Paper messenger birds came and went. Cai Renxiang, informing her that she would be taking back the duties that had been given to her for today, rerouting messages to her own office. A brief message from Zheng Fu, informing her that he 'had a lead' with no further elaboration. More to the General, she was not privy too, presumably organizing security outside.
The wait was interminable. The dread of what was to come eating at her mind despite her best attempts at meditating. Even the most basic cultivation was beyond her reach.
When it began though, she only barely noticed it.
A faint ripple of qi thrumming through the ground and the air, the faintest buzz of something similar to the security scan she had undergone at the Ministry of Integrity's office.
"Interesting. The Ministry has refined their formations."
She glanced toward the General, who said no more. She supposed the Heron General would know. The Ministry had aided the fledgling Cai government, in tracking down the remnants of the Hui.
Her head jerked up, as she felt something pulse in the air. A scent like stagnant water, and a feeling like she was standing in water, rippling from the impact of a thrown stone.
She heard and felt people moving outside, boots tramping. People shouting and metal clattering.
"The dream is churning," Sixiang whispered to her.
Ling Qi stood, cycling her qi once, forcing her energies to calm. She gathered the power needed to walk, to slide through the veil and tentatively reached for the general with that power, nearly wincing at the searing heat that threatened to char her own qi to ash.
It banked, very slightly, enough to feel as if she was merely touching something blistering hot instead of having her flesh melt from her bones. The General's arms uncrossed, and her hand drifted to the white wrapped hilt of the sword at her waist.
Ling Qi felt the thread embedded in her flesh pull taut, sending a sharp pain up through her middle finger.
"Beginning transport," Ling Qi said, more for herself than Xia Ren. She felt Sixiang's arms tight around her as she drew her qi in to walk the dream. Her back felt like it would break from the weight on her shoulders. She staggered, her foot almost slipping.
And then she stepped through, following the black thread down into chaos.
She felt her feet sink into deep, cold mud, and the scent of rot filled her nose.
Those sensations barely lasted a second.
Screams. Crackling flames and hissing steam that nothing but screams. Heat seared her, impossible cooking heat pressing down in every direction.
She let out a hacking, gagging cough as white smoke engulfed her
And the Heron General stepped past her, hand loosely gripping the hilt of her sword. Ling Qi could barely perceive her silhouette in the smoke. Only… it was not smoke, not really.
The essence of the liminal died where it touched Xia Ren. Su Ling's arts had shown her a glimpse of this once, of a technique freezing and stealing the changeability of the liminal's matter. But Xia Ren's effect was infinitely greater.
The trackless dense mangrove swamp they had stepped into with its bruise colored sky and infinite vista of glittering faerie lights in the mist, a labyrinth which Ling Qi instinctively understood could have trapped her for eternity its peaceful and serene ways, died around the General.
Water, air, mist and light turned to dust. Where she walked, the dream was bleached, burned and flattened, a spreading blight of still white dust growing by the second, devouring the landscape.
Ling Qi bent double, a whimper escaping her lips as the pain crashed down on her. The staggering weight and the burning power vented from the segments in the woman's armor washing back into Ling Qi's channels.
Fssh
A blade whispered, and Ling Qi was driven to her knees, tears burning in her eyes as she vomited into the dust beneath her.
And the labyrinth split asunder, a kilometers long canyon ripped in the earth at the stroke of a blade. No concealment, no tricks, no confusion. The Sovereign of Steel and Fire had come.
The Liminal howled the agony of a wounded titan, a noise that threatened to burst the fragile still mortal flesh of her ears. Black ichor welled in the canyon carved before them, mangroves falling and water hemorrhaging into the abyss.
And through the sundered mist, past the ruined marsh, Ling Qi saw the outline of a grand and ancient temple, resplendent with falling waters, with still and deep reflecting pools, winding in spiraling tiers up its towers, so overgrown with life it at first seemed a a great mountain, covered in moss. Water worn stone painstaking carved through eons by natural forces rumbled…
And turned to face them.
And the shadow of a steel heron fell over it.
"Ling Qi, Ling Qi c'mon get up. I know it hurts but you gotta stay moving."
"Stagnation is death," Ling Qi whispered back to Sixiang as she forced herself to her feet. The whispered words, the intonation of her simple, young truth enough to churn the qi in her channels, send the wind whipping about the hems of her gown and lift her into the air.
She understood implicitly that only its small resonation and the General's protection, allowed even that.
She did not feel her vision waver, her senses spiral off into desperate metaphor. She saw Xia Ren in her fullness and wished that she had not.
The General's shadow towered. A twisted giant of segmented steel, gaunt and razor edged and spiked. Blazing light poured from every crevice in her armor, smoke and ash that smelled like burning flesh, and rippled with screaming, suffering faces rising in sky choking columns, the heat of a furnace burning and blackening whatever her mere presence did not bleach into dust.
