Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Ling Qi looked down at the floor, her hands balled into fists. She couldn't do it. Her mind spun out a thousand lines of argumentation she could raise, but it all came back to one thing. Their lives were in danger right now. Perhaps Liming would save Cai Renxiang, but what of the rest of them? It would ruin the mission in so many ways, and end the chance to lessen the impact of war in the south.

She couldn't imagine Cai Renxiang approving of the decision to risk that if they didn't have to, especially if it was done only to spare her pain. Yet Ling Qi was not Cai Renxiang, and deliberately hurting a friend twisted something in her chest. It made the ache she had borne for several months now throb like an open wound exposed to air.

"Ling Qi, you are beginning to concern me," Cai Renxiang said, watching her from the doorway. She stood with her arms crossed, frowning faintly. The simulacrum of Lin Hai stood behind her with a look of faint concern as well. "Are you certain you are well?"

"No, I don't think I am," Ling Qi said, raising her eyes. "I'm sorry for deflecting before, but I am actually here to remind you of something."

"Are you saying our Lady has forgotten something?" Lin Hai chuckled, laying a hand on her shoulder. "How scandalous of you, baroness. We have certainly been busy, but Lady Ren has not been that distracted."

Cai Renxiang however, looked slightly disquieted, and raised her hand to place over his. "No, Ling Qi has my trust. If she believes I have overlooked something, I will listen."

She paused then and shook her head. "Perhaps it would explain the distraction I have felt today."

Ling Qi pursed her lips. She wondered if that was a sign of her lieges mental struggle. "Renxiang, you've already had your dress fitting."

"She most certainly has not," Lin Hai said lightly. "As her tailor, I think I would recall that."

Ling Qi ignored him, and the glint of blue white ice in his eyes and met Renxiang's gaze steadily. "You're not though. Renxiang, you only have one dress, and your Mother made it. She made it years ago, and you've never worn anything else since."

"Ridiculous," Cai Renxiang's frown deepened into a scowl. "My honored Mother would not waste her craft on a child. That is why she had always refused my childish demands to meet her face to face before I achieved the third realm. It would be…"

Her face scrunched up in discomfort, and in a disquieting display for the stoic girl, visibly shook herself. "…pointlessly cruel," she breathed.

"Just so," Lin Hai said, resting his hand on his hip. "Really, baroness, what has gotten into you, speaking such strange things? Are you ill perhaps? Wading into Dream as you do can befuddle the mind."

"…Yes, that must be so. My apologies for misunderstanding your limits, Ling Qi," Cai Renxiang said. "I will see a physician brought in at once. Please take the rest of the afternoon to rest."

She sounded distracted and uncertain, and Ling Qi grimaced, shooting a dark look at the simulacra behind her. Cai Renxiang's discomfort was already fading. This spirit was still laying her thumb on the scale. Ling Qi stepped forward, within arms reach of her liege. "Renxiang, listen. You can't change the past. Even if it's painful, even if it's awful. You know that. I know that. Isn't that why you always talk about the future?"

Cai Renxiang narrowed her eyes. "Baroness, you are really being too familiar."

"Maybe, but how else would you know it's me?" Ling Qi said, she smiled, but it was a painful thing. "I wouldn't be who if I did not know loneliness. If you don't remember what it is you're trying to replace, do you think you can really build this? Make it more than a dream?"

She gestured to the window, beyond which lay the image of the idyllic city, and Renxiang grimaced, pain blooming on her features.

"That is quite enough, baroness," not-Lin Hai said, frowning at her. He moved to push her away, with all the implacable strength of a higher realm. "I know not what has disturbed your mind so, but Lady Ren does not need–"

His hand went through her shoulder as Ling Qi took hold of the dream's fabric and twisted it, stepping closer still to place her hands on Renxiang's shoulders. When she spoke again, Ling Qi's words felt sour on her tongue. "Remember Liming."

The world bent around her as she spoke the spirits' name, the sound of it distorting the air. Like water into which a stone had been dropped, the dream rippled. She was close enough to see Renxiang's eyes widen and her pupils shrink in terror.

"…Mother, Uncle, why?" The words that passed her lips were little more than a whisper, but they reverberated through the dream like thunder.

The light of the bright summer's day outside changed. Warm sunlight became harsh radiance, and the city boiled away into light. The mansion groaned as polished wood split apart, giving way to walls of gleaming metal

The office shuddered, and not-Lin Hai's expression twisted into a snarl, even as he dissolved, scoured away like the morning mist at the dawn. But Ling Qi felt the spirit's lingering malice bloom in the dream.
She was here.

Ling Qi could feel the power crushing down on her back, could see Renxiang looking over her shoulder, pain turning to terror in her eyes. She saw it without her eyes, for what were such pitiful mortal organs in the face of the Tyrant?

Radiance, radiance beyond description. A light that scoured and bleached and crumbled. Ling Qi felt the breath driven from her lungs, and her heart's beat quicken to near the point of bursting. She saw truth unfettered by the thin mask of human flesh and languid wit, the light of creation and destruction in all it's terrible glory.

