“Wet the leaves and dry the land, and suckle the tit of the mother hen; bring me wood and bring me tears, and bring me fire, I’ll be clear: I haaaate dew!”
“And oh! The glow of our skin~ And oh! The fire within~ It burns and burns, it burns us all; I will clear our air of squall…”
Riki’s singing trailed off, and in his eyes did taunting satisfaction gleam.
“Finished?” Alcaeus asked, eliciting a scratchy, insouciant chuckle.
“Since you’re inquiring, I suppose my throat is awfully parched.” From where he was raised into the air, limbs lax and head lolling, now bloodlessly injured, Riki grinned. In reply, Alcaeus willed water trickle up from the ground to the man’s awaiting mouth; a winding river in miniature.
The Wanderer suckled as if it were marrow from bone, hacking and coughing in exaggeration as the stream ended. In the north afield of them, three oxen of enormous breadth carted a cage fit for one. Their eyes were bright with an intellect not their own, and their lowing cadenced musically; a workman’s tune roiled.
“Do you think they’ll thank you for sparing my dog life, oh beast from Heaven?” Riki snorted at the questioning tilt of Alcaeus’ mouth. “You’ve not ended my threat, boy! And to do so is beyond their power, for my wayward student suffers greatly. This prison of theirs is a facade; a petty trinket they’ll no more bring inside Lingyang than yourself.”
“They expect I’ll guard you,” Alcaeus observed, vaguely discontent with the idea’s potential truth.
“They’re counting on it!” Riki cackled. “You’ve shown yourself capable of subduing my grand personage. No mean feat is that.” The Wanderer spat derisively, birthing a cerulean flower the son of Nemea thought resembled the Kingmaker’s merlyns - then, like the onset of Alcaeus’ thunder, his voice grew loud, reverberating through the spear weighed against his captor’s shoulder.
“Why, I suspect they wish you were like the Revenants, who think nothing of killing that which lies in their way; those defiled souls who cannot help but echo their final moments! It would certainly make their lives easier: to have myself and all those Li Wei has wronged be silenced by your hands of storm and bronze! I am mad, oh beast from Heaven; mad enough to think nothing of atrocity. But I am no fool,” and there was a cruel edge to his speaking.
Alcaeus stilled, and with alacrity did he consider the Wanderer’s words; and the glint within his elder’s eyes spoke of secrets salient.
Though obvious in hindsight, Riki was not merely insulting him with potential lies and truths; he was plattering an undefined opportunity - out of amusement or curiosity, the son of Nemea could not claim either or neither with confidence. Still, he knew with goldenbright clarity the Wanderer spoke for true: ‘Maddened he may be, Riki is no fool. He would not have come here to falter fruitlessly.’ Not unless Lingyang’s estimation was wholly inaccurate and his own thinking misled: Ravenous, the Wanderer sought to satiate an inescapable hunger unnamed - his home, perhaps.
Alcaeus laid bare the essentials as he perceived them: Riki was kept from action by virtue of his presence. Presumably, they stalemated one another. He recognized the ancient elder was no less full of fight than before his stabbing, too. Thus, Lingyang’s southern wall was - relatively speaking - undefended. Verily, he could but will himself returned, but therein lay the issue’s thick; time between action and reaction. Movement.
Who was to say the wall’s glaring weakness was not already breached, or near enough time was against him - who but those far from Alcaeus’ location, hidden from all but one of his senses by fortifications many…
Riki grinned toothily at the son of Nemea.
“I see you see.” He craned his head, brows furrowing. “We see? Hmm…” he hummed, before mirth laden by vicious coughs hacked past his throat. Riki went on to speak of greater and lesser inanities. Alcaeus ignored him, for simpering through his mind were the whispers and shouts of unknowable masses, the loudest of them a thousand voices folded in on themselves; a parcel of dense panic etching ‘Betrayal’ into his psyche. Great was the focus he required, and dim were his findings.
“The Wolf Mother comes! Her horde encircles! Where is the beast from Heaven?! Where is the distorted youth?!”
