The upper palace wasn't a quiet place, but compared to the unending roaring noise of the lower palace, it was almost serene. The whipping wind that howled through the naturally formed entry arches of the cavernous hall and the trickle of falling waters down the sculpture-like limestone formations, which tumbled like tapestries of stone down the walls, were there own unending melody. It was much closer to the halls of the Patriarch.
Master of the South wind, ruler of the heavenly currents. She knew those golden coils hovered now well in the south, but she could see the shadow of his kin, swimming through the clouds bellow, flashing gold as they crested from the misty sea below the palace. She could feel the sizzle of electricity suffusing every mote of air up here, tingling on her skin and setting her piercings aglow with blue and white sparks. Sparks danced on her fingertips, crawling down the strings of her lute as she plucked a few meaningless testing notes.
The boom of thunder and the crack of the lightning bolt erupting, striking her back and scattering into a dozen crawling streams of static, drunk in by the metal threaded through her body. "Letting you're hair down a little, Lady Dianmu?"
Her sometimes mentor smiled as her bare feet touched the stone some ways behind her, sliding from the cloud litter which she rode among the lower palace. The sharp, searing scent of lightning only grew. The fairies bearing the cloud on their backs shrieked and giggled as electric strands tore them and the cloud alike apart into drifting motes of qi.
The Dianmu towered, standing at her full height, the mirror held in the crook of her arm a blinding pane of light. She could recognize the feeling of the spirit loosening the iron restraint she held herself with. Another bolt of lightning struck Yu-... Ling Nuan as she turned, scattering in a flickering wave of sparks that danced down the neck of her instrument.
It wasn't hostility or even a test. Lightning wanted to strike. It wanted to move. It wanted to flow, to be wherever it was not.
Yeah, there was a reason she took to cultivating heavenly qi so well. But a person couldn't be all lightning. Even the Lady Dianmu wasn't.
Ling Nuan hadn't been fried in a torrent of carefree power after all.
"It is good to stretch from time to time," the towering avatar of storms said cheerfully, blue white light spilled down her back in a crackling veil and power washed from her lips. Sparks crawled across the floor in a cresting wave as the lightning snapped out striking around her, and through her again and again. She didn't let it harm her, diverting and splitting the power until it was merely a comfortable sizzle in her nerves and channels. She'd gotten past this level of training… a long time ago.
"You are troubled. Shall we dance then?"
Yu Nuan, Ling Nuan, took a deep breath nodding once. She'd known things were going to run hot when she'd gotten up here and seen it clear of the Lady's attendants.
She slid her leading foot out and dragged her fingers down along the strings, filling the air with a harsh chord. The Dianmu merely smiled, and raised her mirror, holding it out before her.
When you came apart into lightning, everything was so harshly crisp. That was the only way she could describe it. She came apart, and the world became a series of sharp and jagged lines, High charge and low charge, everything in the world rendered down to two states.
Pure. Exhilarating.
Fucking dangerous.
She crashed forward into the spiraling convergence of lines that she knew was the center of the Dianmu's mirror. Instantly felt her self try to splinter, to run off down a thousand different channels toward a thousand different storms, to spiral off and break apart, discharging into every one of the storms under the goddess' power.
Being lightning was so much easier than being human.
It wasn't decompiling that was the hard part, it was putting yourself back together again. If she broke apart like that now, with the cultivation of a third realm, she would be as good as dead.
She shot back out of the mirror, catching and channeling her will toward the single line among hundreds that went out instead of in.
She felt her feet skidding across wet stone, sparking and popping before she could even fully form her fingers again.
"The death in the South. Your war. It uncenters you. You are happy, but you feel you should not be," the Dianmu said, tilting her head, adjusting her mirror in her hands, angling it upwards. The stone at her feet was glowing cherry red, slowly deforming under the weight of her footsteps as she leisurely turned. It made it clear that the prints all around the hall were not carvings or sculptures.
"Three circuits."
Ling Nuan, flicked her fingers across the strings, as she skidded in an arc down the wall she had bounced into.
The world simplified, and so did she.
That was the point of the exercise, now that she'd mastered the transformation. Clearing the head, stripping away ambiguity in thought.
She made the circuits, twisting and bouncing through the jagged course the Dianmu set through the channels within the mirror, and this time, barely caught herself on one of the exit arches, stopping herself from shooting off into the sky.
"Rude."
"You should not have had trouble with only that," The Dianmu said.
Ling Nuan grunted, flipping down onto the floor of the hall. She was right. "What right do I have to be happy, to come back and be welcomed by a bunch of people I barely know, get treated like…"
Like she was wanted. She'd known every time she met her aunt's eyes that first day in her new home that she was a 'nuisance'.
Her old man had been an idiot running off to some frontier settlement with some caravan girl, and look where it'd got him. And he'd even left a burden on her, with this ragged surly little girl on her doorstep.
"...I don't deserve it, not when there's so many not coming home. Not when…"
Not when she was making sure there weren't homes to come back to either.
Burning pastures, howling winds, screaming animals and people alike. Wood and brick or hide and grass, the smell of burning wasn't that different.
War of Beasts huh?
Even now, she didn't think she was wrong. Those chords still rang clear in her ears, even if she'd understood why less well.
The Clouds came to kill, and the land chased them back into the sky for revenge, and on and on it went, circling like Qiu chasing his own tail.
…And it'd never stop, because that was just how people were.
"Few receive what they deserve," the Dianmu observed. "Men slaying men is not my province. I am only the eye of the storm, the gaze that guides heaven's wrath, that it strikes only those intended and no other, as lain down in the ordering of seasons. But I do know this. Irresolute wills cannot guide the sparks of heaven."
"Deserve is meaningless. You have what you have. Will you hold it, or will you scatter?"
