Everything was dark.

So pitch dark that Kagome didn’t even realize she was dreaming until her eyes began to adjust to the heaviness of the gloom around her, which resolved by degrees into contours of brownish-grey. She wasn’t walking, but she was moving. She was floating along, gliding slowly through space. She felt bizarrely detached from the world around her—

And cold. So very, very cold…

There was a distant sound like dripping water. A vague, distant howl like the wind. Was it still raining outside? she wondered with strange lucidity, recalling the evening storm that had lulled her to sleep that night.

But Kagome dismissed this waking thought. By her dream logic, she knew that she was no longer in the hut. She didn’t know where she was except that it was somewhere deep underground, deep in the bowels of the earth. She drifted along through the tunneling darkness, which narrowed then widened into a yawning, cavern-like space—

Mutely, Kagome gasped.

It was like a dark stone cathedral, this place—massive and dimly illuminated and pillared all around with great primeval columns of fused stalagmites and stalactites. But most of these glittering columns were broken. Most of the ground was broken, too. Even the cavernous ceiling had largely caved in.

It was a ruin, this place.

And at the center of all this boulderous rubble was a silvery pale figure, bowed and crushed and speared through the chest as though an entire mountain had been pulled down around him.

He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. His gossamer hair fell around him in a stiff, frozen spray. His golden eyes stared through it, dull and empty. And he was still—so deathly silent and still—as still as a statue is still…

Kagome screamed and screamed into the silence.

She was still screaming when she woke—a horrible sharp rending cry that wounded her own ears to hear it. But it was nothing compared to the pain tearing through her chest.

“Kaa-san!” Shin cried, bolting upright in bed as she scrambled to her feet and fled from the hut, out into the still-falling rain.

She was blind with panic, crazed with fear. She tripped badly in the thick muck, scrabbled back up limping and sloughing off mud with each slippery, stumbling step. She kept on staggering ahead as she sobbed her throat raw, casting her eyes and her senses wildly about her everywhere in the drizzling grey predawn.

Which mountain? Which mountain? She could see their dark peaked shadows, looming in the distance, as she racked her mind hysterically for any sense of recognition. But the finer details of the dream were fast fading, slipping through her mind like the raindrops through her hair and clothes.

The pinpricks of claws bit into her wrist. Kagome startled, reeling around—but it was just Shin who’d caught up with her. Frowning, he drew back from whatever expression was contorting her face. The drizzle trailed in rivulets down his black pointed ears, dripped like beads of lead from his black hair and lashes.

“Kaa-san,” he murmured, his green eyes mirrored and wide as he stared up at her, “what’s wrong with you?”

Kagome swallowed, choked. “I—” She broke off, clutching at the sodden neck of her robe as her frantic eyes roved around again, unbidden. “I saw him, Shin. Oh God—”

The horrific image of Sesshoumaru skewered stiff flashed behind her eyes. Kagome’s adrenaline spiked again. An oily wave of nausea rolled over her. As she clasped a clammy hand to her lips, Shin grasped her by the sleeve and shook her.

“Who, Kaa-san? Who did you see?”

Kagome hiccuped, steadied a bit by his touch. “Your father, baby…I saw him. I saw him in a dream,” she said thickly, breathing carefully past the hard lump in her throat, “but it was real, Shin, I know that it was.” A fresh flood of hot tears coursed down her cheeks. “He’s underground somewhere—trapped under a mountain somewhere.” She reeled around again. “We have to find him, Shin—we have to help him. He’s trapped in there, and he can’t move, and he can’t breathe, but he can’t be—”

Kagome bit down on her hand, unable to allow the thought to frame itself in words, even in her mind. Hadn’t Sesshoumaru himself told her that it was impossible? That the mating mark she bore was the irrefutable proof that they were still bound together in this life? She clapped a feverish hand to the familiar scar at the base of her neck, just to reassure herself that it was still there.

“But how long?” she whimpered, sinking to her knees in the cold and the damp. “How long has he been trapped like that?”

Buried alive in that cold and lonely hell.

It was hard to imagine a more terrible fate. As Kagome cradled her face in her muddy hands and wept, Shin hugged her around the shoulders.

“Don’t cry, Kaa-san,” he said, tamping down on the tremor in his own boyish voice. His tone steeled, along with the glint in his jade-colored eyes. “We’ll find him. We’ll search every mountain there is if we have to, but we’ll find him. Okay?”

Kagome gazed at her son tearfully, nodding. As they hugged one another tightly again, suddenly Shin drew back from her with a gravelly whine.

It was a wounded sound. Like a switch being flipped, all Kagome’s concern switched abruptly to her son. She clasped him by the upper arms, searching his grimacing little face.

“What is it, baby? What happened?”

“…I’m not sure,” Shin said, unclenching his fangs as he shakily exhaled. “It felt like something stung me—no, like it bit at me. And now I feel kinda weak.”

His eyelids drooped as he spoke, descending over his glowing green eyes like lamp shades lowering. Kagome could only assume her reiki had run off the rails for a second in her distress, and she’d inadvertently burned him. Guiltily, she dredged herself up, side-hugging him to her. Shin sagged against her with a tired sigh.

“Come on, baby,” she said wearily herself, leading him along with her back toward the hut. “Let’s get out of these wet clothes and try to get some rest.”

Kagome was far from hopeful that any rest would come to her that night—or any night in the foreseeable future. But in the early hours of the morning, a thick, syrupy drowsiness overtook her. In the hazy in-between of delirium, she imagined a phantom tingling at the base of her throat.

When she finally slept, it was dreamless.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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