“Rally, warriors of Lingyang! Life for life and death for death, let none of Dai Jing’s mutts find purchase here!”
“Hunt, my children. Fetch me the odious elder…”
Alcaeus’ fists clenched at the ancient strength and chill of the final voice; feminine silk wrapped by coldest steel, she sounded a conquering queen. Quickly, he closed himself off from the winds and reassessed Riki.
‘To what end are you here?’ he wondered and observed; and his patience was well served, for he considered a new tack - and of his kept presence, Alcaeus was conscious.
‘Mayhaps his hunger for Lingyang is coupled with a hedonism of the plainest sort?’ Riki’s eyes spoke of much to Alcaeus, whose mother often related information through matched gazes. He had searched for stray thoughts and hidden plots in meeting the man’s eyes, always delving past the naked truth, ignoring that which was laid bare. Always he had seen aimless delight: the Wanderer was elated. Senselessly. Guilessly.
‘We could well be but entertainment,’ Alcaeus thought. Riki’s lies and truths, and his displayed emotions, no matter their depths or realities, could well be fuel for an unquenchable fire of millennia. But then, ‘He is no fool, and there is a seeming purpose to his presence beside my stilled self; one aimed at Lingyang’s master. Perhaps all my thinking is true, perhaps none of it. Ultimately…’
“What percolates inside your skull, hmm?” Riki crooned.
Unamused, focus flickering towards the city, Alcaeus huffed, “That I should never trust a word of yours.”
Riki frowned from on high at the laconic reply, and even that was a trustless expression - and so Alcaeus mustered the necessary decisiveness to remain where he was, for awaying was liable to endanger both his captive’s circumstances and the wellbeing of Lingyang’s defenders. Indeed, he could impale Riki against the earth and will the man remain with enviable strength. But such a wager was one he could not bear attending. The Wanderer was no base page to be denied, absent the united enforcement of body, mind and spirit.
‘Whether or not this is the correct course, I will soon know,’ for better and worse.
The moments which followed were fraught with acquainted tension; an ethereal mud that scraped small hairs and turned the shining twinlight of the First Firmament’s skies into a glare from which there was no escape. It made to choke every breath with a heated thickness, souring the nose and ears. Riki frowned throughout and made no move to speak, contenting himself with quiet, perforated observation as those seconds amassed into minutes and the oxen drew nearer. His flowers swayed in the stilted breeze, mirroring the looseness of his limbs.
All the while, Alceaus listened for any hint of worsening circumstances in afar Lingyang.
Then came a howling from twenty and one thousand voices, rendering his attention elsewhere. Of the north’s east and west were they, fronts twice-birthed and great in their convergent freezing. The air crackled and the ground cracked as if whipped by mace and hammer, and the oxen were shivered unto sleeping by their passage. To Alcaeus they sang of imminent violence, preceding the arrival of slavering wolves; loping things of grey and silver fur, whose eyes were polished ice. They stood at half again Alcaeus’ height, and were no less nimble for their size.
With Riki held aloft over his right shoulder, the son of Nemea kneeled without worry or fear. There, he grabbed a fistful of earth. Upon standing, he flicked his fingers towards the encroaching wolves.
‘Thunder,’ he willed, remembering songs of swaddling. ‘Inevitable,’ he hummed, and the crumbled flecks careened betwixt his hand and a thousand some snouts. Of his targets, none attempted to avoid the assault - and none were accurately affected by the billowing force with which they were struck. Twenty and one thousand wolves sniffed simultaneously, ejecting bloodied bits of brain and earth from their nostrils, strides stricken not. Past the oxen they trampled flowers and grass.
Riki grumbled wordless amusement, unseen eyes alive with his opinions. Alcaeus paid him no mind in favour of inhaling deeply, tasting dead blood and riven logic on his tongue. His nose wrinkled at the chilled taste, as frost coated grass and flowers for near a league. Then he blew out and out and out past his lips-
The heated summer of desert day, sand and death, and salted decay; all the ruin of Dhule and Tenax wrought by his mother.
