This tale, like many tales before it, began long ago. In the spring day when the first white flower bloomed.

***

I hear the wind, it flows far from me.

I see the light, only from this side of the shadow.

My footsteps on the great arch weigh so much.

My heart is burdened.

The laughter has abandoned my soul.

***

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young prince. One day the prince left his castle to go outside and he wondered across a grand fortress. The fortress was that of a princess. From the shadows of the forest he laid his eyes on the princess who sang a song to all the flowers and the trees in her garden. Her beauty was so godly that he found it difficult to believe that she truly was just a mere mortal.

From that day on he returned to her. In the shadows he lurked, watched her, day and night. When she strolled the gardens, in secrecy he marvelled her kind spirit, great splendour and gracefulness. Sadly, he had no courage to approach the princess, as they were enemies by God’s will. He was a demon and she was a human.

The prince spent all his waking hours in thoughts of the maiden. The moon followed the sun and day after night her lingering image haunted his memories. He cursed the day she had captivated his heart. For now she was everything that filled his lonely hours.

On a fateful day, the two met in the forest. The prince halted. He feared the woman’s reaction to his demonic appearances and attempted to hide from her. But the young woman reached out for him. She showed no fear and she spoke with gentleness in her voice when she asked who he was.

Her calm presence surrounded him and so he held out his hand for her: “My name is Sesshoumaru.”

As time went by the prince fell ever more deeply in love with the princess. Against his reason, the demon prince felt devotion for the human woman with his young, untamed ardour. Wooed her with white flowers he brought her every day and guarded her every step from afar. Waiting patiently to earn her love. But the princess, despite of her affection for the prince, could not reciprocate his feeling of love. As she was bound by her duty to her kind and hence kept her heart sealed from him. Yet the prince waited for his love to reach her heart.

Time went by, seasons passed.

After long separation the prince hasted to finally meet his beloved maiden again. He picked up a white flower and with longing to be greeted by her tender smile he approached her fortress.

Alas, the young demon prince was forced to behold a sight that made the breath escape his lips.

There in her sweet spring garden, he watched, another man enclosed his loved one in his embrace. The other man who was no other than the king of the demon land. The prince’s father.

The white flower fell on the ground.

Sesshoumaru returned to the demon lands. He swore never to return to the princess. All the while his heart grew bitter and began to be tainted by hatred. He sought an ease to his agony, but found none. He was doomed to his despair and gradually became unable to love or care for anything.

In the end he had to witness how his father’s kingdom crumbled, fell to pieces. And then how the love of his life, Izaiyo, withered to her untimely death. And there was someone to be blamed of this tragedy. The bastard brother of his, a half-breed that had been born of the union of the princess and the demon king. Due to the birth of the half-breed, Sesshoumaru was now denied of his father’s heritage, the great weapon he had wielded, he was denied of his father’s love and most bitterly - he had lost the love of his life. He had seen her dreadful fading into the nothingness until no more was left than her cold, earthly remains slumbering underneath the frozen soil.

That unholy fruit of their love was the reason for her demise. And the cruelest and the most insulting jest of faith was his brother’s face. The face that reminded him of her. For hundreds of years.

But still, every year for the following decades and centuries, someone brought white flowers to the grave of the princess.

***

My heart stayed still like frozen water while yours kept flowing like the spring river.