Standing alone on the icy precipice, Sesshoumaru surveyed his mist-shrouded domain. Sunlight glinted from the snow-capped peaks of distant ranges, vanished into the yawning blackness of abyssal gulfs. Fortresses of lesser lords glowed like jeweled sculptures from their plinths of crystal and cloud, of fire, frost and bone. Vast plains swept out in swathes of verdant, living silk. Forests of blood red, shimmering gold, and emerald green wreathed the land—forever in winter, or autumn, or on the cusp of early spring.

The Western Lands stretched farther than even his keen eyes could see. His inheritance, expanded through successive conquest. It was Sesshoumaru’s own vassal who now governed the Eastern Lands. Not since the reign of the Dragonlords had East and West been united under one rule.

Truly, he had surpassed his father.

His legacy was assured.

A ghostly presence buffeted at his senses. A phantom echo, resounding from the frozen reaches far below. Sesshoumaru closed his eyes to better hear it. The Inu no Taishou’s last reprimands came back to him, on a skirl of chilling wind.

“I know about the deaths, Sesshoumaru…when you slaughter your intended mate for lack of temperance, what then will you do?”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes opened narrowly. Whatever he may have lacked before, such temperance he now possessed in abundance. Once he’d mastered himself, all else had succumbed in due course. Next to this, even subduing her had been nothing.

She lives, Chichi-ue, he challenged his father’s reproachful ghost. What words do you have for me now?

The icy breeze said nothing more. Sesshoumaru took its frosty silence for submission, as he leapt from the precipice into the glittering mists far below, and alighted once more in his earthly stronghold.

His instincts led him to her. Compelled him to seek her out first. The assurance he sought was primal, born not from misgiving but from base feeling. That she was well and his went without question.

Yet he needed to see her all the same.

The palace where she dwelled was called the Moon Tower. By night or by day, its central keep glowed like a pillar of stacked pearl. Stepping foot in this place took Sesshoumaru back in memory, to the time when his mother had still resided here. After Touga’s death and Sesshoumaru’s ascension, the palace had laid dormant. In the tradition of dowagers before her, his mother had taken up residence elsewhere, leaving the Moon Tower vacant for Sesshoumaru’s presumptive mate to claim.

And claim it she had.

Kagome was not alone now in her palace, of course. She rarely was. Whether it was his mother and her retinue, visiting dignitaries, or simply Kagome’s usual hangers-on—not a few of whom, like his cousin Kaigamaru, had once been her staunchest critics—there was always an audience of some sort about her. Sesshoumaru accepted this. She had been a meddlesome woman from the start, and could not help but to thrust herself into affairs which need not concern her.

Mortal or immortal made no difference to her, it seemed. As she had risen to power, her old moniker of Shikon Miko had been eclipsed. The Bane of the East, they had dubbed her—both Sesshoumaru’s enemies and allies alike. But this title was fast fading. As his wife and mate, it was the Immortal Priestess they called her now—a pithy sobriquet popularized by the one who clung to her skirts more fanatically than all the rest.

More than Sesshoumaru would have ever believed possible, but such was the force of her character, to bring to heel even the most vicious and spiteful of his kind, who revered power above all else.

He was with her now in the gardens, prostrating himself before her, as had become his habit of late. Hirokin’s groveling often took the form of presenting her with lavish gifts, which she spurned, as she was spurning him now. Jaw set, she turned her face aside from both him and the long, lacquered chest he’d set before her, whose lid he must have shut once he’d realized the gesture was as vain as all the others had been. Hirokin sighed, but there was a silky quality to the sound that suggested he reveled in her cold disdain of him. As if it were merely a foretaste to be savored, of heated punishments yet to come.

Truly, Sesshoumaru had never seen Hirokin happier. It would have grated on him, had Sesshoumaru not felt content himself.

A trace of smile shadowed Hirokin’s lips as he picked himself up from his sordid debasement and took his leave of her. Something in the contemptuous flash of her eyes as they followed after told Sesshoumaru she must revel in it, too. His dominion of her had made her own thirst for dominance run that much hotter and fiercer.

Sesshoumaru’s tongue slicked the point of his fang as he advanced upon her unaware. Much as he enjoyed to fan such flames in her, he must keep his own desires in check. The slight pain quelled his quickening lust. The taste of his own blood braced him against the ravening desires he wished to inflict upon her.

Her paleness as he drew nearer sobered him even more to this effect. It was subtle, but he could see how her features were faintly drawn. How her reiki simmered, a roil of ceaseless agitation.

Yet for all this she had never looked lovelier to him. It was as though her beauty were ripening with each passing day, swelling like a tender bloom on the verge of full blossom. Sesshoumaru supposed that this perception of his was primal, too.

The moment Hirokin had left, her hands had gone to the chest he’d given her. Vehemently, she unlatched the lid. Sesshoumaru watched as her eyes scanned over its contents with a raptness that surprised him. Her brow was furrowed. She was so distracted, lost in thought by whatever treasure the chest contained that she didn’t even notice him until he was practically upon her.

“Kagome,” he said, as she sensed him at last.

She tensed, frowning. Her slender hand fell from the chest. “Sesshoumaru,” she replied rather narrowly, as she turned to him from the stone bench where she sat, beneath an arbor of gold-flowered vines. “What do you want?”

The question irked him. There was an edge to it that bordered on insolence. His eyes flicked to the open chest, whose contents he could not yet see, except for a glint of silver that shone through the gap between lid and base.

“What has he offered you now,” Sesshoumaru asked coolly as he circled around, “a piece of the heavens?”