-birthing a sweltering doom of grand proportions, warping the air with his superheated intent. His subsequent inhalation was perhaps a quarter as cool as his next breath.
Ignorant of Alcaeus’ machinations, the wolves continued their charge, unfaltering before the rapid shifts in temperature. Their silence spoke of brutal, deathless confidence. Such was their undoing.
Whorling round and round, windsome will and naturality harmonized into consequence. Deep and sharp were the resounding thrums, and pillaring the artifice - like a goldenbright fist thrown against the fabric of the sky, a twister rose in sweeping fashion, stealing twenty and one thousand bodies into its gargantuan center with all the ease a parent hefts their babe. Raucous was its howling and burgeoning its reach. Lingyang’s embattled defenders bore witness to such immensity from leagues out, amidst their rushed response to the sudden appearance of Dai Jing’s horde.
Then, before Alcaeus could click his tongue and so cease his work, the winds dispersed ‘neath a matchless howl - and they did so violently, cleaving into the ground with starved hunger. Were his spear not firmly entrenched within Riki’s flesh, the ancient wanderer might have been ripped away, such was the ferocity of his thrashing limbs.
The source of the twister’s dying fell from on high, limbs four, maw raised towards the sky. Where once there were many now bristled one; and no silver or grey was there to be seen in the beast’s pelt; a dark blue had consumed such colours in their entirety. At a glance, Alcaeus’ quarry was of a size with Aetos Aurum.
‘But you are no child of a godbeast.’ Neither was it a deliverer of animalistic fears. Before it Alcaeus felt naught but confidence; and so he met polished ice with a curious smile known to boldest youths.
Unmoving from where they landed, the wolf exposed ivory fangs in response and craned their head. Silken words like steel and frost leapt from their tongue.
“Alcaeus of the farthest way, how fare thee on so fine a day?”
Outstretched to the side, Alcaeus’ left hand splayed wide. Then he gripped from the nothingness that which beat inside his breast: goldenbright strength sparked, spilling light between clenched fingers. Steady was his hold.
“I am well,” he said. “And you, Dai Jing?”
“Bettered by your asking and the knowledge we might resolve our respective difficulties with words alone – Wanderer,” she acknowledged belatedly. “You look hale as ever.”
The perforated elder grunted moodily at the possessed wolf. To Alcaeus he said, “Ignore this insipid child, oh beast from Heaven. We have greater subjects to ponder. Like your halfhearted commitment to the ideals of freedom.”
Dai Jing chuffed dismissively.
“Cease your prattling, if you would, Riki,” she intoned in turn, and it was so – for a time. Ice had sealed the Wanderer’s lips, but his churlishness was not so easily contained. Through his cheeks he chewed once, then twice (then thrice for good measure), and from his bloodless hurts he spoke, words prapling through the shoddy holes.
“‘Cease your prattling, Riki,’’’ he mocked, pitch high and sharp and doubled. The breeze was chilled for his saying so, and the twinlight of day dimmed as chunks of his flesh dispersed into the ground like so much rain.
Jaw tensing, eyes livened by repudiation, he then shouted, “I’ll cease when you give up your motherly delusions, Dai Jing! You forfeited any right to the child-”
The wolf howled, drowning out the rest of Riki’s words; and through the immensity of Dai Jing’s grief and rage, Alcaeus bolstered his hold over the Wanderer’s laughing form. Evidently, his captive had pulled taut the wrong string. Though, to what endings…
When the Wolf Mother next spoke, her voice was thawed unto crackling flame. No frost or steel was there to be found in her meter.
