The moment I stepped into my sister’s room, I knew it would be the day I finally got caught. Tiny spirits crept around the room and the wind was blowing a fell omen through her window. She had been dead for nearly a year now, but I didn’t feel a fragment of her presence in this place. No ancient dust picked up when I entered and the gust had felled none of her keepsakes. My parents had enshrined this place, and every day they worked to keep it pristine.

As if it would bring her back. As if she would want it to be like this if she came back. I didn’t harbor the same beliefs as my parents so I would be a bit more indelicate here.

I never hated my sister. She was too perfect for anyone to hate. I hated what my parents had done with her memory. In our poverty where I shared a room with my brother and my grandmother was forced to make a hovel out of our living room, the largest room in our shanty of a house was remodeled into a pristine perversion of her life. It was cleaner than she ever kept it and Incense sticks sprouting around the room masked the smell of sweat and grief baked in the floorboards from when she was alive. There should be papers strewn everywhere, dents in the wood from when she practiced late into the night and early into the dawn. There should be frustration, anger, glory, and blood on every surface and instead, there was just a coat of varnish covering painfully refurbished furniture.

I toppled an inkwell as I passed her desk. It was dry, so her entrance exam results stayed unblemished. The day those papers were delivered was the happiest in our family. Who would have thought just days later we would be mourning?

I shouldn’t be here. What I was doing perverted my sister’s memory more than my parents did. If I was caught…well, I definitely shouldn’t get caught.

“Ouch.” “Damn it.” My hands went to my mouth and I slid behind the door as quickly as my short yelp. My heart beat like a war drum as I waited for no one to answer my cry. No one was home. If someone was then I wouldn’t be here.

I looked down with a glare, a crab so translucent it could have been made of wind waved back at me.

Spirits. I was cursed with them. Unfortunately, it was no special power like my sister had. Everyone could see spirits but only I was unignored by them. I kicked the thing into the wooden wall on the side and it burst into vapor. It would reform in a few minutes and be back with a vengeance but I would be done by then. My only saving grace with my affinity for the things was I could hurt them as much as they could hurt me.

The pinch did break me out of my stupor. It reminded me that I was on a mission. Well, “mission” was a weird way to put it. To be honest, I had no reason to be here. No reason to dig through my sister's closet and pull out a box of brushes, oils, and paint. No reason to sit in front of a mirror and recreate my sister’s makeup.

If my mother caught me doing this, she’d kill me. I picked up one of the largest brushes and tried to remember which of the little vials was the same color as my sister’s painted face during her entrance exam. It was the only time she had ever done it and this box was purchased solely for that moment. Over a few attempts, I’d narrowed the possibility down to a mixture of two heavy matte paints. Put together with a lavish amount of concealer for my eye bags, I would sort of almost look like she did on that day. It was weird how close I wanted to get this.

It’s not like I liked doing this. I was just curious after a stray comment. My uncle probably hadn’t meant much when he said I could have been my sister’s identical twin. It was just a joke at dinner, everyone laughed. They loved to laugh at my weird hobbies. Painting, and working in my Grandmother’s garden, I was the exact opposite of my brother. Never mind that he constantly got into fights and fought with my father and uncle, I just wasn’t measuring up to the man he was becoming. My family teased me like there was something weird with being more like my twin sister than my half-brother.

But what was so wrong with that? I mean, my sister was the only cultivator in our family, in the village even. Weak as she was, she could have entered the Emperor’s legions and brought more glory and fame and wealth to our family than any of us could imagine. My brother’s broad frame and musculature weren’t worth a damn in a spar against her, so what was wrong with me having slimmer features than most? What was wrong with…

“Lin? We’re home early. Help us get the seed off the wagon.”

My mom’s voice came like a rock through my skull. I looked down at the mirror and at my heavily dressed-up face. Doey eyes, pale skin, somehow I had managed to put on blush and lipstick by instinct. I couldn’t wipe this all off, it was drying.

“Lin?”

My mom’s footsteps grew louder as she turned into the hallway. Any moment now she would notice the open door of the room. Sure it could be wind. My father had never gotten around to fixing the door hinge so it clanged regularly through the night, but my mom had a sixth sense for these things. She’d come in with her weird motherly clairvoyance. She’d come in and see. I needed to hide.

Behind the Door? No, she’d notice the toppled inkblot and go to the desk. She’d see me hiding in an instant. Closet? No. I made a mess of it digging out my sister’s makeup and all of her trophies were in there. There was too high a chance my mom would poke in to reminisce.

“Lin! Where is that damn boy?”

The bed. My only option was to hide under the bed. I shimmied into that cramped space with my sister’s makeup box in hand. Fitting both of us in there was no easy feat but I managed it as my mom’s sandals broke into view.

“Lyn?”

Mom stood in the center of the room and called out my sister’s name. She didn’t move, she was probably staring out the billowing window in a trance. Waiting. They say the remnants of cultivators return to their families after they perish in babble. My mother had been waiting for Lyn to come home for months. She never did.

How could she when she killed herself?

My mom started moving again after an eternity of playing sentry.

“Lin!” she shouted at the top of her home. I wish I had friends. At least then she would assume I had simply gone to visit them, but she knew I was home, I didn’t have anywhere else to be. It’s not like I was that welcome in the village anyway.

A familiar pinch clamped down on my hand. I practically bit my tongue just as hard. The damn crab was back and it wanted revenge. It squeezed and I bit down in pain. The spirit’s claws were as big as my own hand, and it had the strength to pinch down harder than even I could manage. In moments like this, I wished I was like everyone else. Those claws would just fade through my brother’s flesh, what did my past self do to the Emperor to deserve being bullied by spirits of all things?

