I am fully aware that Kikyo is not a very popular character, but I find her to be highly intriguing. She's not a simple, straightforward 'bad guy' – she's many-layered and complex, with a jaded past and no clear purpose to fulfill in the imitation-life she was forced into. She's a tortured soul, shaped by a life of toil, confusion, lost love, and betrayal.

Please review, even flame if you want. They will be used to burn down that damn Christmas tree that's taken up residence in our house.

Oh yes – I do not own InuYasha, Kikyo, or any other characters utilized, mentioned, or otherwise alluded to from here on forth.

That said, let's get on with the story!

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The Persistence of Memory

Chapter One: Autumn

"I have done that, says my memory.

I cannot have done that, says my pride, and remains adamant.

At last, memory yields."

- Nietzsche

Autumn has come to the world, the forest decked out like a frozen sunrise. The once-green forests are half-bare, the shivering boughs of the trees scantily clad in a thinning cover of flame-colored leaves. The dead husks rustle against each other with soft, dry whispers, trading secrets as old as time. The air is crisp and cool, having a faint, lingering kiss of sultry summer, and at the same time a cold edge that reminds of a winter not too far away.

xXxXxXx

There are many opinions on the nature of fall. Some say that it is a time of rest and rejuvenation, where nature is winding down before winter. Some hold that it is a busy time, where animals, humans, and even youkai are in a frenzy to prepare for that coming of winter, a silent yet mad rush to collect and horde food before hibernation.

Others say that fall is a time of remembrance, a time of reflection on the past, a time of recollection of the events and people that had filled and shaped those previous days. Good or bad, memories rise up from the dark depths of obscurity, like driftwood upon a turbulent ocean.

Like driftwood, such fragments of memory may be as a godsend to a drowning man, propping him up above the hungry waters of mental chaos. But also like driftwood, those remnants of memory can be a cluttering, smothering mass of polluted jetsam, a muddled heap of the detritus of shattered times. Ultimately, memory always seems to eventually come back, no matter how deep you thought you'd buried it.

xXxXxXx

It was an ancient forest, there could be no doubt about that; many of the trees were huge, and grew very close together.

It was an ancient forest, and a haunted one, if you believed the stories of the villagers. They said that demons lurked in the dense groves, that monsters took sport in luring unwary travelers to their deaths, that ghosts and restless spirits prowled the dark shadows.

A lot of people believed the stories, and they should, because most of them were true. Monsters, demons, ghosts, and worse plagued that forest like mice plagued a granary. Only the brave entered it, to hunt or gather or merely to prove how fearless they were.

But the brave never went so far in that they could not see their path clearly, and never did they go out of sight of where they had entered. Only the foolish went farther in, and only the foolish went alone. They weren't foolish for very long. Eventually, in fact usually quite quickly, they turned from foolish to dead.

Well, perhaps one exception could be made to that sentence. In the center of the forest that was, unexplainably, a small clearing. Relatively uncrowded by vegetation, it was as if time had slowed down here, and this little spot had never aged more than a few years as the rest of the forest grew ancient around it. Within the clearing, though, was one tree that seemed older than all the rest. It was huge, and as tall as a redwood.

That aforementioned exception stood facing that gigantic tree, an unreadable expression on her pale face. Dressed in the customary red and white garb of a miko and armed with only a quiver of arrows and a sturdy bow, she seemed out of place in the dangerous forest, as if she had taken a wrong turn and ended up here. But she was here intentionally. This place called to her like a lighthouse in the dark, a cryptic message born upon the raft of memory in that turbulent ocean of mind.

She had walked this path countless times, more than fifty years ago, and looked the same as she did then. But between then and now she had died. Her body had been burned and her remains buried, and for half a century she had remained at rest in the womb of the earth.

But then she had been awakened, and her soul caged in a body forged from her own long-dead bones and her own burial soil. Forged, like an iron tool, and indeed she had been resurrected for the purpose of being a tool, but a tool she would not be. She couldn't be a person either, not really. She couldn't be anything but a clay replica, but she would not let even her dead self be a tool.

Kikyo stretched out a pale hand, her cold fingertips lightly tracing the outline of the great scar on Goshinboku's trunk. It was where he had been sealed for fifty years, by her own hand.

An autumn wind swept across the hills, stirring up the leaves piled up on the forest floor and snatching others from the branches of the shedding trees. Born upon the air, the jewels of the trees danced and twirled like courtiers at a masquerade ball, shades of gold and topaz and crimson, spinning and dipping in intricate step.