“Do not speak to me of forfeiture! Not when it was you who conspired with Li Wei to depose me from my home! Not when it was you who imprisoned me beneath icy seas and glacier bones! I am free now, and-”
“You are what you have always been!” Riki interjected, words swallowing every iota of sound not native to his throat. “Unmoored from truth! You sat atop wealth unmatched, and you did nothing. You were nothing. I traded you knowledge and security for ownership, just as Li Wei traded blood for blood. You live by dint of our largesse! It was not I who attacked my founding! It was-”
“You who said he would build a way to Heaven for all of his beloved disciples! Centuries of toil passed us by, Wanderer - and what did our sacrifice merit? Yet more! Mind and body, you sought to transgress against Heaven!”
“I sought that which I deserved!”
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Spitting flowers by the hundred, Riki split Dai Jing’s wolf into five parts with a clawed hand, shouting, “Homely protection and knowledge I gifted unto you thousands; you wretches to whom the teats of safety and comfort were forbade! In return…” he trailed off theatrically, sadness so artificially overwhelming Alcaeus might have choked were he less than himself.
“In return I asked only for aid. Were my aims and means truly so terrible, Dai Jing?”
In reply, the piecemeal wolf threw back its five part head and screamed sanguine saliva into the air; and the grief of afore was subsumed by a white hot rage known greatly by the betrayed - and the sound of it could only have come from the throat of Man, thought Alcaeus.
Riven by gold, blue eyes watched with unabashed interest as the possessed predator collapsed in on itself, fur and sinew singing through flesh and blood to form a mockery of womankind.
Taller than he by five heads, the puppet was skinless and clawed, with long hair like boiled skin, and too large eyes threatening to burst from her skull. Copper was her air and bulbous her veinage. Stepping unsteadily, she approached the aloft Riki with fists and jaw clenched.
“Bipedal bodies never were my speciality,” she muttered, more to herself than Riki or Alcaeus, shoulders jolting spastically with the admittance.
“And yet yours is a sight less offensive than Riki’s odour,” Alcaeus observed lamely in hopes of temporary placation, goldenbright strength receding beneath his skin. As his arm fell to his spear, Dai Jing’s reshaped puppet cocked its head, lips peeling back to reveal a mouth full of wintry fangs.
“But of course,” she said, narrowing her gaze at Riki, to whom she then answered, “Your aims and means were despicable then, Wanderer. And they are despicable still.” Voice dropping to an airy low, she whispered, “They’re why the Way is closed to you.”
Unaffected by the Wolf Mother’s judgement, strings of oily hair tossed about by chilled winds, Riki grinned down at Alcaeus and cackled, “She speaks as truly as I!”
The son of Nemea sighed, then breathed in through the nose-
Accounting for his conclusions and the Ravenous nature Riki alone possessed, he mulled on the revelations and potential of today - and the Nemean knew he would be here for cycles yet unseen if the immortals were allowed their own pacing.
-and out past the lips.
Seating himself amidst Riki’s flowers, Alcaeus locked his gaze with Dai Jing’s puppet and gestured to the space before him. “Won’t you join me and resolve our respective difficulties with words alone?”
Hung in defiance of physical laws, Riki barked his surprise for all of twinlit Lingyang to hear as the Wolf Mother descended, flecking blood against the frosted grass.
“My thanks,” the son of Nemea nodded, and for the briefest of moments he once again opened himself to the winds. In the fraught sliver of silence shared by Riki and Dai Jing, he heard little of import: but little was not nothing.
Whispers of worry and anticipation flickered against the shell of his ears, while shouted commands rang therein. They were voiced in ignorance of the connection between themselves and him. Then came a continuation of Riki’s song.
“-will clear our air of squall, and break the days of sodden ways! I’ll sing and dance into romance-”
Swift as sunshine, Alcaeus ceased his listening; for the sweet singing had sapped some manner of vitality from his person, fractional though such a quantity was. Whosoever the speaker was, their words had brimmed with conscious intent. To some they were meant for flagging. To all others - himself included - they hungered.
Centering himself in the present, Alcaeus addressed Dai Jing. “What would you have of me, Wolf Mother?”
“Of you?” she pondered. “Patience, perhaps, as I relate a story or two. From him,” she sneered, utmost derision dripping from her tone. “Silence.”
