A Forest on Fire (KuramaxOc)

Ch 19: Ruminations

Pain. Pain so intense it struck her senses numb to all else. Yumiko had spent what felt like weeks in that field, watching the people she burned scream for mercy, and feeling the lashes cut her open again and again. It was never ending. She could not sleep, could not think of anything else, could not distract from the pain.

On and on it went... pain tore into her back, ripping skin from flesh, and flesh from bone. You killed them all... The voice growled through her mind. You murdered them all... Desperately she tried to remember what Mako had told her all those times before when the nightmares came, but nothing could break through the pain. Soon time began to lose it's meaning. She began to forget the ones whose names she called for rescue. Nothing existed but this clearing, this pain...

All at once, the clearing vanished, swallowed by the darkness around it's edges. For a moment, one blissful heartbeat, the pain went with it. Yumiko had only just opened her mouth to sigh, when a scream unlike any before ripped through her. Her back!!! It felt like she had been torn to pieces!!! She screamed, and screamed in the darkness, unable to form thought against that pain, until even the darkness of nightmare vanished.

_______

Maru watched through burning tears as the infirmary filled with dual screams of the two red-heads in front of him. Shuichi held out longer than he had expected, clinging to consciousness for a full five minutes before the pain finally overwhelmed him. Yumiko had woken only for a moment, but her screams had been more terrible than a banshee's cry, and they pierced through his core like a thousand needles.

He had been forced to leave when the healers got fed up with his unending snarls, and had made his way to the roof of the spirit world palace to try and clear his head. Kami help him, this hurt!! This pain in his core was nearly more than he could bear, and he wished for a way to take on every ounce of her suffering if only to stop the girl's horrible screaming!

He had never intended to make his way to the human world. In fact he had never intended to leave his secluded little mountain range in the Makai.

For nearly twenty millennia, he had lived on that mountain within the eastern peaks. He had hunted it's peaks, valleys and streams for his succor. He had protected the villages, outposts, and dens of the demons bold enough to live under his wing. His treasure had been the mountain range itself, including every life held within. From the roots that bore the mountain's weight, to the creatures who churned her soil, it had all belonged to him. Losing it all the day he was forced to hide his soul in the body of a pregnant goat demon had been the worst pain he thought he would ever know, but this....

Those first thirteen years had been hell, and even now it would take all the strength he had just to form his wings again, much worse to reclaim his tail... but everything had changed the moment he saw that girl. His reasoning for going to the temple in the human world had been purely to get King Enma's dogs off his back. He had learned the hard way that escaping assailants was much more difficult when you were confined to the ground.

He had gone to ask the healer for her help as he felt the pulsation inside growing, begging to be released. He knew the target it placed on his back, and wasn't too fond of being powerless to it's whims either. That was when his eyes first fell upon Yumiko Sayo... He remembered her little village, just at the edges of his territory, and even as he had taken his first glance at the ten year old girl before him, he had seen her father.

They had been a gentle people. They tilled the land, foraged his forests, and fished the rivers. Every solstice, they would leave an offering in the center of the village, and he had vivid memories of the girl's father laying the body of a mountain cat larger than the demon himself at Maru's feet during one of the last offerings he had attended. It had been their village in fact, that had brought a young goat demon to his very peak, fearing for his health when the great beast did not appear for two offerings in a row.