Witness the implacable and infinite. Behold the Tyrant Progress, whose breath is the end of kings and whose hands are the builders of thrones.

She felt Cai Renxiang's shoulders shake under her hands even as the world was consumed in white. She saw the shadow of a workshop through tear and blood blurred eyes, walls of resplendent cloth and the tools of a weaver and tailor, wrought of the wood and metal of gods. She stood horrified/laid screaming upon the loom. She felt bile in her throat/She felt her flesh unspun. She heard a child scream/She felt fingers like merciless razor edged shears plunge into her soul, severing some threads to lie on the floor and forth other strings of black. She felt threads of herself wound round a spindle, prepared to be woven into a half finished gown of gold and white.

She saw the Tyrant pluck gleaming threads of diamond and adamant from her own self, and pass them through the eye of the embroidering needle.

It was the echo of an echo, a child's memory of pain and incomprehension, made as clear as it was only by the nature of the Liminal. She knew that the tiny fragment of the Duchess' truth she had witnessed was just that, else she, too, would be broken.

She knew that the light failed to truly scour her only because it was filtered through a child's memory. Even as the taste of acid burned her tongue, she did the only thing she could think of. Ling Qi stepped through the dream, and wrapped her arms around Renxiang, the real Renxiang, who stood frozen before her.

"You've withstood this already," Ling Qi said through gritted teeth. It wasn't just physical pain that made it hard to think. It was the feeling of betrayal, the intense emotion of a child's incomprehension and hurt at a pillar of their life performing an unforgivable hurt. "Renxiang, you've withstood this already! This is only a memory!"


Cai Renxiang stood stiff in her arms, shaking like a leaf, but as Ling Qi repeated herself, all but shouting in her ear, she felt the shaking stop, and heard the grinding of gritted teeth. She felt her liege's hand on her shoulder, not quite returning the embrace, but not rejecting it either.

The luminous workshop shattered like spun glass under a boot.

They stood in child's playroom, lit only by a faint, sourceless gray light. Ling Qi heard a deep, rumbling growl and felt the heat of bloodlust on her back. She felt Cai Renxiang's tension return in an instant, and the hand left her back as Cai Renxiang stepped out of her embrace, leveling Cifeng's curved blade at the slouched figure of Liming.

"Not one step closer," Cai Renxiang hissed, the point of her saber pressing directly against the spirit.

Liming cocked her head slowly to the side, long black hair falling away to reveal one gleaming eye of glass. Ling Qi swallowed as the spirit briefly looked at her, and then locked its gaze on Renxiang. There was something different about the spirit that Ling Qi could not quite place.

Then, with a deep rumble in its throat, the spirit reached out, and smeared it's bloody hand along the length of the blade. It took a step closer, and Cifeng punched through it's chest and out of it's back in a shower of blood. Liming grasped Cai Renxiang's wrist, and let out a low hiss.

Ling Qi realized what was different. The cloying hate the spirit exuded like mist was banked when it looked at Renxiang. It was replaced by ice cold contempt.

Cai Renxiang's eyes flicked over to her and then back to Liming. "Ling Qi–"

Whatever she might have said was lost as the playroom vanished in a flurry of snow.

Ling Qi almost stumbled as she came to herself high on the mountain ridge as a pulse of power reinforced the material world like the gate of a castle slamming shut. She stood on solid stone, surrounded in white, but it was the natural haze of an intense blizzard. She heard gasps of startlement from her companions, and the babble of her spirits in her head.

"Knew you had this," Sixiang said in her mind.

Ling Qi looked ahead and saw Black Sky's Yearning, hovering in the air, her mask like face twisted in an expression that was both angry and worried.

Ling Qi only realized that the spirit's attention was behind her as she heard stone shatter. Whipping her head around, she saw Cai Renxiang, her left arm buried up to the elbow in the mountainside, pebbles and grit still flying outward from where her fist had pulverized stone. The others behind her looked on in bewilderment as they shook off their dreams, but Ling Qi saw Cai Renxiang's face.

Her eyes were beacons of pale radiance, and the stoic girl's expression was twisted in hatred, glaring at the spirit in the snow beyond. It felt wrong seeing that expression on Cai Renxiang.

Ling Qi looked to the others; Xia Lin surreptitiously wiping moisture from her eyes, Gan Guangli looking at their liege with concern even as his fists clenched and unclenched, and Meng Dan, still smiling but with a distant look.

She glanced down to the light still shining from Liming's eyes and the heavy scent of blood and steel hanging in the air.

"I believe I have won our wager," Ling Qi said coolly. "It would be best if we passed through now, I think."

The ice spirit looked back at her with empty black eyes, and she felt its resentment, but there was something else, too, the wariness of a predator that had just been bloodied by its prey. She had felt the ripple of power that had yanked them fully back into the material world. What had Black Sky's Yearning felt, she wondered?

"The victory is yours child of winter," the spirit whispered sulkily even as its physical form dissolved. "Pass then with my blessing."

AN: Part 2 of this update will be going up tomorrow thanks for your patience!