Alcaeus inclined his head, sharing, “Then you’ll find him thusly,” in the same moment his motion muffled the air about Riki.
Unless he chose to wield powers of disruptive potency, the ancient would find speaking with them an effort in futility. The son of Nemea gestured for Dai Jing to continue.
“My thanks,” she smiled, sharp teeth shrunken in the time since she last spoke. “Now,” the Wolf Mother breathed out, head craning, “Where to begin?”
Alcaeus kept quiet in the face of the rhetorical question. After a breathless beat of indecision, Dai Jing spoke:
Of love. Of loss. Of family.
~ X ~
“Five thousand summers past, I fell in love with a humble disciple of Riki…”
“Have you ever seen so beautiful a sight, Jing?”
“Wei…” and there was a much visited sadness in her tone as he brushed her hair. Staring into her reflection, her friend’s pleased mien hidden by disparate heights, Dai Jing sighed.
“You know my father will never allow a union between us. This privacy we share already stretches the bounds of proprietary. To ask as you do…”
“What if I were greater than he? What if I could build your demesne into a city proper; the beginnings of the dreamt empire he has long discussed with my master?”
“Then…” Jing huffed with resigned fondness. “I suppose he might very well be convinced in spite of his stubbornness. It would be many years before we could know one another’s touch, however. You are not yet of the fifth stage,” while her father was of the seventh.
Falling into a crouch to better meet her reflection’s gaze, Wei grinned. It was a boyish expression, but possessed of true conviction.
“Then I will wait and grow, and none will contest that I am worthy of your love as we soar to sights unseen.”
Jing melted into his touch, thinking all would be well, even as she wondered at his meaning.
“I believe he loved me, then. That his intentions lay with eternity. Alas, avarice claims even the best of us…”
By virtue of distance, the mountain Jing had called home for ninety-seven summers was isolated from the kingdoms of the Khalkha and Pribumi, Utari and Tilin. Its only visitors were riders of the Strong River and those rarefied westward travellers who sought riches purported to lie beyond the desert dangers of the Serpent Road. Villages dotted its towering expanse in their dozens, each fortified by strong walls Riki had erected as payment for hosting his sect. Many were its chickens.
It was homely and poor. It was beloved and strong. It was, truly. But no more. That mountain, Shorn Fang - named after her father’s father - was gone.
Jing looked upon earthen death with disbelieving eyes.
“How…” she breathed out, voice a strangled whisper in the dark of midwinter. Her vision reflected naught but moonlit rubble and imperiled lands, wounded as if struck by Heaven’s fury.
From the east she came with many hundreds in tow, having journeyed at the behest of her father. In the cart of her ennobled horse were treasured spears and armours, and elixirs whose potency would return an elder to their prime. Fine furs and silks drenched with blood not her own, hair a frizzled mess born of lightning and frost - she had longed for her bath and bed, for she had toiled against spirits of the sky and bandits of the earth, secure in the knowledge her father and Riki were a bulwark against unlikely dangers.
Now… “Xie Tai, with me,” she sounded with frosted worry.
Unlatching the cart, Jing leaned flush against the back of her befriended transport. Hooves a hard thunder, they flew across fields and streams and bridges, all the while the rider between them searched for signs of survival. She found none in the east and spied none on her flanks. But west - there, her qi washed over a hundred souls, her father’s weakest amongst them by dint of sickly wasting.
“Jing!” leapt into the air with the unfurling of her strength, booming worriedly from the voice of her love. “Jing!” repeated Wei, who was himself galloping across the earth atop a steed of metal and stone.
Jing saw him coated in dust and grime, blood and rime - he was a mess formerly embattled.
As one, the unmarried pair united on the southern edge of the rubble; many were the pieces towering overhead. Chill melting from the thick of her voice, Dai Jing leapt from her horse to grip Wei’s shoulders and ask, “What happened?! Shorn Fang is gone!”
