Numb, Kagome lay, staring at the candle by her bedside. Like the hearth, its flame had sputtered out some time ago, and she hadn’t yet mustered the will to light it again. Shivering in the cold and the dark, she stared on and on at the melted wax, frozen in its bleak ugly fall, and

She hadn’t meant to do it. Not consciously, anyway. No more than she’d meant to when she’d started walking toward her husband’s funeral pyre, the night they had burned his beheaded remains. It was as if something was pulling at her from within. Some subconscious undercurrent of feeling—a pain beneath the pain. Twisted like a

But the more pressure she felt to avoid it, the more Kagome was drawn to it—the cool and patient darkness that lay at the bottom of her grief. A darkness she could fall into, settle into. How easy it would be, like slipping over the edge of the Bone-Eater’s Well. Like returning home. In the

Depleted, Kagome lay, her weary eyes trained upon the hearth’s dim coals. She had barely mustered the wherewithal to kick off her sandals upon returning home, let alone rebuild the fire. Collapsed on her bed in her priestess attire, she was merely aware of her rumpled, shivering state. Merely aware of her continued existence as

Near the steps of the shrine, Kagome met him. The trailing end of his fur mounded like snowdrifts against the weathered stone. Wintry sunlight wreathed his silver-white form, lending him a particularly ghostly quality as he looked out over the rows of graves. Coming to rest upon her, the lambent glow of his eyes felt

It was the one rite of hers which Sesshoumaru had never prompted her to observe, this daily paying of her respects to Inuyasha. Not that Kagome had ever needed prompting. Even in the depths of her depression, she had dragged herself here, to his graveside. It was the one place she felt a fleeting measure

I must go was all he had said, and rather sharply at that. Kagome ground her teeth—as much at Sesshoumaru’s abrupt departure from Edo village as at the pangs now assaulting her lower half. With all the stress and weight loss following Inuyasha’s death, she’d experienced a temporary reprieve from the relentlessness of womanhood. But that

Softly, Kagome smiled. “He’s such a beautiful boy, Sango-chan. You and Miroku-sama must be so proud.” Cradling the newborn to her breast, the former taijiya smiled in turn, though the expression didn’t quite reach her eyes. Exhaustion, Kagome assumed and therefore asked, “Have you been able to get much sleep?” “It’s been difficult,” Sango admitted,

She was assisting Miroku with the consecration of the new temple when the visitor approached. A traveling priest. More and more were trickling into Edo again, as word spread that the Shikon Miko’s mourning had ended. Kagome scowled to herself. As though she would ever stop lamenting the loss of her husband. Glancing sidelong at