the darkness beyond stood the wooden lip of the well; the dark wood dull in the light of the flashlight. Her muscles jerked as she conjured the images of that monster sliding towards her in the dark, whispering her name - yet for some reason, she didn't feel the terror she had remembered. Her side ached as she approached the mouth of the well, the wood smooth under her fingers. Just a light touch, and her head was clearing. She shone her light down, and the beam was engulfed by black; the pillar of light reflecting off some invisible lid of the well. She reached her hand down, and darkness swallowed it.

A warm breeze greeted her from the other side. A reassuring breeze, and a familiar scent she couldn't place. Her heart thudded in her chest as she tightened the straps of her backpack that suddenly felt as heavy as lead.

Before she could stop herself, Kagome took a breath, and leapt into the dark.