Ordinarily, he couldn’t have cared less what latest trinket Hirokin had sought to ply her with. But the way her gaze had warily followed his, as though wishing she’d thought earlier to shut the chest, made him darkly wonder. When he stopped at her side and gazed down, what he saw lying there on its bed of dark silk was perhaps the last thing he might have expected to find—

It was Tenseiga, or the shards of it, at least.

In a line from the splintered hilt, the pieces of the broken sword lay. Jagged fragments of blue-tinged silver, arrayed like so many busted fangs themselves. Irreparable, Sesshoumaru had sensed, when he’d left the fragments of his birthright scattered in the dust a decade ago. How Hirokin had recovered them, Sesshoumaru could only guess. Wresting them from Toutousai’s clutches would have been no small feat.

“Why would he give you this?” Sesshoumaru demanded, as he looked from the sword to his wife.

“Beats me,” Kagome muttered darkly, glancing away. “He’s desperate to worm his way back into my good graces, so to speak. I feel like he’s throwing everything at the wall at this point, just in the hopes something will stick.”

Sesshoumaru eyed her closely for a moment. “It seems this time he struck true.”

Kagome stiffened, before her gaze cut back to him. “He caught me off guard with this one, that’s all.” Her look lost its edge, softening wistfully as it wandered back to the chest with its bed of glinting shards. “Toutousai told me once that great swords have memories of their own. I didn’t understand what he meant, until I glimpsed into Tessaiga’s. That was how I knew I—” Her words bit off as she shook her head to swallow them back down. “How I knew for certain what had happened to Inuyasha.” She scrutinized the shards a moment more before her shrewd gaze slid up to him. “Maybe there are things Tenseiga remembers, too. You used it to resurrect me, after all.”

A chill breath of wind seemed to stir the air, as though he stood upon that icy pinnacle once more. Sesshoumaru’s fur pricked at the sensation, yet he knew it was only in his mind. Kagome understood the full truth of that night now, the night of her death. She had told him as much, and he believed her. Even so, he felt the need to remind her.

“Whatever Tenseiga might show you, you remember it now for yourself.”

“I know,” she said, frowning in thought, “but I’d still like to see it, just in case there’s some detail I might’ve missed.”

Sesshoumaru couldn’t have felt more strongly otherwise. Her death and its aftermath were etched into his mind in such excruciating relief that his greater concern was for the memory to dull altogether. To dwell upon it in detail was the furthest thing from what he wished for—for himself and Kagome both. She had an unwise tendency to dig into old scars that were best left to fade.

Yet it was all a moot point, as he told her presently, “Tenseiga has been shattered beyond mending.”

“As far as we know,” Kagome said as she rose from the bench, her hand straying now to her stomach as it always did. “But who’s to say a new set of fangs can’t be used to reforge it?”

Ignoring the question, Sesshoumaru rested his gaze on the slight swell that rose beneath the layers of her red-and-white kimono. His colors, ostensibly, but Sesshoumaru suspected otherwise—especially when the light caught her eyes as it presently did, and the blue of her irises was lost in a gleam of ghostly white. Pale as the eyes of that fiery beast he’d subdued in order to mate her. The beast which was Kagome herself, at the core of her being—the first incarnation of her unfettered soul, now caged in the immortal flesh he had given her.

Transcendence, the monk Miroku had called it, this ability of hers to channel past lives. A name far too benign, in Sesshoumaru’s experience. It was a soul unhinged from its physical moorings, a constant danger to the consciousness that presently ruled it. Despite her skill and forbearance, Kagome’s transcendent power had nearly overwhelmed her mortal self.

Surely it would have, if not for his interference.

More than his own ferocity had been tamed on the night of their mating. Still, the thought of Kagome in communion with the spirits of her past selves, let alone in abiding control of them, was not a thought Sesshoumaru relished.

But such was the price he must pay, to have her as his.

As though changing the subject, Kagome asked him, “Have you thought of a name for your son?”

The first of many, his mother had remarked with a secret smile when he’d told her the news, her golden gaze lifting to the moon high above them.

Yet there was something pointed in Kagome’s phrasing which Sesshoumaru misliked. His son, she had said, as though she had no part in the child she was carrying. It was true enough that even from within her womb, Sesshoumaru could sense their son’s demonic nature. How much keener she must be aware, with the clear strain his burgeoning youki was placing upon her. It was unnatural to say the least, for a human to whelp a youkai, let alone a miko such as herself.

But if their son took so strongly after him as she implied, all the more reason for her to give up these absurd notions of repairing Tenseiga.

“No,” he answered, leveling his gaze against hers. “You name him.”

Kagome was taken aback. Her eyes widened slightly as she looked down at her round stomach. Absently, she circled it with the press of her palm.

“But he’s your heir,” she protested, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“If you put forth something stupid, I will tell you,” Sesshoumaru said, smirking slightly as she shot him a baleful look. “But I don’t think you will.”

Kagome bit her lip, considering. After a while, her gaze strayed beyond them, toward the Western Sea.

“Your mother told me a story once,” she said softly. “It was about an ancestor of yours, a great warrior who used the last of his strength to smash the fangs of a serpent that had swallowed up his beloved. His sword broke when he did so. But he went into the belly of the beast after her anyway, knowing that the fangs would regrow, and the jaws would close behind him forever. He flung her out to safety, just before they did.” Kagome’s gaze returned to his, a chagrined half-smile on her lips. “What was his name again? I forget.”

“Saitou,” Sesshoumaru said.

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Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Control may be over, but the story continues in The Rebel Anthology…

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