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EIGHTH BLOOD

Chapter 108: The sight

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Kohaku's frantic cries alerted Octavia to Rin's near catatonic state. Without hesitating, she sprinted over to them and gasped in horror. The girl's eyes had rolled so far backwards that only the whites were visible. Octavia tried calling her name, but she remained unresponsive.

"Don't touch her!" Kohaku warned as she reached for Rin's shoulders.

"Why?" she snapped. What gave him the right to order her around outside of their sparring matches as well as during them? Didn't he know that Rin was her responsibility, not his?

"Because then we'll both be stuck," he said.

She frowned. "Stuck? What are you—"

"Oh my god!" Kagome cried suddenly. "What's happened to your hand, Kohaku-kun!"

Octavia followed her gaze down to the aforementioned hand, which was welded to Rin's wrist by a thick sheet of lilac-tinted crystal. She backed away instinctively as the crystal expanded and travelled all the way up Kohaku's forearm to his elbow. He didn't seem to be in any pain, but what would happen if it spread further—towards his heart and other vital organs?

"Rin?" she tried again. "Can you hear me? Say something!"

To her surprise, Rin did answer; just not in the way she'd expected her to. "Four flowers crushed beneath snow," the girl rambled nonsensically. "Three wither and decay, but one blooms again the following spring."

The others exchanged wary looks, but Octavia was unable to tear her eyes away from Rin's. What's happening to you? she thought as she gazed into those fogged-over windows, searching for answers in them. What can you see?

They all breathed a collective sigh of relief when Rin's eyes returned to normal and she panted for breath. Kohaku finally managed to pry his arm free, but the crystal coating remained intact. It was as grotesque as it was beautiful—like dewdrops on a spider web.

"What the hell happened back there?" Inuyasha asked. "Well? Did you hit your head during the earthquake or something?"

Rin's bottom lip trembled. "I don't . . . I saw . . ." Her eyes shifted to Kohaku's crystal-encased limb and widened in evident alarm. "How did—"

"It happened again, didn't it?" Kagome interrupted.

Rin gave a mute nod.

The miko's eyes flitted between Rin and Kohaku's arm dubiously. "Was it the same thing you saw last time? Or was it something different?"

"Different," Rin replied in a tight voice.

"In a good way or a bad way?"

Octavia saw Rin's throat bob nervously. "The latter," she whispered. "Definitely the latter . . . This might sound crazy, but I think I saw the end of the world."

A deep crease appeared in the middle of Inuyasha's forehead. "What do you mean saw?"

Rin looked incredibly guilty all of a sudden. She averted her eyes and murmured, "It's hard to explain. The truth is, I haven't been entirely honest with you guys. Some more than others." Sighing, she raised her head and met Octavia's questioning gaze. "Every night, I have bad dreams. I've been drinking a sedative for the past month to help me sleep – which it does – but it does nothing to ward off the dreams."

"What are the dreams about?" enquired Octavia.

"All sorts of things. Most of the time, they're new, but I get recurring ones, too."

I sometimes dream about moments I wasn't there for.

Could they be like the dreams the Reikon Blade had given her? Or the ones Nagisa had been experiencing since she had forsaken her old faith in favour of worshipping the God Stars? She and the sea dragon had both travelled into the past and the future via their dreams. Could these ones be in the same vein as those? Or were they of a more sinister nature?

We're more vulnerable when we're dreaming, the Dressmaker had claimed. It's like a door gets opened. Yes, we can travel anywhere, but it goes both ways. Anything can wander in.

Octavia balled her hands into fists. "Why is this the first we're hearing of it?"

Rin's expression darkened. "Because I've just realised that they weren't dreams, after all."

"What makes you say that?" questioned Kagome.

"You have to be asleep to dream. Did I seem asleep to you when I said all that stuff about flowers withering and blooming again? And to top it off, there's Kohaku's arm. Just look at it. That's no dream. It's real."

Kirara mewled loudly, demanding their attention. She was a kitten again, but the fire in her eyes still burned as brightly as it had before. Octavia desperately wanted to know what she was thinking about. The nekomata was a mystery to her. According to Kagome, she was older than all of them combined, and there had been times when Octavia had caught her staring at her from a distance, as if she were keeping track of her movements. She was fairly certain that Kirara knew a hell of a lot more than she let on, but she had no means of proving it.

