Chapter 2: The Withering Garden
The forest began to thin, the ancient trees giving way to a clearing choked with weeds and memory. The air changed. The clean, damp scent of the woods was pushed aside by the smell of wet stone, rotting wood, and something else—a faint, ozone-like tang of old power.
Ahead, through a crumbling torii gate whose vermilion paint had long since bled away into gray, stood the shrine. It was a skeleton of its former self, its roof sagging under the weight of thick ivy, its walls bowed inward as if in a perpetual sigh. The silence here was different from the forest’s; it was a held breath, a watchful quiet.
Sesshomaru stopped just outside the torii. He didn’t look back at Nala, but his entire posture was a challenge. His golden eyes scanned the dilapidated structure, his expression unreadable.
Jaken, however, practically vibrated with malicious glee. He hopped from one foot to the other, pointing a trembling finger at the sacred ground. “See? A place of purification! No true demon can cross its bounds! The wards will reject your filthy presence, you smoky witch! You’ll be burned away!”
Nala came to a halt beside Sesshomaru, her new cotton kimono rustling softly. She looked past the gate, her head tilted. “It’s… loud,” she murmured.
“Loud? It’s silent as a tomb!” Jaken screeched. “Because it’s holy! You can feel it, can’t you? The pressure? The righteous energy that seeks to expel your kind?”
“It’s not a sound you hear with your ears,” Nala said, her voice distant. She took a step forward, past Sesshomaru, and placed a hand on one of the torii’s weathered posts.
Jaken held his breath, waiting for the sizzle of burning flesh, a cry of pain.
Nothing happened.
Nala ran her fingers over the grooved wood. “It’s tired. So very tired.” She then stepped through the gate.
There was no flash of light, no barrier of force. The ancient wards, designed to repel demons of malice and corruption, simply did not register her. She was a void to them, a non-entity. She walked into the courtyard as if entering a familiar, if neglected, garden.
Jaken’s jaw hung open. “But… but the purification… the sacred energy…!”
Sesshomaru’s eyes narrowed. This was not the result he had anticipated. He had expected resistance, a definition of her power through conflict. Her utter non-reaction was more disquieting. He followed her through the gate, the ancient magic brushing against his own potent aura like static, unnoticed and irrelevant.
Nala was drawn to a single, stubborn rose bush that clung to life near the base of the main shrine building. It was a twisted, thorny thing, but from it bloomed one perfect, blood-red rose. The air around it hummed with a concentrated, bitter energy—a curse, old and deep.
“Don’t touch that, you fool!” Jaken yelped, scurrying after them. “It’s blighted! Cursed! It will poison your very soul!”
Nala reached for it anyway.
Her fingers closed around the stem. Thorns that could pierce dragon hide did not break her skin. As her grasp tightened, the vibrant red of the petals deepened, then blackened. The bloom shuddered, and in the space of a single heartbeat, it desiccated completely. The petals crumbled to black dust, leaving behind a brittle, gray skeleton of a flower that disintegrated and fell through her fingers.
She stared at the empty space where the rose had been. A faint, sad smile touched her lips.
“Oh,” she whispered, the word soft as settling ash. “This place remembers me.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even Jaken was struck dumb.
Sesshomaru watched the last of the black dust drift to the ground. “Remembered what?” His voice was low, cutting through the thick air.
Nala turned to look at him, her dark blue eyes seeming to see not just him, but layers of time superimposed over his form. “The silence. The one before the cold.” She gestured vaguely at the crumbling shrine. “They called to something here, long ago. Something from the void between stars. They wanted power. A weapon. They did not understand that what they called… was hungry.”
She took a step toward the main hall, her gaze fixed on the darkened entrance. “It was not a good listener. It started to eat. First their prayers. Then their voices. Then the sound of their hearts beating.” She spoke with a detached, clinical air, as if recalling a mildly interesting weather event from centuries past. “I was passing through. I found the noise… irritating. So I ate the eater.”
Jaken made a small, strangled noise.
“You… consumed a celestial entity?” Sesshomaru asked, his tone flat, but a sharp intensity in his gaze.
“It was making a mess,” Nala said with a slight shrug. She looked down at her hand, flexing her fingers. “The little priests were very grateful. They built this place around the… quiet… I left behind. They called it a blessing.” She looked around at the decaying ruins, the ivy-choked statues. “It seems the blessing has faded.”
Sesshomaru considered the crumbling walls, the faded symbols. He had sensed the residual power, a hollowed-out shell of what must have once been immense. He had brought her here to see her repelled, to define her limits against a known force. Instead, she had defined herself as the source of the force itself. She hadn’t broken the wards; she was the reason they existed in the first place.
He looked at her, truly looked at her, not as a disruption or a puzzle, but as a fact. A being whose history was written in the negative space of the world’s memory.
Nala met his gaze, her playful charm returning to her expression, smoothing over the ancient weariness. “Your test was very creative. Did I pass?”
A faint, almost imperceptible breeze stirred the dust at their feet. Sesshomaru did not answer. He turned and walked back toward the forest, the line of his shoulders rigid.
