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No.
No, this couldn’t be true.
This was yet another illusion created from desperation and exhaustion.
Because if this was true, if the little girl currently bent over, swirling a stick in that stream, was Rin. The daughter that Isuzu was so certain she’d lost, along with the rest of her family. The daughter that Isuzu had been chasing whispers of since the night her life fell apart.
“R—R…” She couldn’t call, not just yet. If it broke this beautiful dream, Isuzu didn’t know if she would be able to pick up the shattered pieces again.
The attack was sudden.
And it was violent.
Her husband and sons ran from the hut, carrying the scythes only ever used to harvest rice.
She did not have to hear the howls and the screams to know what became of them.
“Rin,” she had whispered to the curious eyes of her daughter. “I need you to hide, and I need you to not say a single word. Promise me.” Isuzu bit her lip to push away the tears. “Promise Mama. Not a peep.”
Isuzu lived on the hope that Rin had kept her word. That she had stayed in the hiding place beneath the hut when the marauders came. That when they carried Isuzu away—a “spoil of conquest”—that even then little Rin had stayed hidden, stayed silent. So that maybe they both could live out another day.
It had not been easy, staying obedient, staying silent, waiting for the right moment. And when the wolves attacked the bandit’s camp, Isuzu enacted her plan, fleeing without abandon into the night, the screams and the pleas of slaughterers being slaughtered falling on unforgiving ears. The ouroboros of karma for what those demonic men did to innocents.
She would never know if the wolves saw her that day and decided to let her flee, as starved and broken as she was, or if the kami had blessed her escape. Isuzu did not have time to think upon those things, not when she left her child hidden, and begged her for silence. Not when…
Not when the wolves had ravaged their old village, too, not more than a few weeks after the bandits. Any sign of whether or not Rin survived had been erased from the land.
Isuzu didn’t leave right away. She combed the husk of their old hut. She asked the farmers from neighboring villages of the orphans that begged them for food. At her most desperate, she dug out the shallow graves of the wolf-slaughtered villagers, looking for the coral-colored yukata and child-sized bones.
She could not tell if her coming up empty was a sign of hope or despair, but yet again, Isuzu decided not to think upon it. Her life was forfeit now, dedicated to either finding the truth of what happened to her daughter, or finding Rin herself.
Then, a whisper: a little girl had been seen accompanying a great white demon in the mountains.
Then, another: a child on a two-headed dragon asking a horse hanyō for healing herbs.
And finally, the last: of an imp babbling endlessly to a young girl, who rolled her eyes and called him boring.
They were said to be in a village called Musashi, a place only mentioned in whispers. It was the place where demons lurked, and a resurrected priestess would roam. Where a great spider had fallen from the sky, its poison sloshing into the land and disappearing as if purified by some unknown force.
It was said to be jealously guarded by a white-haired inu hanyō, who had slaughtered fleeing bandits without remorse and, fifty years prior, had even murdered his only companion.
“Don’t go to that cursed place,” people had warned Isuzu. “You will perish at the hands of those demons.”
But there was something about that child, the one who would sass a demon, that hooked into her mind and would not let go. Because were Rin alive, Isuzu just knew that she would have the spunk to tell an imp he was boring.
It called Isuzu forward. It encouraged her on. It did not let her go, even when her feet blistered and her stomach cried for food. She only took breaks when necessary, sleeping during the day and bathing in the black of night: it was often safer that way, to be on the move at the same time as the monsters who only moved in the night.
Now here she stood, on the opposite bank of the river from Musashi, staring at a little girl with doe-brown eyes and a patchwork orange and coral kimono, her hair still in the slapdash ponytail Rin loved so much.
If Musashi was the gateway to hell and her child’s visage her temptation, then Isuzu would dance with the devils. She needed to know if this was real, or if this was an illusion. She needed to know if everything she had survived had been worth it. She had to…
“Rin!” Isuzu shouted before she lost her nerve, and she stepped out onto the river bank to greet the startled look of the girl on the other side. The one who looked so much like she did at the tender age of eight.
“M—Mama?” Rin did not need to speak another word. Isuzu charged into the water and began to paddle. “Wait Mama, be careful! Mama!”
Isuzu was through the current and on the other side before Rin finished speaking, swooping her up in her arms.
“It’s you, it’s you, it’s you!” Isuzu’s knees nearly buckled, not from the chill of the river water soaking through her yukata, and not from Rin, but from a grief so long locked away, surfacing at the same time as bliss. “My girl! My brave and beautiful girl!”
“Mama!” Rin had begun to tremble, her little hands tugging at Isuzu’s hair. Her rosey lower lip quivering under the weight of the reunion. “Mama’s alive!”
