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Moroha is inugami.
It’s something she’s known from when she was a little girl, long before she really understood what the word demon meant. Her world is all smells and touch and sight. People lie with their words, they are very good with that, but they don’t lie with their bodies, with the way they move, the way that first young man stumbles back from her on that night.
Her mother was a miko. Moroha has a part of that in herself as well, the power to purify, to set up barriers and burn demons – her own kind, even though there is more human in her – with her touch if she wills it. That, too, comes natural to her. It compliments her other side, tames it in a way, gives her the balance Myouga and Kaede say her father lacked for a long time.
She is three-quarter human and only one-quarter youkai, but for all the relation she should feel towards other humans, when asked what she is, this is always her first thought. I’m inugami.
Myouga loves her blood, loves it as much as he apparently loved her father’s. It’s power he is attracted to, she figures out, but also the taste of her inheritance. Her grandfather was the Daiyoukai of the West, one of the strongest demons to have ever lived. He was pure inugami and his blood runs through her veins, makes her more demon than she has any right to be.
On nights like this, she wonders what he was like, the Great Dog Demon. (Moroha never wonders about her father. She’s learned fast to avoid the things that cause pain.)
She sits in the canopy of her favorite tree, so far out from the village that she won’t be seen, and watches the sunset on the horizon, a red orb of light that fades until it has vanished completely behind the horizon.
The change ripples through her like a wave.
Moroha knows that she doesn’t look all too different – her eyesight is now keen enough to discern between colors even in the darkest hours of the night. Her hair is still midnight black, her face still round, her nails still sharp. It’s her eyes that become golden, golden like her father’s. (Another thought that she doesn’t chase after.)
Her ears are always the last thing to change. It itches when they move from the sides of her head to the top, barely concealed by the bow in her hair.
Inugami. For one night of the month, when the full moon is highest on the night sky, she is Yashahime, the Half-Demon Princess.
On that night she is free. The forest blurs beneath her when she jumps from tree to tree, there are a thousand smells in her nose, of deer and a river and the herbs growing hidden beside the oldest trees. She hears the rabbits bolt at her approach and doesn’t chase them because it wouldn’t be a fair fight.
In the morning, when the first rays of the rising sun transform her back into Moroha the three-quarter human, she always wishes that there would be more like her. Other inugami. She’s never met one, knows that she isn’t strong enough yet to survive a meeting with a full-blooded inu – she’s a smart girl, she doesn’t pretend that they wouldn’t try and kill her. Maybe…
On another full moon night, years in the future, when she is strong, prepared, she’d like to meet them, would like to ask them all the questions about their kind that Myouga and the humans around her were never able to answer.
Moroha is one-quarter inugami, and on full moon nights she is lonely.