But he did not command her to leave.
Jaken stared after his lord, then back at Nala, his fear now mixed with a kind of horrified awe. He scurried after Sesshomaru, his protests dying before they were fully formed.
Nala remained for a moment longer in the courtyard of the shrine she had inadvertently created. She reached out and touched the stone foundation, feeling the deep, exhausted silence she had imposed upon it. It was a strange feeling, like meeting a very old friend who had forgotten your name.
Then, with a last, lingering look at the silence, she followed the two demons back into the world of sound and substance, the memory of the cursed rose still dusting her fingertips.
The forest felt overwhelmingly loud after the shrine’s deep silence. Every rustle of a mouse in the undergrowth, every drip of water from a leaf, was a sharp intrusion. Nala walked a few paces behind, her movements becoming less a flow and more of an awkward mimicry of a human gait.
“The little noises are everywhere,” she murmured, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Does it not drive you all mad?”
Jaken, still seething from the shrine’s failure to vaporize her, spun around. “We are not all primitive smoke-spirits! We have the mental fortitude to ignore the mundane! Something you clearly lack!” He stomped his foot for emphasis, sinking slightly into the soft earth.
Sesshomaru did not acknowledge their exchange. His pace was relentless, a steady, ground-eating stride that forced the others to hurry. He was processing the implications of her story. A creature that consumed celestial predators was not merely a curiosity. It was a historical event walking on two legs.
They reached a shallow, fast-moving river cutting through the rock. Without breaking stride, Sesshomaru stepped onto the surface of the water, his youki holding him aloft as he crossed effortlessly. It was a simple, unconscious display of power.
Jaken scrambled to the bank, looking for stones to hop on. “A moment, my lord! I shall find a suitable crossing!”
Nala stopped at the water’s edge. She stared at the rushing current, her head tilted. She then knelt and, just as she had with the plastic bottle, reached out to touch it. Her fingers dipped below the surface, but the water did not wet them. It parted around her skin like a living thing avoiding a flame, leaving her fingertips perfectly dry.
“Fascinating,” she whispered.
“Will you stop that!” Jaken shrieked from a mid-stream rock. “It’s water! It’s wet! Cross it or don’t, you impossible creature!”
She stood up and simply walked forward. Her feet met the water, and the river recoiled. A path of dry, slick stone appeared beneath her for the second it took for her to take a step, the water piling up in a small, frustrated wave to either side before crashing back into the space she’d just vacated. She reached the other side without a single drop touching her.
Sesshomaru watched this from the far bank, his golden eyes missing nothing. Her existence was a series of negations. She negated sacred wards. She negated curses. She negated the physical world itself. He had never encountered a power that was defined solely by what it was not.
“You disrupt the natural order,” he stated, his voice cutting over the river’s noise.
Nala looked back at the water now flowing normally again. “Do I?” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “The water is still there. The shrine is still quiet. I just… moved through the spaces they weren’t using.” She offered him a small, lopsided smile. “It is more efficient.”
Jaken finally splashed his way across, soaking the hem of his robes. He glared at Nala with pure, undiluted hatred. “Efficient? You are an abomination! A hole in the world! Lord Sesshomaru, surely we have endured this… this walking contradiction long enough!”
Sesshomaru’s gaze remained on Nala. He was considering the utility of a walking contradiction. His goals often required the removal of obstacles. What better tool than one that simply caused obstacles to cease being?
“The next village we approach will have humans,” he said, ignoring Jaken’s outburst entirely. “You will observe their interactions. You will not speak. You will not… touch anything.”
“A village?” Nala’s eyes lit up with that unsettling, ancient curiosity. “Like the little priests? But with more crinkly trash?”
“Just keep your mouth shut!” Jaken snapped, wringing water from his sleeve. “And for the love of all that is demonic, try to look normal!”
Nala looked down at her perfectly replicated, impossibly clean cotton kimono. She then looked at Jaken’s sodden, muddy, and frazzled state. “I am trying,” she said, her tone utterly sincere. “But you are making it very difficult to know what ‘normal’ is.”
Sesshomaru turned and continued his journey. A faint, almost non-existent breeze stirred the leaves overhead. It was the only sign that anything in the world had shifted. He had not answered her question about passing his test at the shrine. He was, it seemed, designing a new one. And this one would take place in a world of fragile, talking, crinkly-trash-hoarding humans.
The path descended from the wild mountains, the trees shrinking and thinning into managed woodland. The scent of pine and damp earth gradually surrendered to the acrid smell of woodsmoke and something less definable, a greasy, lived-in odor that clung to the back of the throat. Lights flickered in the distance, small and yellow against the deepening indigo of the evening.
Jaken sniffed the air with distaste. “Humans. Their stench is unmistakable. All that… sweating and cooking.”
Nala inhaled deeply, her nostrils flaring. “It’s complex. There’s burned fat, something sweetly rotten, and… is that fear?” She seemed more intrigued than repulsed. “It’s not a clean fear, like prey. It’s stale. Threadbare.”