Crouched at his front, boots planted against the neck of his molded steed, she was a ridiculous sight; and yet, her presentation did little to dissuade a serious response from Wei. Such were the times they lived in. So, to Jing he spoke of a stranger claiming to be from the Serpent Road; of grand riddles and grander questions, and wretched cruelties unveiled in the heart of her father’s abode. He spoke of demons.
Fine features haunted, Wei revealed tribulation in the form of Man, of judgement wrought by a single fist.
Astride of their absorbed pairing, Xie Tai circled his steed towards the west and rasped, “What was this stranger’s name, Wei?”
Without hesitation, the most stricken of their lot returned, “Song Jin, old friend. He bore a plain sabre and spoke with the grimy accent of drunken vagabonds…”
“My former lover lied, Alcaeus. He lied with the same ease I breathe, even as he celebrated in secret the unveiling of his master’s long sought goal.”
Subsequent moments crawled into minutes, sprinted into sunsets, and so the decades passed Jing by. She grew older, as most did under the constraints of time. So too did she grow stronger and wiser.
He father died miserable and alone, abhorred for his consortment with twisted aberrations of purest malice, Riki returned from his northerly affairs, and the ruin of Shorn Fang was repurposed as grand walls of perceived impenetrability were revealed amidst confrontations. Jing wed Wei, trading a stained inheritance for secret strengths and the promise her union and its bearings would be forever honoured by their elder and his students. It was a time of change.
“Then came my child; the center of our troubles: Li Chen.”
The dregs of night warred with day’s beginning, whose twining twinlight was strong and bold: beauteous blue brandished itself without reserve for the First Firmament’s enjoyment, illuminating golden acres and waters clear.
Looking out from the top of walls she’d inherited through a confluence of chance and justice, Li Jing hummed, echoing a familial warmth. Roads and buildings were momentarily reflected in the icy blue of her eyes, before they centered joyfully.
A doughy face gurgled, delicate fingers grasping, toothless mouth scrunched in consideration. They smelled of honey and grass, and Li Jing loved them so. Her mother had traded life for life in giving birth to her - that she had traded property marred by its origin for the same felt cheaply won; but righteous all the same, for her heart was full and her own child guaranteed a life well lived by oaths and gifts.
“Agah!” her babe cried, reaching for her nose.
In response, Jing leaned down, her smile irrepressible. Chen secured their target, triumph vibrating their swaddled body. Together they laughed, tittering and giggling and shrieking heartfelt affections.
Theirs was a bond Jing treasured with the whole of Jing’s body, mind and soul. And it was with such heartfelt emotion they played their simple game for another hour, by which time Chen’s blue eyes were blearied by sleep.
Cradling her babe, Jing wondered: ‘What will you make of the steps being forged by your father and his teacher?’
Would their thoughts be approving? Would their doubts be looming? Would they understand Wei’s long absences were not without reason? Would the path she’d lain allow proper perspective?
Jing hoped so. As warmth encompassed her back and brushed against Chen’s cheek, she hoped so dearly.
“Wei,” she greeted.
Her husband hummed. “I thought to-”
~ X ~
“-find you here.”
Dai Jing’s mouth of blood and too-sharp teeth was curved by an expectant smile as she ceased her interrupted telling. Her focus, like Riki’s and Alcaeus’ and the silent skies and flowers, was turned to the White-Wearer amidst them. Wrinkled and frail like dying oak, the elder suffused with Li Wei’s energies wore a peaceable countenance. In his hands he held a mirror of a size with his face - therein, an ordinary man in the prime of his life was reflected.
He wore a dress of stark grey, mien closed from emotion. Eyes like jade cut through the liminal distance, sharper than any sword. Dai Jing’s smile broadened.
“It’s been too long, Wei.”
“Has it?” returned Lingyang’s master, focus flickering to her company. “Riki, Alcaeus,” he acknowledged.
“But of course!” Dai Jing laughed, the sound of it grating against the ears. “Four millennia by my count. More than a million days of monotony waiting for a moment of weakness. I told you then, I would have my child returned.”
