"Keep us steady little brother. You got us here, now let me take the next step," Ling Qi said. "Keep a holding circle out here."
Since the end of the summit, she had found herself able to speak, hear and understand without words. In truth in the weeks following her recovery, she had found it distracting. There were always voices whispering for her attention, the little voices of sun and wind and grass and stone. The voices of homes and tools, and countless others too. Most were not even whispers really, just faint impressions of proto spirits, less than even the least coherent fairy.
But she'd soon pushed that odd sensation to the back of her mind. But now, it did leave her with a low awareness of everything and everyone which could possibly hear her, could understand her. That was how she had chosen their first singing locations with Hanyi, how she had chosen the site which had been roped off for the shrine to winters in Shenglu, how she had determined the right place to row out to in Snowblossom lake.
And she could feel the presence of the shade of Kohatu too. It was a vast and closed off thing, like a dense network of roots whose trunks had long since been felled, closed off and buried, operating on only the lowest and most automatic of processes.
Her ears were closed and her voice was withered with silence, burrowing mindlessly onward, driven only by the stubborn urge to not allow herself to become another still, forgotten fossil, buried under mountains of ignorance.
The core of this shade was bitter, dogged spite, and for a moment, Ling Qi hesitated to speak, whatever Kohatu had been, whatever she was to Zhengui, did she truly wish to expose him to this particular facet of the old beast?
She looked above and below, to Zhen and Gui as his flames guttered and reoriented to fly them in a slow circle. She had already asked him. He had told her he wanted to be here, to do this. He had given her answer. She had no right to deny him now, not without twisting herself inside out to weave a justification from her own fear.
Ling Qi drew her strength inward, like a singer preparing to launch into a long aria, leaving her skin tingling with the dissolving press of dream qi as she focused all of her power, her qi, her determination down into her voice.
[AUDIENCE]
The Layered Labyrinth rippled, the dusty miasma of ignorance and silence in the air blew away, countless tons of broken material tumbled down from the shaking sides of the canyon. Ling Qi felt a tingling, throbbing pain in her temples, akin to a throat strained by screaming.
[HERE]
[LISTEN]
[KIN]
Her still burnt dantian twinged, and mist leaked from under her fingernails. Her silhouette wavered, and Ling Qi coughed a cloud of burning smoke as she hurriedly reinforced the qi containing the Crucible embers still smoldering in her core.
But digging claws slowed, and a mountainous head twitched and rose, shadowed by whirling dust. She felt a pressure across the distance, even before she could see the sharpening of intelligence in dull eyes and a half sleeping mind.
She could not call that pressure a response really, there were no words, nor even really concepts. No welcome, nor malice. There was only the cold weight of reptilian observation. Ling Qi looked into vast black eyes across the gulf between them and swallowed.
"Take us in little brother," Ling Qi said quietly.
"Is Big Sister sure?" Zhen asked, uncharacteristically hesitant.
She was. She could never be certain a higher realm could not hide their intentions from her sight but…. The rampant vigorous growth at the core of the beast was not something that inspired thoughts of veils and lies.
"I am," Ling Qi said. "C'mon, lets go meet your…"
She trailed off, her tongue rebelled at forming the word in her thoughts.
"...Let's meet Kohatu. That's what the tortoise who made your egg from her core called her."
"Kohatu," Gui rumbled thoughtfully. His flames roared, and they left their circling trajectory, soaring toward the titanic lizard waiting for them at the end of the ruined canyon.
A titan that loomed more with every passing second. The corpse in the cave had not even been a fraction of this size. But then the physical dimensions of a spirit beast could always be so deceptive. Stone cracked and rumbled as burrowing claws dragged Kohatu around to face them, the lazy whip of a tail collapsing a city's worth of debris.
They arrived shortly directly under those deep black eyes, a mere twenty or thirty meters before her lowered snout.
"Who. Calls?"
Her voice was a collapsing mountain and the buzz of a million insects, and Zhengui's soaring form wobbled unsteadily in the air beneath it. It was an unsteady thing, an instrument left to clog with dust and grime.
"I…" Ling Qi began
Black eyes narrowed, focused in, really seeing her. Something dark and hateful stirred. "ARGeeeeent…"
The wind of the exhalation ripped at her hair and robes, made her teeter back in her seat.
"No. You listen. No more thoughtless swiping, Kohatu!"
Zhengui didn't use personal names, Ling Qi thought dizzily.
The titan lizard paused, the rising oily darkness of hate rising behind her eyes stuttering to a halt.
"Ata…mai….? No… noT… WHo dAres…"
Confusion, but underlaid by something so much softer. But it didn't last, in the span of a sentence it began to change shifting back to suspicion and fury.