Silence fell in the wake of the spirit's words, heavy and cloying. Even the shriek of the wind seemed dampened, and the cold less biting. Ling Qi turned to face her companions, and clasping her hands together bowed low.

"I apologize sincerely for the trouble my choice has caused," Ling Qi said. Images of Cai Renxiang's memories flashed in her head, and she felt her stomach churn a little. "I accept fault in the matter."

"Any path would have seen us face such a creature, there was no avoiding pain of some kind," Xia Lin responded first, her voice was a little thick. "I was, and am prepared to accept some pain for my duty."

There was a sound of falling stone, and Ling Qi saw pebbles and dust falling into the snow, even with her eyes down. When Cai Renxiang spoke, her voice was even and controlled, with no sign of the intense emotion that Ling Qi had seen on her face beforehand. "Xia Lin is correct. The Wall is riddled with dangerous spirits, and your actions have achieved our purposes. Raise your head, baroness, and lead on. I do not care to stay here."

Ling Qi straightened up reluctantly. "…Of course, Lady Cai."

She hoped Renxiang would forgive her for what she had done.

"I don't think that's the problem, Ling Qi. I don't think she's blaming you," Sixiang said as she turned around. "You are the one who wants forgiveness."

<Shouldn't I?> Ling Qi thought back, stepping forward on the narrow path. Snow was still falling, but the cold no longer seemed to sap at her bones, and the wind no longer threatened to tug her from the path. She supposed Black Sky's Yearning was upholding her end of the bargain. Such was the advantage of dealing with spirits.

"I'm only seeing this second hand, but I don't think you were wrong. I think you were choosing between two bad choices. Maybe you could have been gentler, but do you think that girl would appreciate that? Appreciate you risking everything on her feelings?" Sixiang replied calmly. "You opened a wound, but it's not one you made."

Ling Qi trudged on without replying. She still didn't like it. She hated what she had seen, and the pain she had caused to someone she cared for. It felt wrong.

"Big Sister is really greedy sometimes. She won't leave any responsibility for anyone else," Zhengui murmured. "Zhengui thinks that the mean aunty is the one everyone should be mad at."

"She was a jerk," Hanyi muttered sulkily. "I'm not broken."

<You're not,> Ling Qi sent back tiredly. <You're just yourself, and that is what Master Zeqing wanted.> Let others think what they wanted, Zeqing wasn't wrong in what she did. Black Sky's Yearning had admitted she was kin. If that was so they would just have to accept the difference in her line.

She glanced back to Renxiang with another twinge of guilt. There were things you shouldn't bend on. If only it was always so easy to tell where that line was.


The hike through the glacial gorge took the rest of the day and more than half of the next, and never during that time did the storm seem as intense as it had been going in. It was still an unpleasant journey. The mood of the group was lower than it had ever been. Cai Renxiang gave out clipped orders when necessary, and otherwise remained silent. Xia Lin scouted the path ahead and returned, never spending more than a few minutes with the group.

Meng Dan seemed to recover the most quickly, and had his nose back in his studies within a few hours. He kept drawing Gan Guangli into conversation, distracting the larger boy from his own brooding. Ling Qi didn't listen in, but she was glad to see at least some of them didn't have their thoughts occupied by dark things.

Ling Qi distracted herself with the rhetorical exercises of her speech arts. Soon she would need to be in top form for negotiations. That alone was a valid reason to put away the unpleasant thoughts in her head, was it not? Despite that, Ling Qi found it difficult to focus on arts like the Playful Muse's Rapport when her head was like this. She was glad then that she had done much of the cultivation necessary during the early journey. She found herself wondering if she could really do this, convince total foreigners of a connection to the empire and a ceasefire, when her only practice with rhetorical arts were the sort of things useful for court parties. When she had been forced to use crude methods just to shake her friend out of a dream?

Despite the thoughts niggling at her though, the journey was coming to a close.

At last, their journey became an ascent as the narrow rocky path came to the end of the glacial gorge and rose along the sheer cliffs of the high snowy plain at its top. They were very far to the south now, off of any of the provinces official maps, and here the Wall began to thin out, mighty peaks no longer packed so densely, granting a view of the great scrub plains of hardy grass that lay beyond the mountains populated by hardy grasses and little else, from what Ling Qi could see.

But it was not that view which brought them up short. No, it was the unnatural peak that jutted from the plateau. It was a dark grey cone half visible through the snow, too regular to be natural, but too jagged and weathered to seem intentional. It was a heap of smelted iron ore in the shape of a mountain, piled and fused by forces unknown.

Ling Qi could feel a resonance in the iron shard as she looked upon it. That was their destination. She didn't object when Cai Renxiang called for a halt, to allow them a short rest before they made contact.
With Cai Renxiang secluding herself in the pavilion to meditate, Ling Qi found herself…

[] Drifting into the conversation between Gan Guangli and Meng Dan on the Mountain folk, where Hanyi sat listening idly.
[] Outside the pavilion, where Xia Lin sat beside Zhengui's bulk, staring thoughtfully out into the snow.
[] In her own mind, with Sixiang, pondering the meaning of insights, and the demon gnawing at her heart.