"You're all pissing me off today," grumbled Inuyasha. "I'm sick of the freaky-ass shit that keeps happening to us. Why does the universe enjoy messing with us so much? There are billions of other people to choose from, but it somehow always ends up being us. That's one hell of a coincidence, don't you think?"

"Unless it isn't," Octavia mused aloud. "I wonder . . ."

She couldn't commit to saying the words out loud. Not until she had consulted with someone else first. Tuning out Inuyasha's mithering, she turned and left them all to mull over her suspicious statement together. Whilst she walked, she found herself thinking back to the conversation she'd had with her uncle in the jail sector, shortly after he had revealed his true identity to her.

We're the last of our kind, Cyril. You, me, Augustus, and Galen. We're the only ones left.

Not in this era.

Could he have been right?

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She had some nerve summoning him via parchment as if he were a lowly servant. Had it been anyone else, Sesshoumaru would have punished them for daring to order him around, but Octavia was a different story. There must have been a reason she hadn't come to him in the flesh. He wondered if it had anything to do with the recent earthquake. The stronghold hadn't experienced one of that magnitude in decades, but it had been designed to withstand natural disasters such as quakes and typhoons, so the minuscule amount of damage was hardly surprising.

As per her instructions, he entered his father's old study and was surprised to find Cyril waiting there as well. The warlock, on the other hand, seemed to have been expecting him. He bowed his head respectfully. Sesshoumaru returned the gesture and lifted his foot over the threshold.

"Watch it!" Octavia's voice echoed from behind the large oak desk.

He paused in the entryway and shot Cyril an interrogating glance. The warlock flashed him an exasperated smile before gesturing to the countless sheets of parchment strewn across the floor.

"I don't recall giving you permission to root through my father's belongings, woman," Sesshoumaru said as he pulled the door closed behind him.

"I tried to stop her, my lord," Cyril mumbled. "But you know what she's like."

That he did.

Being careful not to step on any of the pages she had placed meticulously around the room, Sesshoumaru made his way over to the desk. He found her hunched over another thick stack of papers and watched as she leafed through them quickly.

"What are you doing?"

She responded by thrusting a few pieces of loose parchment into his hand. "Hold these for a second."

He decided there could be no harm in complying and waited for her to finish rooting through the disorderly pile. Some of the pages were even older than he was, as evidenced by the musty smell and curling edges. Aside from their age, they looked like perfectly ordinary invoice documents to him, so what exactly was she playing at?

"I was thinking about something that my brother said," Octavia remarked as she finished tying the pages back together with string. "When he told me about the Reikon Blade and Nidawi's plan to use it as a failsafe, he claimed to have learned the truth by peering into its memories. With everything else that was going on, I didn't think to question it, but since when do daggers have memories? And then I realised something. What other weapons do we know that are sentient and have agendas of their own? I don't know about you, but I can think of at least two."

Sesshoumaru clenched his jaw. "The Tessaiga and the Tenseiga," he said, earning a nod in response.

"What if some inanimate objects do have memories?" she theorised. "Especially if they used to be a part of someone, like an eye or a lock of hair . . . Or a tooth."

His brows quirked upwards. "You believe that both blades contain a fraction of my father's memories," he stated rather than asked.

She reached across to unfold one of the pieces of parchment he was holding. The paper in question contained various concept sketches for the Tessaiga—and by extension, the Tenseiga. After all, the two swords had originally been one and the same. The Tessaiga had been created with the sole purpose of protecting Inuyasha's mother, but how far had his father been willing to go in order to guarantee her safety?

"It's more than that," Octavia muttered. "Maybe that's how it started, but after the Tenseiga was cast off from the Tessaiga, what if its consciousness evolved to the point where it could form its own thoughts and desires? What if – in the midst of its abandonment – it saw you and realised how alike you both were? It wasn't acting out your father's wishes. It was acting out yours."

Sesshoumaru was speechless. It was certainly a reach, but it wasn't the most absurd thing he'd ever heard.

Octavia turned to Cyril and said, "You're awfully quiet, Uncle. Is something wrong?" When he failed to respond, she narrowed her eyes at him. "I have a question for you. You were there when Touga asked Totosai to extract Meido Zangetsuha and Tenbasuto from the Tessaiga, right? Tell me, how did that result in a sword with the ability to bring people back from the dead?"

"I used to ask myself that very same question," Cyril confessed. "Touga-sama never did give me a straight answer."

"Did that not seem strange to you?"

