The world seemed to skew on its axis. In Kagome’s mind, there was a perilous dark crack.

Her subjugation spell hadn’t held him—

Had it ever?

Around her own wrists the rosaries caught flame, burning through her sleeves. “Courtship?” she seethed, ripping the singed beads from her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

But Sesshoumaru was stalking toward her still, deadly serious. Her face blanched then. Only for a moment, before it darkened in deepest rage.

“Sesshoumaru, I’m warning you…”

Heedless, he advanced upon her. Reiki coursed like wildfire through her veins. Her immortal self cried out, from the depths of her soul, and she surrendered herself to it, this first incarnation. As the transcendent flames coalesced around her, Sesshoumaru drew his virulent sword. She laughed then, in a high ringing voice that echoed again and again.

“So, you wish to challenge me? Very well, demon. Do your worst.”

The red-white flames bore her up, into the loathsome dark skies. A conjuring glow surrounded her. The earth cracked, the sky split. Scattered across the void of time, spirits of the righteous dead gathered gleaming at her summons. Souls rained down like flaming white shards from the stormy firmament, a hailstorm of sacred reckoning.

Sesshoumaru’s eyes flashed red as he bared his fangs. Slashing his green-edged sword, he leapt and parried. A dark barrier rose around him, which the soul-shards pierced through like so much mist. But with a cosmic blast of youki, he drove the shards back, pulverizing them to glittering dust. The righteous dead gasped their last laments to the one who’d called them forth, and vanished into the ether.

But she had already drawn her fiery scourge, its nine tails as hot and blinding as rays of the sun.

“You,” Sesshoumaru grit out, as the broken pieces of his armor crumbled from him. “What are you?”

“What am I,” she said, as she swept toward him on a wave of flaring red light. “I am a Scion of the First Flame.” The blazing tails of her whip struck out at him as he dodged narrowly, bloodily. The spectral scourge changed to a sword, and the ground where he’d been standing smashed smoldering under the slam of its blade. “I’ve grown tired of dying, but I would gladly die a thousand more deaths just to spite you, you despicable cur!”

Swiping blood from his mouth, Sesshoumaru chuckled, though his eyes were searing with venom. “A thief,” he said as he leapt into the dark skies, ahead of the tidal wave of scalding reiki that swept over the land, leaving no safe place for him to rest. “That is what you are.”

The glowing white of her irises burned afresh. “A thief, you say…”

Her blazing sword flew apart as she hurled it at him, a meteor-fall of pale holy fire. In midair he phased to counter, again and again. But the shards multiplied as he shattered them with blade and claw. Sesshoumaru’s growl rumbled through the sky like thunder. White spectral spearpoints flashed out at him from the roiling air, a multitude of projections that sought to run him through. One caught him in the chest, a hairsbreadth from his heart, and he ripped it out with a snarl.

“Give her back,” he said as he soared high, high above the lake of raging fire that surrounded her. “You will give her back.”

Bakusaiga slashed out, shining dark and fell in its whirlwind sweep. The deluge of miasma it unleashed dissolved the glinting spikes of her reiki in a surge of acidic green. She glared up at him, wreathing herself in fresh flames—flames she stoked higher and fiercer with the lifeblood remaining to her.

“This body is mine,” she yelled as she lost her form to the flames. “Mine to use, mine to destroy. It is mine. MINE!”

Sesshoumaru sneered. “Yours?”

Hovering far above her, he put his sword away. It was a fiery beast that faced him from below. The world around them had lost its shape. In this astral plane all was darkness and flame.

Around Sesshoumaru the darkness thickened, obscuring all but the crimson gleam of his eyes, growing wider and bloodier by the second.

It was a white beast that charged through the abyssal darkness, that brought them both crashing back down to earth again as he tackled her, roaring a name—

KAGOME

Massive forepaws smoked as they smashed down to smother the flames. Dark youki slammed against her, crushing her back into herself as they fell. She couldn’t withstand him. Her soul’s wild chaos was nothing in the face of his fine control.

Kagome struck the brittle ground, and it cracked beneath her like glass. His golden eyes glared down into hers. In the clearing, all else was dark, save for his fair face, slashed with red and streaked with ash—

And the moon that loomed above them, shining and full.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi