Bloodlust: Purity by Lira

On a Snowy Evening

Chapter 1

On a Snowy Evening

"Mama! Catch!"

"Ai!"

A powder-soft ball of snow exploded from Kagome's blocking hands and left her with a fine mist of momentary particles, frozen dust stuck to her eyelashes and the fur of her outer robe. Child-pitched laughter caressed the air, and Kagome turned with a mock-angry expression conspiring on her face.

"Soki, you know I don't like cold!"

The laughing child behind her responded with a brighter grin. She was human, a girl of only ten years, obviously not the child of the youkai lady she played with. When Kagome's soft-spoken Rin had come to an age when she could live and love alone, Soki had come to them the same way Rin had come to Sesshomaru- a broken-bodied, broken-hearted almost baby, all out of second chances. The ransomed power of Tensaiga's sacrificed soul had flashed then with no second thoughts from Kagome's body to Soki's life – and another little girl had joined a family that seemed to deny no innocent heart.

All the brokenness had been healed by three years of growing and life, and now a gap-toothed smile shone wide under eyes with brilliance and twice as much sparkle as nature usually gifted.

"Come with me, Soki. Kouga's awakening is tonight you know, and your father agreed you could stay up for the ceremony if you wished. Will you dress with me?"

The girl leapt out of the snow like a white-fired arctic fox, a splashing mound of crystals that lifted like new clouds into the sky. The gentle freeze that blanketed the world was as soft as wool, falling still around them in a cool parody of mist. The taste of snow ran thick in the air, fresh patterned flecks of light and fog coming to rest ice-heavy on the solemn remnants of summer blooms, alabaster roses glittering transparent in the winter sun.

Kagome tugged her adopted daughter through the cold and into the great fortress, unmoving against the lessening, lashing storm. Twenty years of Kagome's habitation had softened the hardest corners, but the fortress had stood mostly unchanged for nearly twelve hundred years, and even her beauty could not alter the stone. Walking down a familiar corridor to a familiar door, Kagome was filled suddenly with panic – a sense of irrational danger. It lasted less than a second, less than a moment, hugged at the light easing out from strands of her miko power and then was gone.

The intrusion pulled at her memory, drawing her back to thoughts and times that had crushed her heart as a penalty for living, cost her blood like water, salve for the wounds of the world. Intervening years had somewhat quieted the explosive terror of reaction to those thoughts – the training she received from Eldest helped more. To know finally and truly that the power she held she could wield and wield well was a precious gift.

She shook off memory with an oft practiced twist of her shoulders, and pulled open the door and shooed Soki into her little chambers, full of dazed blues and shudders of green.

"Find something pretty to wear, Soki, and perhaps it won't be blue this time?"

The laughter cascaded again.

"Blue is pretty!"

Kagome shook her head and left the girl alone, shutting the door behind her. Attempting silence and watching carefully around her with all senses at her disposal, Kagome turned her attention to finding her wayward, mischievous son. Some strangeness had occurred that drew attention and awkward questions with her Shippou, which gave him weapons of fire in his hands and a magic that followed houriki with its rules but not its abilities. They made him difficult to find if he chose to be – and even as old as he was, Shippou chose mischief and magic over making things easy. Her adopted boy-child had begun to confuse them all shortly after his thirteenth birthday, growing the mind of a man with the form of a child.

Nothing was wrong with him, nothing prevented him from aging as should have been normal that anyone could find – but he lived through the years and suffered almost no effect from them. The now-grown pup who had been brought to the world in a flash of night and fire, who would know the pangs of his awakening youkai soul in the night's ceremony, was nine years younger than his adopted sibling and did not show it.

Only silence greeted her every probe at his soul for the source of this impossible agelessness and his unexplained power. Even in a time of general peace, Kagome's days avoided boredom with ease of motion.

As these thoughts crossed her mind, the wall on her left between two stunning tapestries of winter and spring moved – close peering peripheral vision on Kagome's part discerned a pair of glittering green eyes tucked away against the wall.

"Shippou! It is one thing to play games, but your brother's ceremony will begin in less than two hours and you cannot dress up in stone!"

He grinned, a ridiculous expression of red mouth and pearly teeth glinting in the wall, and then he stepped forward and seemed to melt out of the stones.

"I am sorry mama, but its so much fun to play this way...if I'd been able to do this when I was small, Rin and I would have had a hundred times more fun."

Kagome shuddered, remembering, and Shippou laughed.

"Don't worry, mama, we'll behave tonight."

Kagome looked back at him with sharp eyes, catching all his words and rolling them through her thoughts.

"You convinced your sister to come!"

He was already off and running down the hallway to his room.

"Yes!"

Somehow he managed the word over his shoulder, running at full speed without falling on his face.

Kagome smiled, a sweet expression still innocent, and made her way down the stairs and through a mob of servants in the dining hall. The silent servants who had suffered so long unseen still kept their places – twenty years had helped heal the old sad wound, and even Sesshomaru found it more pleasant to see those who served him.

There was a change that brought laughter to her lips – her stoic mate, so proud in his silence and his formal cold, finally glad for some company and so often smiling. In her thoughts of him were the naughty and the nice, moments of solitude and passion, danger and laughter, all those things that existed almost invisible, the comforts of love.

