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

She found him today, not by the lakeside, nor at the site of the geyser, but in the midst of one of his patrolling walks through the farmlands of Shenglu. His routes throw these lands had themselves become roads, just by the natural effects of his tread, a wide path of packed earth, cleared of boulders and trees for his own convenience, and where he walked even the grass had shifted to grow verdant and green along its edges rather than the sort of clumpy patches that might catch a foot or wagon wheel. And the earth itself was dark and baked by the heat of his shell to give firmer footing.

Out here, her little brother did not restrain himself. He loomed. A walking hill whose footsteps sent small tremors through the earth, some nearly eight meters from the front of his shell to the back. On his back was the mobile shrine he had described to her, much larger than the one which he had worn in their little family garden. Racks on racks of ceramic planters, set into metal piping affixed to his spiky shell, filled with a menagerie of plants from the farms and town given in offering. He was a steep tiered field unto himself, and the rattling of the planters was matched only by the buzzing of the bees which flitted among the flowering plants, each one like a little drop of liquid gold.

She approached through the hazy, light flow of ash wafting off of him to be scattered on the breeze, carried out to the surrounding fields to fertilize the soil. She drifted toward him like a leaf on the wind, Qiyi's silk rippling around her, since she was flying today, she'd let the dress grow out the train of her gown into a long fluttering thing that waved a good half meter behind her, little wisps of mist rising from it.

"Big Sister!"

"Come to see this young King's walk today, Elder Sister?"

My, Zhen's haughtiness was reaching critical levels. She would have to tease him over it later, and gently deflate it a little, but now was not the time

"I did, do you mind if I join you, little brother?" Ling Qi asked

"Please?" Gui said happily. "If Sister comes around the front, Zhengui had his friends build a seat into the new model!"

She blinked, circling lazily above him. Indeed among all the flowers, there was a hollow large enough for her to sit in, set with a chair made of thin metal tubing and sturdy linen padding. She didn't miss that it was surrounded by darker colored and more cold resistant plants too.

…Zhengui really did love her, didn't he?

"Don't mind if I do then," Ling Qi said, drifting down.

Pretty pretty blooming bright, cold and white, sleeping blue!
Her dress hummed happily as she settled down, the embroidery on her gown crawled and shifted, from wintery whorls to the outlines of petals and stylized white lines like sprouting shoots.

Her sleeves expanded, sprouting lace and covering her hands. Ling Qi sighed, she looked much too fancy enthroned like this, but she would indulge a little. She supposed it lent Zhengui more gravitas too from the people who watched him trundle by from their homes and fields.

"Everything has been fine since the ceremony?" Ling Qi asked.

"Mhm! Miss Snowblossom and I have been chatting a lot, she likes hearing about the fields and hills, and even if swimming is no fun Gui likes hearing about eh fishes and the water plants down in the muck," Gui chirped happily, though at his sized it was more of a bass rumble.

"I, Zhen, have been carefully adjusting the release of my qi, to better match and mingle with the water coming up from below."

His qi was certainly mingling with hers. Ling Qi sighed. It really wasn't helpful to think of things that way. All of her friends joking aside, the relationship between two symbiotic spirit lords really wasn't necessarily… intimate in the way that a human would think of it. It could be, but right now, she was just giving herself weird feelings for no reason.

Or more honestly, she was using this silliness to distract her from the more serious topic she had come to discuss.

"I'm glad, you've really been prospering out here, haven't you little brother?" Ling Qi said wistfully, watching the land around them roll by. Even with his slow gait, the sheer length of his stride ate of ground.

"Yes!"

"Of course!"

Ling Qi nodded faintly. "Zhengui, can I ask… have you ever felt any concern over where you came from?"

Zhen's body arced up over his shell, looking down at her from above. His tongue flicked out, white hot, trailing a wisp of ash. It was a confused expression for the serpent.

"I, Zhen, do not understand."

"You're maturing, growing into your own. I just wonder if you have ever been curious," Ling Qi said quietly. "About you're… actual parents I suppose."

Her little brother was silent for a moment. "Gui has wondered if he is doing things right sometimes."

"I, Zhen, have only one family," Zhen replied stiffly. "Big Sister is kind, but should not worry about such things."

"I have never doubted that we are true family, Zhengui," Ling Qi said, bowing her head. "But, it is fine to want to know things.
"I…" Zhen trailed off, smoke puffing out with each flick of his tongue.

"Gui does not like being ignorant. Big Sister wants to talk about this?"

It was strange how maturity could seesaw back and forth between his two personalities. "You remember the trip we took with Xuan Shi?"

He craned his neck up, looking back at her over his shell.

"You may be able to speak with the shade of the ones whose core became your egg there," Ling Qi said quietly. "I've known for some time, but I am only now confident in my ability to approach something like that. And… there are things I want to know as well."

"Hmph," Zhen hissed. "So, Big Sister wants to go on a dream adventure with this young King, you should have just said so."

She craned her neck back to look him in the eyes, and he turned up his snout, flicking out his tongue haughtily.

