The guardsmen she had served, were not so different than mortal men, though the bruises they left often lasted longer. So, stronger, perhaps, and with an intensity and vigor that normal folk lacked, but not fundamentally different.
She could remember her great uncle, the clan head of the He, a graying man said to be nearly two hundred years old, yet even the authoritative patriarch she recalled from her early memories paled compared to her daughter. For all that he had seemed an unshakable pillar of the clan, he was still just a man. Her daughter on the other hand... it was difficult to describe.
She had felt her, before she had seen her, a presence like the first kiss of winter cold drifting on the fall wind, like the feeling in ones bones when the rains were coming and the mist would soon drift in, casting the world into dreamlike haze. That feeling had only intensified upon seeing her, and it made Ling Qingge wonder, the old judge who had visited her did not seem so intense, save for a moment when he had dismissed a frivolous excuse from one of her creditors. Was making oneself seem human merely a skill her daughter lacked, or did she simply not see any reason to bother?
She supposed, if she still knew her daughter, that it was more likely that the girl simply wouldn't have considered the matter. She could not quite put to words what made her daughter seem inhuman now, perhaps it the too quick movements of her limbs, the faint glow in her eyes, or even the strange way that she breathed, so slow and shallow, the rise and fall of her chest barely visible to the eye. A hundred little things, that made her seem more like a spirit from a cautionary tale than a young girl.
Yet it had all faded away when they embraced. Beneath the cold and unsettling breeze, Ling Qi was warm and welcoming, a blazing hearth on a cold winter night, reminding her of better times, and uncorrupted memories of her own long deceased Mother, singing her to sleep while the cold southern winds rattled the shutters. She had accepted it then, that this strange spirit-girl truly was her daughter.
If only she could feel confident that she could be a mother to such a person.
