Kagome was glad Sesshoumaru had warned her to shut her eyes. The vertigo she experienced as they shot off through the sky was enough to make her head spin as it was. She felt eerily weightless, almost disembodied. It was a disorienting sensation to say the least. Even when her feet touched solid ground again, she kept her eyes screwed shut. Breathing carefully through her nose, she ran her hands and senses over her stomach, desperate to reassure herself that the baby and she had arrived in one piece.

When she finally did open her eyes, Sesshoumaru had to steady her again. The wobbling step forward she’d taken had nothing to do with her ghostly flight, however.

“This place,” she said, a bit breathless with wonder, “it’s so beautiful…”

It was like something out of a fairytale, out of a dream. Wandering to the edge of the balcony, Kagome placed her hands to the carved rail and gazed out. Alpine air filled her lungs, a clear cool draught. Vining flowers brushed her hands, their snow-white petals silky to the touch. In the valley far below, pearly mists swirled, parting and coalescing, like the clouds were in a dance whose graceful steps were known only to them. Through the breaking mists, Kagome glimpsed slivers of emerald wood and golden fields, glinting threads of silver streams and lakes that gleamed like mirrors. 

Behind the cage of her ribs, Kagome’s heart soared. There was something beautifully wild about this place. Something mystic in the air that told her this was a demon’s abode, a magical place. She had felt this before, many times, but not in ages now, it seemed. She turned to Sesshoumaru, who’d been watching her.

“I remember now,” she said, smiling with a wistfulness so deep it made her heart ache just to speak of it, “how I used to feel when we were hunting for the shards of the Sacred Jewel. I used to think, if only we could piece the Jewel back together, if only, if only…then my happiness would be complete.” She shook her head. “I wished for the adventure to be over, but what if the adventure was what I loved all along?” She glanced back to the mythic valley, frowning in doubt. A shadow seemed to have fallen over it now. “I used to feel so free here, but now I feel trapped just like I did when the well was shut.”

“What would you do,” Sesshoumaru asked her, “if you could do anything? Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?”

“What would I do, where would I go…” Kagome closed her eyes, imagining. A breath of sound escaped her, half sigh, half rueful laugh. “I’d go back in time, I guess.”

A warm touch to her cheek had her eyes fluttering open. The sight of him standing just before her was more painful to her eyes than the valley had been. Sesshoumaru’s claws curled into her hair, tugging a few locks loose from the ribbon that bound them. Dark and waving they listed free in the wind.

“As would I,” he said quietly, as he bent and brushed his lips to hers. “Let us go there, then, together.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 5/24/23