“They fear everything,” Sesshomaru stated, his voice a low murmur that didn't quite carry to the village below. “Their own shadows. The fall of night. Each other. It is their natural state.”
He stopped at the tree line, the cultivated fields stretching out before them. His imposing figure was a stark silhouette against the fading sky. “You will remain here. You will observe. You will not interact.”
Nala nodded, her platinum curls catching the last of the light. “I understand. Watch the fragile things in their… habitat.” Her dark blue eyes were fixed on the closest structures, her head tilted in that bird-like way that made Jaken’s skin crawl.
“And don’t do that… thing with your head!” he added, jabbing a finger in her direction. “It’s unnerving! Just stand still and try to look like a rock!”
She slowly, deliberately, straightened her head. “Like this?”
“Worse! That’s even worse! You look like you’re judging everything!”
“I am simply observing,” she replied, her tone mild. Her attention was caught by a flicker of movement near a squat wooden building. A human child, no more than five, was chasing a frantic chicken around the side of a house, its squawks piercing the twilight.
Nala took an involuntary step forward. “The small human is hunting the noisy bird. Is this a ritual?”
“It’s called being a nuisance!” Jaken snapped. “Now stay put!”
But Sesshomaru was already moving, not toward the village center, but along its periphery, a shadow skirting the pool of human activity. Nala flowed after him, a silent, attentive ghost. Jaken scrambled to keep up, muttering curses under his breath.
They moved past a window where a family was gathered around a flickering blue light—a television, its tinny sounds of laughter seeping through the thin walls. Nala stopped dead, her eyes wide. “The little people in the box. Are they trapped?”
“It’s not real, you idiot!” Jaken hissed, pulling at her sleeve. His hand passed through the cotton kimono as if it were mist, and he stumbled back with a yelp. “It’s… it’s pictures! Magic pictures!”
“They seem very distressed,” Nala observed, watching the frantic comedy unfold on the screen.
“They’re laughing! It’s entertainment!”
Nala watched for a moment longer, the canned laughter seeming to baffle her more than any cursed rose. “Their joy is very loud.” She turned away, her gaze sweeping over clotheslines, a discarded bicycle, a plastic bag caught in the branches of a tree. “So many things. Do they use all of them?”
Before Jaken could formulate a sufficiently scathing reply, a new scent hit them. It was thick, greasy, and artificially savory. It came from a brightly lit cart near the village's main path, where a man was handing wrapped parcels to other humans in exchange for clinking metal.
Nala’s head tilted again. She drifted toward the scent, drawn by an instinct older than the concept of money. “That smell. It is… compelling.”
“It’s fried food, you simpleton! Stay away from it!” Jaken pleaded, but it was too late.
She was already at the edge of the cart’s glow, a pale, strikingly beautiful woman in an anachronistically simple kimono, staring at the sizzling oil with an expression of profound fascination. The vendor, a man with a tired face and a stained apron, did a double-take.
“Whoa, hey there. You alright, miss? You look… lost.” His eyes darted around, looking for her companions.
Nala didn’t look at him. Her gaze was locked on a wire basket of golden, twisting dough. “What is that?”
The vendor blinked. “A… a pretzel? You want one?”
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the warm bread. “It has a very symmetrical shape.”
Sesshomaru watched from the shadows, his arms crossed. This was the test. How would her utter otherness function in the banal chaos of human commerce?
The vendor, unnerved by her intensity, quickly bagged a pretzel and held it out. “Here, on the house. You look like you need it.”
Nala took the paper bag. She looked at it, then at the man. She brought the bag to her face and inhaled deeply. “Thank you for the offering,” she said, her voice formal and utterly out of place.
She then turned and walked back to the tree line, leaving the confused vendor staring after her. She didn't eat the pretzel. She simply held the bag, examining its crinkly texture with the same focus she’d given the plastic bottle and the cursed rose.
Jaken let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “You were supposed to observe, not acquire human garbage!”
“He gave it to me,” Nala said, as if this explained everything. She looked toward Sesshomaru. “He did not seem afraid. He seemed… weary. And confused by my presence.”
“A predictable reaction,” Sesshomaru replied, his golden eyes glinting in the dark. He had seen enough. Her presence didn’t cause panic; it caused a different kind of disruption, a cognitive dissonance that made humans question their own perceptions. It was a subtler, more insidious form of power.
He turned away from the village lights. “We are leaving.”
“Finally!” Jaken exclaimed, scrambling after him.
Nala took one last look at the bag in her hand. She then let her fingers loosen. The bag, along with the uneaten pretzel inside, dissolved into a wisp of smoke that vanished on the night air, leaving no trace it had ever existed. She had consumed the experience, not the object.
She fell into step behind Sesshomaru, her curiosity momentarily sated. “Their world is very loud, and very full,” she mused aloud. “And they give away their food so easily. It is a strange kind of strength.”
Sesshomaru did not reply. He was already calculating the next point of reference, the next boundary to test. A village of humans was one thing. There were other places, saturated with a different kind of power, where her nature would not be met with weary confusion, but with immediate, violent recognition. The world of youkai was not so forgiving.