The Principle of Evil Made Flesh

Naraku was on his hands and knees, retching loudly. The jewel wanted out of him and it wanted out now, but its cruelty demanded he suffer at its dark rebirth rather than just move it out of his various, shifting flesh.

Another wave of excruciating contractions twisted his guts and Naraku again cursed the Shikon no Tama for its wicked birth. He hated the goddamn thing above everything else; for he knew he was a slave to its will. Naraku knew this all too well and could do nothing about it, except complete the thing and make his wish. He hoped once his vile dominion was granted, the damned jewel would be extinguished from this world! Secretly he knew the malevolent orb would demand a sacrifice in exchange for its banishment – and Naraku knew who and what the bewitching crystal wanted above all others and snarled. It was not a choice he wanted to make!

Bent double, his mouth painfully wrenched wide, strings of thick, gluey saliva ran in glistening lines into the depression of liquid black within his dark lair. The shallow pool showed his distorted, pain-wracked form and the metaphor of the disturbed surface showing the hidden monster within was not lost on the heaving Spider, who smiled in bitter agony and cursed Fate for the hundredth time in five minutes.

His stomach convulsed one final, excruciating time and drove his upper body nearly to the cave’s slimy floor in spasm. The mucous-drenched blue-black and now livid-purple bruised light of the Shikon no Tama swirled hungrily within the shallow pool – it was content with the misery its avatar had brought forth as a suitable offering of dark devotion – for now. The panting, cursing hanyou pushed himself up to his knees and retrieving his own captor from the slimy pool, returned to the stretched and bound Miko no Shikon, who was awaiting his newest cruel thrill.

Kagome could turn her head just enough to see her Master as he approached her chained captivity. The ruthless look on his face had a dull, angry cast to its flickering perfection; Naraku appeared to be performing a service to the jewel – as weird as the notion of Naraku serving anyone else’s whims was, the stretched girl knew without a doubt that her observation was a correct one. The Spider held the corrupted Shikon jewel in his outstretched palm like Diogenes and his lantern; only he searched not for an honest man, but for the priestess who shared her soul with this waxing moon of bruised evil and desire.

The jewel itself had something to say to Kagome and it demanded attention like nothing else in the waking world could. The smoldering flame of desire and sex curdled into a cold ball of fear within her stomach and the sinking premonition of doom became so palpable that Kagome could taste the bitter bile of it on her dry tongue.

Approaching the strung-out priestess, her chained and collared form a tightly-drawn arch of erotic perfection, ripe for any abuse and delicious torture he could devise, Naraku ground his fangs together in irritation as he was compelled to loosen her overstretched arms from their leather straps. He then quickly sliced through the same leathers that bound her perfect long, trembling legs apart, just when they were begging him for his cruel touch! His jaws flexed and his red eyes flared with crimson death-light.

“Sit up, girl, and hold out your hand.” he tersely commanded Kagome in harsh, fang-clipped syllables. Her instinctive flinch at the deadly menace in his voice would have made him smile – any other time. But Naraku knew the miko’s swirling, sour-smelling reek of terror was for the jewel in his hand, not him.

That very snub was what pissed him off about this little demand of the cursed sphere. The jewel was a conduit for dark power – his power! It was not sentient nor a being in and of itself. The complication that idea raised in his calculating mind soured his mood even further.

The girl’s shaking hand stretched slowly out to his own and The Beast carefully, slowly poured the evil thing from his pale hand to hers.

Naraku wanted to ponder this new convolution in his plans and was further annoyed by the dead black voice booming within his head as he turned to retire to the back wall of their luminescent cavern.

“You will stay and you will watch.” intoned the voice within the Shikon no Tama itself.

Twisting purposely around to face his slave once more, Naraku attempted to hide his unwilling compulsion with the appearance of a change in plans. Settling his pale form to kneel in front of the transfixed miko, the Spider waited with thinly-veiled anger and curiosity.

Kagome watched the swirling vortex of nightmare colored light within the Shikon stone. The scudding clouds and vapors were hypnotic and she found herself drifting within them, forgetting Naraku, forgetting his seething, quiet anger and her premonition of terror.