“You could wait a million more, and still success would elude you, Jing. Our babe is dead.”
“Ha!” Less than a bark and more than a chuckle, Dai Jing’s smile split her puppet’s face from ear to ear. “You lie so easily, Wei! I know as you that my resurrection succeeded!”
Li Wei’s tone turned tired. “They are not yours, Jing - no more than Lingyang is.”
“And yet you cling to them both, constrained.”
“And here I am,” Alcaeus drawled bitingly, feeling like Arkas at his most irritable, drawing the focus of all and sundry to himself with his breakage. “Confused. Lacking context. Wei, you interrupted your wife’s tale. I would have the fullness of it,” while they were civil still.
The mirrored man blinked slowly. Just the once. Then he agreed, “You should, yes. And you will have the truth instead of Jing’s convenient lie,” he promised. “But first-”
“Us,” Jing sniffed, dislodging flecks of crimson against the flowery ground.
“Yes, us,” Riki echoed. Lazing from around the White-Wearer’s back, he slunk into the Nemean’s awareness like oil through water, inexorably apparent. Madness thickened the air with shivers to match the racketing of his body.
For a beat of dull silence, Alcaeus ceased breathing in response to the elder’s appearance. The Wanderer had freed himself – was currently unencumbered by injury or spearhead, if ever he had been captured at all. And in his hands, buried inside the White-Bearer’s heart so fiercely it pierced through his chest, a dagger’s tip glinted. Laughing lowly, fury fraying into utmost satisfaction, he took hold of Li Wei’s reflection and spoke into the ear of his freshly made corpse.
“I have waited ages for this moment,” he whispered, rictus smile mirrored by Dai Jing as the Lord of the West’s image rippled and cracked, splintering into uncountable shards and particles, through which a riven truth was refracted: Li Wei had been dealt a grievous blow. Deftly, he kept the White-Wearer’s body from collapsing, unmoored arm wrapped around the dead man’s chest. Tears in his eyes, Riki cackled. Then he ripped, tearing the corpse in half with blade and hand, an exultant cry jubilating from his mouth. His dagger; a jagged thing of plain make whispering of deepest cruelties to Alcaeus, rent the air unto a pained screaming, bared and bloodied.
Throughout, overpowering the scene in scale and volume, the earth shuddered, a tautly pulled drum struck by six thousand years of love and loss. The winds chorused culmination and sin, echoing their tale, whorling as qi bloomed, blinking between Lingyang and the sky, scouring darkness from the First Firmament’s totality with fury to match a dying star. The clarion note of the Tiger Lord’s life sang through a trillion hearts, foreign and native.
It was an ending unworthy, and a beginning unexpected.
Stood before triumphant elders, Alcaeus bore witness, caught betwixt oaths and sense, feeling for true the youth he was. Surprise gripped his limbs, and a question his mind. Which was the road he was to take? Li Wei was owed – the son of Nemea had chosen to fulfill promises made. But Li Wei was-
Laughter burbled from worried lips, and Alcaeus let surge his fullness at the foolish thoughts filling his head.
‘Why,’ he wondered, ‘do I question that which is right?’ Was he feckless, absent the grace and glory of his friends? Was he not a son of Nemea, heir to storms immortal? Was he not a rebel of conscious intent, defiant in the face of his mother and the histories writ by She-Who-Reigns?
Rhium and its denizens awaited, yes. But Rhium and its denizens would remain long after he lost the will to live. His loved ones were thriving, doubtlessly. There was no reason for hesitation: Lingyang had lost its greatest protector by dint of his foolishness. There was a child endangered by Dai Jing’s potential delusion – unassociated children and innocents, too.
In Alcaeus’ heart, kindly and loving, a warmth not his own beat thrice and thrice again. In his hands, Zhiyuan’s gifted spear thrummed. Alcaeus breathed. In-
Dispensing with trivialities, holding tight to truth, he let go of his reservations.
-and out.
Thusly he spoke: “Hold.”
Thusly he commanded: “Cease.”
~