Her sword burned with a trailing pale blue light, where its edge sundered even the air.
Still tasting bile on her tongue, Ling Qi rose into the air as the stone temple rumbled, naturalistic spires flexing like the spines of some titanic beast, exuding mist and faerie lights in every color. They whipped around its perimeter, an an achingly beautiful shell of dancing and refracting light. From deep inside the temple, something mournful played, the sounds of an ancient zither piercing the screams that roared and crackled from the General in her advance.
Preservation. So much had been lost, so much taken. One chop after another, felling the Forest People, a thousand insults, changes to the ways of the ancestors. Insidious things, whispers claiming betterment, superiority, even kindness. Lies all, Lies all! The stone builders, the Heavenly Jailors, the Hill Burners, the False Dreamers, the Slayer of Foundations! None had ever been worthy. Each seeking merely to crack the shell of the last and chosen people, the final stewards of the diviner's legacy. Conquerors and Kin of Beasts!
Thieves and despoilers all, that would taint even the kin, take from them the last vestiges of pride and identity. Still waters deep and cold would bear no more, would drown it all, before surrender. Ten thousand years of history sang in the foundations and the depths, and would not go quiet into the night
It was unbearably sad, Ling Qi felt like her heart might freeze even as she felt her world go mad. Her senses threatened to rebel, twisting the world into a nonsense smear of chaotic sensation. Only the sharp pain remained real, the feeling of blood running from her nose and eyes, the feeling of something in her skull threatening to burst.
Meaningless.
A sword that cut down mountains rose into the sky, no lurid light in red or orange crawled on its surface, only raw and ineffable heat, rippling, invisible in its fury.
Chain Breaker.
Ling Qi gagged as the felt the name sear into her mind, stripped of the niceties of language, of courtly characters and human understanding, like the molten shards of broken links. She darted into what remained of the mangrove forest, far from the titans tread, amid the burning, withering canopy and the wails of dying fairies, she hid herself down in the boiling waters without a splash, diving deep, deep into the muck that stubbornly tried to remain cool.
Legends shall die. Heroes shall die. History shall die. Songs shall die. Languages shall die. Petty little nations shall end.
The Crucible would devour them all, and let there be only one people, one DAWN, and one future. Tradition wields no swords, raises no shields, marshals no armies, fills no bellies, fulfills no lives. False comfort, aiding none.
Scream then, rage then, if you would not go quiet. The result is the same.
She felt the sword strike, cracks of shattering air beyond counting, and the earth bucked and heaved with their impact as a zither shrieked and stone cracked and rumbled. A firestorm of heat devoured the sky. And the sundered marsh alight, twisted the stuff of the dream veins of pulsing black rippling and spreading like fractal cracks in the world, as all went to dust.
And it threatened to devour her. The pressure was in her own veins, straining and throbbing with the pain of supporting such a monstrous existence, even tenuously. She could feel her qi, deep pool that it was, wicking away with frightening speed. It was only the black trickle of darkness flowing in from her little finger, from the thread there, that offset the drain.
She had thought long on the nature of power of what it meant, what wielding it was for.
She knew now that she had the core of it right in the beginning.
Power was change. Power was resisting change. All boiled down to that. Power was the exertion of your will upon the world, of making your beliefs reality, of making them matter.
The wisest philosopher's wisdom was nothing if it did not reach ears that could take up their cause. The most diligent ruler's reforms were nothing without the power to enforce them.
…That was what she had done. What her songs did. She sang, and sometimes, the world listened. Small as she was meager as her personal power was…
She had wrought this, without her, a titan, a Sovereign, would not be screaming.
Power did not have to come from within. Winter was not one voice, one single thing, but the movements of countless forces in unison wrought by the turning of the world, set in motion by voices long, long gone.
How many of those voices had been forgotten, mighty or not?
Ling Qi rose from the boiling muck like a flickering star as the firmament exploded under her feet, a thousand thousand roots and filaments of power reaching to strangle her, touching her, leaving welts and tears upon her skin before they burned to ash and seared her too in doing.
In the distance, the titan pursued and the temple fled, throwing up walls of warped reality and perception, twisting space and the stuff of dream in twisting labyrinths.
They crumbled as fast as they were made.
Ling Qi closed her eyes, shrouded herself in darkness and still saw light as bright as day through her eyelids. There was no safety here, only choices of danger.
She could feel the crawling on her skin, of Still Waters Deeping, in his pain and terror and hate. He saw her too for all that he could not afford to crush her with even a mote of full attention.
[ ] She would soar, one spark among the conflagration. Today she was a voice of fire and steel, better to embrace that.
[ ] She would skulk as was her wont, her nature. In the boiling mist and the burning labyrinth, she would be as a shadow, a voice singing unseen.