“Yes, baby. Yes. Mama’s alive.” The tears were streaming from both of them now, a current of joy and relief more powerful than the river on whose bank they embraced. Isuzu wanted to stay there, holding Rin, suspended in time, but… “Rin, how did you—”
“Rin!” A voice booming enough to shake the branches in the forest around them interrupted the moment. Isuzu’s head jerked up, toward a glowing figure in white. The one who called her daughter’s name. At the sight of her, his eyes widened, though they lost none of the menace. “Who are you to be laying a hand on—”
“Her mother,” Isuzu snarled, holding Rin more tightly than before. So this was her daughter’s kidnapper. Isuzu turned to face him completely, and she squared her shoulders at him. She had not endured the limits of human suffering, dug out her family and friends’ graves searching for her daughter’s body, or walked homeless and hungry through the night to be challenged here. She would not have him touch Rin again. “And you will not take my daughter from me.”
All logic would say that Isuzu would lose should this daiyōkai decide to challenge her. It said that her journey to reunite with Rin would end with a single plunge of this man’s claws, but maybe she could hold him off… just a little bit, and tell Rin to run once more. To find the imp that was so so boring, to…
But his eyes burned not with aggression or malice, but with curiosity. As if… as if he were not a master holding Rin as thrall, but something different. His lips were pinched and he’d unclenched his fists. He was studying her, not as an enemy but as…
“Rin, is it true that this is your mother?” the man asked.
“Y—yes, Sesshōmaru-sama,” Rin answered, her little hands clutching even more tightly to Isuzu’s shoulders.
So the white demon’s name was Sesshōmaru.
“And how, may I ask, did you survive the massacre of your village?” the demon—Sesshōmaru—asked.
“A tale I would rather not tell in front of my daughter,” Isuzu said carefully. She did not look away from the man’s amber eyes; they reminded her of a tiger’s. But they were not the eyes of a predator who had locked on to his prey, but rather… the eyes of a mother protecting her cubs.
…Could it possibly be..?
“It’s okay, Mama. Rin was attacked by wolves and Sesshōmaru-sama brought me back to life. I’m a big girl now. You can tell me.” Rin’s declaration was in a voice bigger than her body. Isuzu snapped to look in her daughter’s eyes; the luster had not extinguished, but there was a weariness in their depths far older than her years. It made Isuzu so very sad.
“I promise, someday I will tell you, but not today.” Isuzu squeezed Rin more tightly in her arms. She then turned her attention back to Sesshōmaru.
“Sesshōmaru-sama took good care of me, Mama. He taught me to get food for myself and didn’t let the bad men take me. And—and when the spider put me to sleep inside his body, Sesshōmaru-sama rescued me from that, too!” If there was any doubt that this little girl was her Rin, the way she beamed as she recounted horrors put them all to bed.
It also confirmed that Sesshōmaru, the white demon, had protected her daughter.
“Why?” Isuzu asked, before she could help herself. She took one step forward, toward Sesshōmaru, to get a closer look. “Why did you protect her?”
He towered over her, in his armored kimono and the fur cape he drooped over his shoulder. His face was youthful, proud, with magenta stripes adorning his cheeks and a crescent moon across his forehead. His impassive face was betrayed by the roiling emotions of his golden eyes, and his hair streamed like moonlit silver behind him. He was as beautiful as he was aweing.
“Because,” Sesshōmaru said; he took one step—and only one step—forward, too. “She was in need of protection.”
“Mama, he let me name his dragon!” Rin beamed. The tears on her little face had already begun to dry.
“Does the dragon have two heads?” Isuzu asked, and Rin vigorously nodded.
The rumors were all true. Rin had been taken as a white demon’s ward. She rode a dragon to the town of Musashi, where the white demon still rushed in to protect her, even from her own mother.
“You are not like other demons, are you, Sesshōmaru-sama?” Isuzu probed; she took another step forward.
“No.” Sesshōmaru’s lips twitched as he answered, as if he were battling to suppress a smile. He took one additional step. “What is your name?”
“Isuzu,” she said, and instead of one, she took two steps forward. She was not yet close enough to reach out for him just yet, but every step closer further underlined the loveliness of this man. The white demon who saw fit to adopt an orphaned and helpless girl as his ward.
“That is a very pretty name,” Sesshōmaru declared, and he finally seemed to give in to the urge to smile. “It is nice to meet you, Isuzu, mother of Rin.”
Perhaps the rumors of Musashi were all wrong. Perhaps the tales of angry demons and vengeful priestesses and uncontrollable hanyō were there as a shield. One that would keep the bandits away, preventing anyone else from enduring what Isuzu had endured. So that Rin could play in the water, under the gentle watch of her white demon guardian, safe and sound, and never asked to quietly hide under a hut again.
“Do you think Musashi might be able to find a place for a widow?” Isuzu asked, taking the last two steps forward, close enough now that the rise and fall of Sesshōmaru’s chest had become apparent.
“Perhaps,” Sesshōmaru said, then he extended his hand. “If you should like an escort to the village, I will provide you one.”
Isuzu looked down at his outstretched hand, then at the cherubic face of her daughter, then back up at the glowing eyes of this beautiful man.
She took Sesshōmaru’s hand, and together they walked to Musashi.
It seemed that Isuzu could finally rest.
There would be no more monsters lurking in the night, only demons.