Warnings, disclaimers, etc.

A/N's -

- So I already wrote a fic dealing with Koorime burial customs. Then a few weeks later, I had another thought on that. This is something entirely different.

Keynote

Some ten thousand years after her Kazuma has died, Yukina is the eldest Koorime. Still the most scandalous, too, but most such rumors died some centuries ago with the last maiden to remember that Yukina's blood flows in the veins of an unknown percentage of humanity... to remember Hina, Hiei, and Kazuma ever existed.

Scandal or no, the eldest Koorime holds the history of the ice maidens in her hands. Literally; there is a single key to the museum vaults, the ceremonial treasures, and the innermost chamber of the library.

That chamber, Yukina discovers, holds the only text that precedes Yuki'onna, the progenitor of the Koorime race. And a single, shattering fact...

The Koorime are not Koorime.

Seventy thousand years before Yukina's time, the Makai was dominated by a race whose power was only exceeded by their vast wealth. The race was dichotomist; their children were born either resilient powerhouses, small bundles of S-class potential and a remarkable ability to overcome magical crippling...

... or they were born female. And their only amazing skills were their ability to generate cold, and the gems they shed as tears.

The lone text describes how the women were taught to cry on command, were guarded and hoarded as jealously as the teargems they produced, were treated when they didn't produce enough gems or children.

Yukina's five years in the teargem dealer's tower were a taste of history.

The end came after a daughter had been born to the house of one of the moderately-wealthy clans of these rulers of Makai. They'd named her Yuki, and indulged her, and allowed her just the slightest bit too much knowledge.

She'd discovered a method of inducing parthenogenesis in herself.

Within a matter of decades, no sons were being born to the Koorime ancestors in all of Makai. A century of madness, of internecine war; entire clans disappearing, the women's bodies never found... because there had been no bodies, and the theft of women wasn't unheard of on such scales. It wasn't until the final ten or twenty years that the men realized the wholesale slaughter of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons was occuring.

The open battles decimated the remains of the race. And the surviving victors retreated to the only lands that would protect them: the Glacier.

When twins -- one female, one not -- were born some thousand years later, the resulting panic ended after determining it was a genetic hiccup, and adding laws to throw the boy away.

The Koorime are not Koorime. Yukina's father does not exist.

Yukina carefully copies the pages, and for the first time in three thousand years, she sets out for the hut of a three-eyed healer in the wilds of Makai.

She leaves the key for her successor.