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 hearts 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 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.