"I, Zhen do not know that name," her little brother shouted into the wind of the old beasts words. "This young King is Zhengui! He came here seeking the one whose core became his egg, Kohatu, whose real name he cannot see!"
Ling Qi pushed her own will behind his voice, to amplify, to carry, to reach beyond the choking dust and tar which coated every inch of the dead echo towering over them.
And she prepared even more to forcibly drag them both out of the dream with their skins intact. She was not the same girl who had been trapped by Madam Grey, and Kohatu's shade did not wield dream like the old fox had either.
Building rage collapsed back into confusion and uncertainty. An immense snout lowered, and long tongue overgrown with moss and branching floral vines flicked out, tasting, testing. Finding something.
"R…e… A….l"
"Gui is real, and so is Big Sister, who brought him here. Hear and listen!" her little brother.
The beast's eyes were level with them now, contemplating. "I. HeAr. Kin of shell and soul. How…"
Growing more coherent, Ling Qi could feel the dense, crushing weight of centuries burrowing sloughing off. Looking now with Kohatu still, she could see the swathes of graying scale amid verdant green, the way half of her digging claws were chalky cracked and broken things, the growing cataracts in eyes and spirit alike.
The fight against becoming another fossil… it was a losing one. Of course it was. Even the verdant roaring green which blazed beneath the cloying dust was still only a shade and echo of a living beast.
"I do not know how the one you called Atamai accomplished this," Ling Qi spoke up. She had felt in the contours of that name the shape of the Volcanic Tyrant Tortoise chained and bound under the Outer Sect Mountain. The echo of him in Kohatu's thoughts was a less miserable and trapped thing, but it resonated with the sights in her memory all the same. "But… I had discovered one of your cores, and he chose to give of himself when I spoke to him, creating the egg which would hatch my brother here."
"Big Sister has taken much care and raised me well. It was she who found you here too," Zhen spoke.
"ArgENt… a fading scent, but it cliiiiings all the same. Why would hE do tHis," Kohatu rumbled, some of the anger flaring, boiling in the core of the shade's spirit.
"I was once a member of the Argent Peak Sect," Ling Qi admitted carefully. "But I do not know what tresspasses were committed against you. Atamai…. He thought me worthy to 'at least take something of us away from this place'."
It was a little manipulative, continuing to use that name she had just yearned. But she could see the way its every use becalmed and stabilized the shade, as if reinforcing this present moment against the endless centuries of burrowing.
Zhen craned his body down to look at her thoughtfully.
"Big Sister has taken us away from the Dragon Court, Gui now rules a land of hills and chilly streams. It is strange and uncomfy sometimes, but Gui likes it very much, and Miss Snowblossom is kind."
"I, Zhen rule. Gui toils."
"Not now boorish Zhen."
"A. Land. Your Own. No ArGeeEent." Kohatu's whole immense form swayed slightly, like one trying to shake themself to stay awake. "Good… that is…. Good. I do not. unDerstAnd, but Atamai was the wIser. Better judge, he saw what we did not wiSh to sEe."
"Gui has not known him, but if he chose Big Sister, then he is wise," Gui said quietly. Her heart twinged a little. She had never really spoken to him of the tortoise much either, because why would she, it was only a single conversation, shared beneath the mountain.
She wondered if that had not been a mistake, born out of her own possessiveness. Was it just another manifestation of the greedy girl who had felt a twinge of jealousy for Meizhen's attention even after rejecting her interest?
No. No it was not. She had refused that feeling too. And she had brought Zhengui here of her own will, contemplated this conversation and chosen to face it anyway. Self recrimination could go too far too, and become a lie just as swiftly as overburdened pride.
"Why. Then. Do you come here, leave your garden, for this place of dust and despaiR?" Kohatu asked.
"...To know you, Gui thinks," her little brother said thoughtfully. "Isn't that right Big Sister?"
"Yes, he deserves that chance. And… there is more I would know. The province and the world is in flux I think, I want to know more of what built the landscape upon which I stand."
Clear and unrevised answers were best, though she was not fool enough to think any source free of bias.
Black, reptilian eyes unfocused, and thin slivers of verdant green split them, pupils reemerging from blind black spite, if only for a short time.
"I. See. This feeling. So strange. I do. Not. RemEmber it… Ask. then. The fog. It retreats, with yOur words."
Ling Qi let out a breath, and reached down, patting Zhengui on the head. She did not know what to expect, but… the conversation was open now.
Her little Little Brother leaned into her touch.
And what did he ask?
[ ] Where had Kohatu and Atamai come from?
[ ] How had Kohatu and Atamai come to be beneath the mountain?