The miko raised her head to watch the baroque waltz, a silent dance set against the rustling applause of the leaves still clinging to the trees. The perfect time of year, she thought to herself. Summer has not yet died, and Winter has not yet been born…a time between times, between a time of life and a time of sleep – the twilight of the seasons…

She watched the leaves begin to spin more rapidly in the air before they were caught up in a greater gust of wind, and born up into the sky and out of her sight. Her dark eyes returned to Goshinboku, her gaze tracing the scar over the bark with the half-attention of one who has seen it so many times before it has been memorized again and again, etched so deep in the mind it could never have been forgotten.

Of course, she didn't need to see it all those times to remember. She could have never seen it all, yet known the exact shape all the same. She could see in her mind the way the bark would have grown around that red-clothed figure, slumbering in a timeless limbo between life and death. She could see every curve and angle, every crease and mark that would have formed as the years passed, the bark and wood of that great tree aging around an ageless hanyou.

A soft sound floated down through the air, like a single mournful note on a flute. A few pale lights, clustered together like the ghosts of fireflies, descended from the sky. As they grew closer, one standing at the viewpoint of Kikyo would see the lights become long, sinewy shapes, and then become the spectral forms of Shinidamachu, Kikyo's soul-catchers. They were like moonlight given serpentine form, beautiful in their reptilian grace. Each was guiding a soul with its insect-like legs, with an almost motherly protectiveness, tender in the gentle herding of their charges.

They hovered about Kikyo, undulating in the air. One by one, they swooped down to the miko, dropping the souls into her body. When all four present had delivered their charges, Kikyo reached out to one, gently stroking its reptilian head with a tender caress, a touch reserved for that which one felt to be very dear.

The Shinidamachu cooed softly at her gentle touch, like a few notes of a funeral dirge. It swirled about her in the air for a moment before quietly departing with its fellows. Kikyo stood in place, and watched the spectral lights until they disappeared from view. Even then, when her eyes could not see them, she knew where they were.

They were dear to her, those strange demons – they would follow her to death, asking nothing, giving everything; they did not recoil from her unnatural state of being, or flinch away at her cold, lifeless touch; they were always there, always caring, always watching over her; and she knew that at a moment's notice they would fly to the ends of the earth for a single soul, if just to keep their mistress 'alive' for a few more hours.

Who would ever have thought? she mused to herself. I am a miko, trained to kill that which is impure in this world. My Shinidamachu take the souls of girls once they have died – fifty years ago, that alone would have been enough for me to kill them without a second thought.

She knew that they did not really steal the souls, per say. It was more like they borrowed them, taking the soul from the body once it had died, and giving them to the miko. Kikyo would then let the souls go after a time, letting them enter the afterlife, which was why she continually needed more to replace the ones she released. Still, thought Kikyo, at most I should only tolerate them – they are youkai, after all.

But they are like my children, so loyal and true to me. They are scavengers, so weak that they cannot fight...I am their protector, their mother. A mother to youkai...I never would have thought of such a thing fifty years ago. But a lot has changed since when I was alive.

Turning her face away from the empty sky, Kikyo gazed once again at the accusing scar on Goshinboku's trunk, that deep wound that never truly healed...

With the autumn leaves swirling about her, the miko turned and walked away from the god-tree, stepping out of the fading light of the clearing into the shadows of the forest. Above her, dusk faded into evening, and the shy stars appeared one by one in the darkening sky. She stopped to gaze up at those crystalline stars, scattered fragments of silver dreams in the never-ending eternity of the night sky.

Kikyo smiled a sad smile at those stars, those countless frozen tears on Eternity's cheek. As cold and lifeless as they were ancient, they shone icily down on the world of the living.

It was a world that could never be theirs – unless they risked it all, and fell.

-

Well, that's it! Yes, I know it was rather rambling, but this actually started out as a sensory exercise for English class. So I had about a page of description (which I got ten out of ten on, if you were wondering) that I more or less attempted to stitch the beginnings of a plot into. I know it probably was quite pointless, but this is just the first chapter, so please bear with me!

Well, please review and tell me what you honestly think, even if it's something along the lines of "Your pathetic attempt at literature is horrendously mislead and is undoubtedly a miserable failure in all respects. Both you and Kikyo should die slow, painful deaths involving rusty nails, hot pokers, salted wounds, dull pickaxes, large quantities of sulfuric acid, and starving rabid squirrels."