Sesshomaru watched his son pull back the string of his bow, and the arrow on the string whistled down a path outlined by frozen strands of stem and twig. It thudded into the center of a drawn knot wood target with a satisfying 'thunk', and Sesshomaru smiled, violent thoughts in the gleam of his eyes.

"Excellent. You will be as skilled as your mother soon."

Kouga shook his head.

"No one will be as skilled as mother – she never misses a shot, never even misses dead center."

His father's smile widened.

"Perhaps, but then she has had quite a bit of practice."

Kouga turned to him then, all of a sudden quiet in his motions, and Sesshomaru felt the pressured stare of his son against his skin like a hot wave of too thick oxygen rushing down into his lungs. Scorched, he turned to meet Kouga's eyes, and the rippling edge between the silver and gold that he found there muddied, dividing without separation.

"And where did she get her practice, father? I have been thinking, lately, and neither you nor mother will tell me anything about the past. All my questions are redirected, or the same stories are told. Why am I so turned aside?"

Sesshomaru looked well and truly startled. The silence he had kept, that Kagome had kept, was a personal silence, a dogged silence that came from fear of the unsealing of quiet and the momentous tug of old memories that had locked themselves into patterns of pain. There came into his eyes then a look between rage and panic, trembling and moving in the no-knowing path of his expression.

"Why...why would you wish to know the past, Kouga? It is history – it is written. Read what is there...there is nothing else that you could possibly need to know."

"Nothing answers, again! Listen, father, listen! I have dreams of fighting you, dying and living under your sword. I dream of blue eyes, intense and sacred to my dreaming thoughts, burning in my heart and clawing at my soul. I dream the end of the world in laughter, a withering soul in a darkness of purple pain. I dream my blood and burning blood, all over in silence. Tell me the past, father! Tell me!"

Sesshomaru reeled, struck dumb by an old anguish that forsook all hope, all possibilities of prayer and sacrifice.

"When did you dream these things, Kouga?"

The burning was back in the Inu-Prince's eyes, and he let his words crawl through his father's soul with the backwards harmony of vengeance.

"Every night of my life."

"The ceremony begins with the first hour of full moonlight. I....will talk to your mother, afterward. I cannot give you this...what you seek. Not unless she also knows."

Kouga nodded, passion fading with the hope of knowledge. He followed his father in silence, leaving his last arrow still in the target, shivering alone in the winter wind. From nowhere, he was undone in himself by a half-formed question from his father's murmuring voice.

"What soul was so birthed in my son..."

A tempest of sand grained awareness rushed all Kouga's limbs, and he felt in his thoughts the sudden beginning of the turning of a key. The gold in his eyes dilated, turned almost black with straining, and then he shuddered and pulled back away from whatever howling watchers confronted his senses.

The moon rose over the horizon, settling into the sky like a pale, quicksilver pupil in some great eye of the night. In the hours time it took for the moon to rise and hover high and bright over the trees, a crowd had gathered outside the great unsealed gates of the castle. Kouga stood still with his father and watched his mother, standing at a black altar of unblooded stone. Behind her old allies and family stood in silent ranks, betraying no thought by their faces to his study. Only a few obvious faces were missing – his mother's friends, the priest and his wife, home with a daughter who was due to deliver her first child in any flashing moment.

Kinawai was there, proud tiger lord of the northlands, still head of the Great Council, though it had not been convened since the end of the Dragon War. Akira stood behind him, now Lord of the East, once Commander of the Army of the West under his father in that same war.

Many heroes had been made, more broken than in the elder legends. Rumors and whispers spoke of the dead, Storm Flower –Kasuka - mate and betrayer of Kinawai and all those who touched his life. Night had flickered over the world with her living, and her death brought a cleansing deeper than the iron heart of the earth. So went warfare.

The gardens now held more lovely flowers than had bloomed, spectacular wraiths of opal champagne surrounding them on bushes and trees of frosted steel.

In the moments before speaking, a soft distraction of whittled malice insinuated itself, riding on the senses with poison horned tongues. The deepest strings of a seven stringed koto could have struck no more pulsing a note than the instant of breath that greeted a wild footstep, a shudder of low half-whispers that died at courtesy's hands.

The girl that stood before them was not often seen – a human woman-child, dropping by as quickly and lightly as a raven. Still, she was not unaccepted. With all the presence of a summer rain, she stepped up lightly to the Lord who was her father. For the sake of all those behind her, she dropped into the gentlest of bows, a lightening stroke of grace in her spine. A single blossom she tucked into the sash at his waist, and then her laughing arms made it seem as though she were only six again.

"Rin...I did not think you would come."

She smiled, bright, open. Sun glinted in her hair even in the darkness, crazed like the rest of her.

"Not come for my own brother's Awakening? You should know better, father. Rin always comes for the important ones!"

She winked, and he scowled at her, teasing.

"Don't let your mother hear you talking that way. She was so happy when she taught you to use proper grammar."

"Yes, father."

The Lord Kinawai stood in awe of this dancing vision of happiness, leaping in his vision like a goddess of the sun, alive with a radiant fire, a circle of burning aura bright and visible to his eyes. There was copper shining in her hair until a cloud covered over the moon, and then she was dark, shadows and deep water, shining and blessed. The hard brightening of his green tiger eyes shone just a little softer, and the lost waiting embers of his heart were lit.

The keeper of records noted only that the Lord Kinawai dance a single dance at the ball following the ceremony, and that with the Lady Kagome herself.