"On the contrary. I found it to be extremely odd, but it was not my place to demand an explanation. He may have been my friend, but he was my master first and foremost."

"I bet you regret not asking now."

"A little, yes. But regret cannot alter the past. Nor can it help us understand it."

"It's not the past I'm interested in."

"Then what is all of this about?" Sesshoumaru asked impatiently.

Their gazes locked. The intensity of her stare made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle in anticipation. What in the world could be making her look at him like that?

"Inuyasha made a good point earlier," she said. "He was contemplating why the universe enjoys messing with us so much. A reasonable enough question given everything he's been through, but he's right. Whenever something crazy happens, we always seem to get caught up in it. The jewel. Naraku. Even Ryukotsusei. It's like there's this vortex of fate swirling all around us."

Her eyes strayed down to the Tenseiga, which was silent in its sheath. Given its temperament, Sesshoumaru half expected it to leap out of its scabbard in response to the fierceness of her gaze, but the sword remained as still as a statue.

"It told you to save her, didn't it?" she whispered finally.

"Who?"

"Rin. When you found her body in the woods, the Tenseiga urged you to bring her back to life. Why do you think that was?"

"Doubtless to teach me a lesson about compassion," he answered bitterly. "My father wished for me to learn the value of life—both mortal and immortal. That is why he entrusted the sword to me."

"I'm sure it was. But I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about the Tenseiga."

Cyril's eyes widened. "Are you insinuating that the sword resurrected Rin-chama for a different reason?"

Octavia nodded resolutely.

"And what reason would that be?" queried Sesshoumaru.

She shrugged. "Maybe it knew how important she'd be. Not only to you, but in the grand scheme of things, too."

"Enough riddles," he chastised. "Speak freely now."

Her purple eye glittered ominously – the sight of it almost hypnotic in the low light of the study – before she turned to look at Cyril again and asked, "When we were little, how did our parents know that Augustus and I had powers?"

"There were already clear signs of magic during your first months of infancy," he answered.

"Is that normal for our kind? And if so, is there such a thing as late bloomers?"

"Normal for Erem's Vessel, yes. But for a typical star mage? Not so much. Sometimes the magic doesn't fully manifest until the individual reaches puberty." He folded his arms. "Why do you ask? And what does this have to do with Rin-chama?"

Octavia's throat bobbed anxiously. Sesshoumaru had often prided himself on his ability to correctly guess what people were thinking, but nothing could have prepared him for what she said next.

"I think she might be one of us."

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She told them what had happened in the gardens once the earthquake had subsided. As she described Rin's episode and summarised what the girl had said afterwards, she saw Sesshoumaru's eyes lower to the Tenseiga and stare at it almost accusingly.

"By the gods," gasped Cyril. "Is the taijiya boy all right?"

"I think so," replied Octavia. "For now, anyway. It can't be comfortable having one of your limbs completely encased in Shikonstone, and what's going to happen in the long run? If we can't remove it, is his arm going to rot under there? What if our only option is to amputate it?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I will inspect the boy's arm myself. If it is Shikonstone, I may be able to extract it through the use of magic. It will likely be a slow and arduous process, though. And not to mention incredibly painful."

Poor Kohaku, she thought. And poor Rin. She must feel terrible.

"I presume this is what you were referring to when you implied that the Tenseiga had ulterior motives for wanting her alive," Sesshoumaru said.

Octavia nodded.

"If you're right," Cyril started cautiously. "If Rin-chama possesses even a sliver of spirit magic, then it means her blood is the same as ours. Heavily diluted, mind you, but blood is blood. Should Gus find out about this revelation—"

"Then she'll be in danger, too," Octavia finished for him. "If he knows we have not only another star mage but a soothsayer as well, he'll try to take her from us." Her eyes blazed with determination. "I'll die before I let that happen."

"As will I," agreed Sesshoumaru. "The heretics must never find out about this. In order to ensure Rin's protection, we will speak of this to no one but each other. Understood?"

"What about Rin-chama? She deserves to know the truth."

"Very well. We will tell her on the condition that she keeps it a secret from Kohaku and the others."

"She'll never agree to that," Octavia sighed.

"She will if I command it."

Octavia opened her mouth to rebuke him, but it was Cyril who beat her to the punch this time. "There will be no need for that, my lord. Allow me to speak with her." He flashed Octavia a small smile and added, "From one late bloomer to another."

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