The cold, dry voice of the jewel within her mind began to speak and she could not help but listen:

“Look deep within us and see what you have done.”

Kagome’s chocolate eyes narrowed as purple and midnight blue light strobed across her still face.

Sango lay inside somewhere, her beautiful face pale as death. She appeared unconscious and the way she had been propped up with pillows, rolled up blankets, even rolled up items of clothing made Kagome very, very nervous – Sango must have been having trouble breathing. The slow, hitching incongruent rise and fall of her covered flail-chest drew the slayer’s eyes together in slow pain with every inhalation. Even Kagome knew that she was working too hard to simply breathe!

A hitching sob escaped the watcher as she continued to stare into the glowing stone before her.

Fog drew a curtain over the scene of Sango’s deathbed and parted soon again on the now grey-faced slayer, her once-lovely eyes wide in mortal fear as she struggled with a wide silent mouth to draw breath into her drowning, broken lungs. The suffering woman took one last struggling inhalation and then took no more. The monk looked over her in impotent sadness, his head bowed against his tear-soaked chest. InuYasha’s crimson form flanked that of the monk, his still wooden face belying no concern or emotion, except for the yellow hate swirling deep within his sulfurous eyes. Kaede was bowed in prayer, as serene as always, sadness pouring off her bent form in waves.

A tiny Kirara lay in Miroku’s lap and mewed an elegy for her departed mistress as the monk absently stroked his voided-hand in empty comfort down the nekomata’s small back.

“No… no, not Sango – please, no…” Kagome whimpered as her heart tore at her ribs as she strove to avert her leaking eyes.

“Look within us and see what you have done.” the jewel intoned with more force from within the recesses of the priestess’s mind.

“No – I can’t! I won’t!” the grieving girl whimpered with false bravado, even as her face was turned once more to the flashing stone in her open, shaking palm.

Naraku’s breath hitched silently at the jewel’s limitless cruelty. He should have been excited and pleased by the pain and suffering his entrapment and enslavement of Kagome was causing his enemies, but instead he was slowly simmering in restrained fury. The Shikon no Tama itself was indicting the little miko for the death and suffering of her once-strong companions; he, Naraku was merely an instrument in the execution of Kagome’s ultimate betrayal. An actor speaking well-crafted lines! The Spider was no one’s puppet – he used things to his own ends, not that other way around!

The dark hanyou began a low rumbling growl in the back of his long, pale throat.

Kagome blinked back bitter tears as she continued to watch the parade of heart-rending images that flashed within the blasted Shikon jewel, each sadder than the last.

InuYasha sat in silent, damning contemplation at the charred remains of the Goshinboku.

A subdued InuYasha knelt in a strangely paternal gesture to a wide-eyed fox-demon kit. The inuhanyou’s eyes were hidden by his thick sliver bangs but the shining tracks down his smooth, hard face told the watching miko everything she needed to know. Shippou looked stunned at what was being silently told to him and when InuYasha unfolded his body from the dusty earth once more, the little kit turned around, his eyes unseeing in shock and began to walk, dazed, from the village on into the dark surrounding forest. He never looked back and soon disappeared from sight.

A tortured sob escaped Kagome as she watched her little orphaned friend abandon himself once more to Fate’s harsh whims.

Miroku’s hard violet eyes flashed in deadly determination as he finished burying his beloved Sango in the dusty sepulcher of her destroyed village. The finality of each shovel of dirt upon Sango’s shrouded form closed the Monk’s heart up tight. Throwing the shovel down in disgust – and nearly hitting the tiny neko at his side – Miroku walked slowly towards the broken palisade of the extinct village. Kirara slowly followed, her twin tails dragging the ground in listless mourning. Once he was outside the leaning, tilted gates Miroku’s eyes met Kagome’s own and accused her of every evil thing she’d ever done. His reddened gaze spat blame and hurt at her with the strength of a Fury and then with a quick gesture the monk whipped the protective barrier off of his void cursed hand, turned his devouring palm towards his hard, determined face and was sucked in. The drooping neko at his feet slowly blinked her huge orange eyes and jumped into the howling vortex as well.