"I suppose we haven't gone on a trip with just the two of us in a long time have we," Ling Qi said fondly. "Although…"

Quiet. Quiet. Silent silk fluttering.

Of course. Qiyi was a good girl, wasn't she?

Try veils and high boots after?

…Or at least a patient one. She supposed she could manage that.

But Gui's thoughtful silence belied no knowledge of that little aside. "Yes, Gui remembers. Diggy digging is not quite right, but did not feel wrong either. Being a hidden stone was fun."

"Tasty, juicy rabbits. They are never big enough anymore," Zhen lamented, his body drooping. "It is not the same being fake-small."
"No, I suppose it isn't," Ling Qi said, looking out toward the curve of the road ahead, where it turned to pass around the row of farmland on their left, to return back toward Shenglu, boarding the pastureland on the other side.

The past was gone, you could not get it back. Zhengui's days of being small and near helpless were far behind him, but even that came with good and bad. Time was. Change was. There was nothing more certain than that in the world.

"Well, let's see if we can't make a new memory or two. Will you be free tomorrow, little brother?"

"Yes sister!"


Ling Qi inhaled deeply of the heavy history laden air on the other side of the rings, feeling the weight of material reality leaving her shoulders dripping from her fingers and heels like droplets of water scattering as one surfaced from the water, and beside her, Zhengui boiled from the earth, grass and stone flowing cherry red with heat as he too emerged, blinking from the false firmament under their feet, formed by her expectations and thoughts.

"Oooogh, Gui's tummy feels funny," her little brother groaned, she was sure if he had a less stable gait, he might have wobbled drunkenly. "It feels even weirder than it used to…"

"I, Zhen, can hardly feel my home," he grumbled. "Hmph! I shall have to meditate a hundred times to improve my connection!"

Ling Qi smiled faintly, but it faded as she looked around. This locus point, the reflection of the lunar shrine, her entrance into the realm of dream, floated now as an island upon a vast serene blue lake. Surrounded by mountains which scratched at the far distant sky, and filled with rolling hills, it was like a bowl, or perhaps a cradle. The symbols of human life flickered like ghosts here and there, fitful impressions on a sleepy, little touched landscape.

But dark clouds churned in the south, columns of sickly sweet rotten fog and flashing lighting. But there was something else too. A tower of dark iron shrouded in cawing crows and limned with rosy sunlight faced a many tiered pagoda, with roof tiles of dragon scale, wreathed in crackling lightning, and even from here, Ling Qi could hear the rumble of voices, unintelligible even to her ears, radiating from the crackling confrontation.

But she was not here for that, no, her hand fell on the smooth dark wood door frame which stood on her little island, the door to nowhere, to a goal meant to be locked in circular time.

She was not here for this today though, for all that she felt the scratchy question in the back of her mind.

"Not yet." she said quietly.

But soon.

She nodded.

"Big Sister?"

"Ready to move little brother," Ling Qi said, turning away from the door. "Come with me to the edge."

He trundled up beside her, here he was only as high as her shoulder, his spirit not quite caught up to his body. Ling Qi clapped her hands twice, and bowed three times as the lake and circling mountains blurred away.

"I offer my respects to the great Patriarch of the South."

"Zhengui offers his respects to the great Patriarch of the South."

The infinitely tall trees stretching beyond sight above and below loomed ahead, the first sight she had seen in controlled steps into the dream, and down among the leaves and branches, the teetering ruins of a hundred hundred settlements all built atop each other and sinking into dust sprawled in the twilight.

And bove winding through clouds and distant drifting leaves from a canopy out of sight, the kilometers long coils of draconic scales drifted serene through the unending twilight.

Their words echoed and echoed out, and sparks crackled and popped. Ling Qi felt more than saw an eye larger than her whole body roll towards them, and fall upon their bowed heads.

Towering pride earned a hundred times was a weight upon their backs, and Ling Qi grimaced as she felt the smoldering flames within her flare, sending spasms of pain through her limbs. But then it passed. The Dragon patriarch bound to Sect Head Yuan He took no offense nor interest in their doings.

Ling Qi took a deep breath, and looked out over the ruins, and far in the distance she saw a tower of teetering buildings begin to fall, a slow motion calamity of crumbling wood and stone and rising dust. And there she saw a flash of brilliant, verdant green.

"That is where we are going, huh," Zhengui rumbled, peering out beyond the edge of her little isle. He sounded a little nervous.

It was a bit disquieting to hear him like that, with both voices joined together.

"Yes," Ling Qi said. "Do you want me to carry us there?"

"Zhengui, thinks that he should. This young king has been practicing with his fires," her little brother said hesitantly. "But Big Sister is the expert of the spooky twisty places…."

There was a symbolism in it, but Ling Qi did have to admit, she was definitely better at moving in the dream, so…"

[ ] She would dance and twirl her way through the twilight wood, as she had done before.

[ ] She would trust the rocketing flame of her little brother to soar here, in this space beyond the law of earth.