“Oh…my god…” whispered Kagome in a wet, strangled sob and whipped the hand holding the soulless evil of the Shikon jewel closed, sending the offending orb flying –

- just as Naraku’s form shivered and flung wickedly spiked tentacles at the slow descending arc of the blue-black crystal as it fell.

When Naraku’s limb hit the falling jewel shard, it exploded, sending hard spikes of flesh in a fluttering cloud around both him and the sobbing girl. The pain was a cold bitter fire that Naraku had felt many times before and he unflinchingly moved to catch the deplorable thing in one clawed hand. The jewel itself was silent, having caused all the mayhem it desired, for the time being and The Spider slowly moved around the shaking, crying girl to deposit the thing back onto its fur-lined cradle by the bed.

He did not want the thing back within him until it was complete and completely his. He was a slave to no one’s will but his own.

The little bitch’s pain was a bleeding wound that soaked the silken masses around her and Naraku sat himself very near to her to watch every twisting facet of her guilty grief. He found himself wanting to taste the salty tracks running in rivers down her blotchy face, so he did. Leaning into Kagome’s tear-humid face, the Spider brought her face up with his hand and dipped his fanged mouth to her damp skin.

Kagome felt heat radiating off the being in front of her but that heat never reached the grief-frozen abyss of her heart. Painful ice gripped her chest from within with each hitching breath and even when Naraku wrapped his arms around her back, brought her into his lap, drew her numb head back and began to once again lick the salt from her face, she did not feel anything but cold, hopeless, and helpless.

The destroyed miko focused her eyes on something just on the other side of her master’s bed and for some reason, it gave her a slim fire of hope. Kagome slowly reached over, her hands walking her slim body over to the place on the cavern floor where the object of her interest lie, full of dull purpose. Drawing herself along in sinuous curves upon her hands and knees as she slowly moved, she hardly felt her master’s tongue as it traveled down her shoulder, her side – where it made her oblique muscles twitch in ticklish irritation, which Kagome totally ignored. Naraku’s hands moved over her body in concert with his roving tongue, tasting the fear, sadness and hopelessness that no doubt would sustain him better than any meal. As the girl stretched over to the side of the mattress, inches from her goal, hand outstretched in blind supplication, she felt her master’s hot tongue between the cheeks of her ass. The wet appendage swirled over her tight rear entrance and further – he drug an unthinking fang down her bridge of flesh between one hole and the other, earning him a shivering pause in her slow, heedless momentum.

The Spider knew something very dark was festering in the priestess’s fragmented soul; he could taste it dripping from the pores of her skin, like spoiled honey on his rough tongue. When he dipped that questing tongue into her peeking slit and slid it sinuously up within, Naraku could taste the bitch’s very soul. She had stopped her slow crawl across the bed towards some unseen purpose and her master took his fill of her delicious pussy, which using his fingers, he spread out like a feast before him.

Losing himself in his wet and musky feast, the dark hanyou tried to tempt his little mistress from her jewel-engendered darkness and back into his own twilit clutches. He did not like the emptiness he saw within her grieving eyes; those eyes should be filled with thoughts of serving him, not the damn Shikon no Tama!

“Do you want something from me, Kagome?” he drawled out between licks to her wet, ever-hungry sex.

“I want something from you, Naraku.” She replied in a dull, flat voice that The Spider didn’t like one bit.

Grabbing her hips as she suddenly leaned over the mattress and grabbed one of his cast-off spears of thorny flesh, Naraku suddenly knew what she was going to do and thought quickly how to divest her of her dark goal.

Bringing the serrated point of his broken spike up under the fragile skin beneath her chin, Kagome drove her dead, dull eyes into the flashing crimson of her captor.

“I want you to kill me.” She whispered.

Naraku stared hard at the stupid whore for a moment and knew she could never cause the death of another, even herself. She simply did not have the ability within her to end life and he knew it very well. Naraku had used that very weakness against her and her erstwhile friends enough times to know it very well.

“So use that part of me as kill yourself, miko. I won’t stop you. You can go join your pathetic comrades in the next world. Go with my blessing, you weak little bitch.” he spat back at her, hands draped over his lotus-crossed legs.

She shuddered in a quick, broken sob and slowly pushed the razor-sharp point of his spike into the white flesh of her throat. A tiny depression formed around the invading tip and it quickly filled with red, red blood.

His eyes never softened or wavered.

Tension visibly sagging out of her defeated body, Kagome knew she couldn’t kill herself. She withdrew the broken spine from her neck and dropped her shamed eyes from her Master’s hard examination.

“You lack even the power to take your own life – how pathetic. You deserve anything you get, priestess.” Naraku spat the last word at her with twisting venom as he slowly turned his eyes from her botched attempt on her own life.

“You deserve the degradation and compulsion at my hand, little bitch. You are only fit to slave.” he pronounced with finality, turning his bare scorched back on her.

Kagome’s heart filled with bloody hate and she saw red fog at his denouncement of her inability to commit suicide. Was she so worthless and weak because she refused to give up on her life, no matter how tortured it now had become? If the asshole wanted death, then she’d serve him what he wanted! Snarling in obscene anger, Kagome changed her grip on the deadly weapon in her hand and sprung onto the back to her clever master.

Her unexpected weight slammed him forward enough that Naraku had to catch himself on his strong arms lest he fall forward on his face. The bitch was surprisingly strong in her fury, but she was nothing he could not handle – and handle her, he would. When Kagome wrapped her legs around his waist and heaved back with all her weight, the dark hanyou let himself fall back into her locking arms. His spike was clasped in one white-knuckled fist around his neck in her need to hold onto him for leverage. He felt her shimmy up his back once she got settled quickly upon her knees and he helped her along by grabbing her weapon-held wrist and bringing the same razor-sharp point over his slowly beating heart.

Naraku felt her small hand around the back of his neck and one of her small pointy knees in his back. He thought seriously for a split-second about letting loose a tentacle to stroke her gorgeous little ass, since his other hand was busy holding up their combined weight, but figured he didn’t want to distract the girl from her righteous fury. Jerking her wrist in his hand, the dark hanyou pricked his alabaster skin upon the serrated spine aimed at his utter destruction.

“Come on then, bitch! Kill me!” he snarled over his shoulder at the furious girl trembling and groaning with rage.

He put more pressure on her wrist and dug the spine in a fraction closer to his black heart. He could feel the cold sweat condensing on her soft belly as it pressed back against his branded flesh. Naraku knew she couldn’t do him in any more than she could destroy herself, no matter the level of pain in her soul. How far could he push her before she broke apart again?

Kagome’s breath hitched suddenly when Naraku jerked hard on her deadly instrument which was burying itself slowly within his chest. The stinging dark purple ichor that dripped slowly from his mouth, down his neck and onto his impaled chest made her want to vomit. The sharp smell of shouki burned her nose and mouth. Kagome began to struggle to release The Spider from her dark judgment, but he wouldn’t let her. His hand held her wrist like iron and he was slowly, purposely killing himself on her impotent rage.

“What will you do when I am gone, Kagome? Who will have you when I am gone? Who will love you, if not me?” Naraku’s deep voice bubbled from his bloody lips.

Tears ran from her eyes with renewed force and Kagome threw herself away from Naraku’s bloody form with all her reiki-fired might. Her power had surfaced in agreement to Naraku’s dark wisdom and it knew he was right.

The girl’s watery eyes watched in sighing relief as her Master slowly pulled the spine from his chest and slowly closed the poisonous hole in the once-pristine flesh. Naraku left the scar in place, so the stupid whore could be reminded of her weakness every time she looked on him. Dipping one of his long white fingers in the slowly congealing pool of blood on their soaked sheets, Naraku leaned over with serpentine grace and drew a stinging dark red line down the trembling priestess’s white body with a wicked smile.

She was now well and truly his again and that was how she was going to stay.