My mother shrieked. “Shoo. Shoo you stupid thing.”

Damn it, she saw it. Why did it have to come back so solid?

“Get out of here.” My mother’s foot passed right through the spirit as she kicked it. She couldn’t hurt it, could barely influence it at all except for some light buffeting. As long as she didn’t have fire…

“Okay, fine. Get a whiff of this, you nuisance .”

Incense. My mother lit one of the incense sticks placed throughout her room. Spirits hated fire, even if it was just smoke and ash. She’d get rid of the spirit, but if she looked down to see why the spirit was down here in the first place…

I had to risk it. I balled up my fist and punched the spirit in its face. The spirit clattered back like a fallen plate, shooting out of the room and crashing against the wall, vaporizing instantly. I had forgotten that the thing had no real mass and even a punch from me would send anything flying.

“What on earth?”

My mom’s hand dropped to the floor. Then her head.

“Lin!”

I was dead.

—

The worst part about my dad seeing me in my sister’s makeup was his complete lack of surprise. A hardened man, once a palace guard for some haughty noble from the mainland, he had the tired look of a soldier who had seen everything that there was to flinch at and decided that shirking away wasn’t worth the effort.

I could tell he disapproved but not a shred of that disappointment crossed my father’s face. His expectations of me were just that low. Instead, he sat back in his recliner, hairy arms crossed, and eyes closed as my mother tore us both a new one.

That was the downside of having a child out of wedlock. My mother could yell and curse for hours on end but one word out of my father and the look he would receive could silence a cultivator.

Though I didn’t bet that he couldn’t bail me out of this situation if he tried.

“This is your fault you know. If you treated Lin like your other son, maybe he wouldn’t be in his sister’s things all the time.”

“This was the only time,” I chanced the lie and my mother looked like she would immolate me when she turned.

Luckily, my brother stepped in through the front door before my mother could bite my head off.

“Sen,” my mother beamed with a willful forgetfulness. My brother paused halfway through the door at his name, a great burden was lashed over his shoulders and out of frame. Only a foot and half a torso were in the house and he looked like he wanted the rest of him to collapse inside the house. He gave my mother an annoyed look at the sudden call, but before he could get a word out, he saw me.

We couldn’t have been more different. My brother’s chiseled jaw dropped with a look and I could see the beginnings of a smile form on his high cheekbones. My grandmother stole the first laugh though.

The nimble woman swept from outside a basket of herbs tied around her back. She caught me immediately and her sudden laughter was the permission my normally stoic brother needed to let loose.

Whatever sack he was dragging in from outside crashed as he slapped his knee in jolly, my grandmother went as far as collapsing on his back only pausing in laughter long enough to refill her mirth on my looks.

“It’s not that funny.”

“Lin it’s hilarious,” my grandmother said through hiccups. My grandmother was the type of widow who managed to find extreme joy in everything as if life after the death of her husband was so novel that she couldn’t help but behave like a child.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The laughter didn’t stop until a smirk broke across my father’s face. Then my mother suddenly had things to say.

“Stop it. Stop it you two and especially you, Wei,” she said glaring at my father who faked a cough and resumed his stern fatherly mask. “This is your fault, Jinnan. You’re always teaching the boy about herbs and keeping him from working the fields with his brother. Look at him.” My mother gripped my hand and spun it like a wet noodle. “Look at how scrawny he is. Stop laughing. This is your fault too Sen.”

“My fault?” My brother didn’t even look at me as if he were remarking about some lame rooster in the coop.

“Yes. Your fault. You should be taking him places. Introducing him to your friends’ siblings. Instead, he’s cooped up in the house doing heaven knows what.”

“That’s not my fault. Whenever I check on him, he’s in his room painting or carving or something.”

“Well, he needs to start doing fieldwork. He’s nearly fourteen now.”

“Mom,” my brother droned. I was surprised to see him actually stand up for me. We didn’t talk or spend time together even after my sister’s death. I thought he was pretending I didn’t exist. Turns out he was actually looking out for me. “The village loves his paintings and his statues. That’s all Lady Yu talks about whenever I bring her deliveries.”

“Well if he’s that good at painting then it’s time for him to broaden his skillset.” My mom said, placing a hand on my father’s chair, somehow borrowing the authority of a man she just spent an hour diminishing. She waved a finger at me with her other hand. “And that doesn’t mean makeup practice, young man.” My mother grabbed my hair in a clump and shoved me toward my brother.

“Here,” she said as if tossing him a wet rag, “take him to your uncle. You two go help the mayor with whatever’s got him pulling his hair out.”

“Now?” My brother groaned. “We just got back.”

“It’s fine dear,” my grandmother said not at all saving my brother, “I’ll unload the things. You spend some time with your brother. Oh that reminds me,” my grandmother dug into her pockets, patted down her robes, and frowned. “I had that tincture somewhere. Xiao Yu is going to be so angry if I’ve lost it.”

“I know where it is Nan. You left it by the cauldron last night.” My mother trounced off to the kitchen. As she rounded the corner, my grandmother elbowed me and shoved a red bean bun in my arms when I turned. She held a finger to her lips. My father and brother seemed to find more interesting things than that bun to marvel at in our small living room. I hid the bun in my spacial ring as my mother returned with a little glass vial in hand.

“Here,” she said, handing it to me. “Give this to Lady Yu while you two are off doing errands.”

I groaned but put the tincture away in my special ring. “Could I at least wash this makeup off before going outside?”

The way my mother frowned in response you would have thought I asked her if she wanted an elixir that make her ten years older. “No.” She crossed her arms and stared me down like a cockroach. “You’re going to parade around the village with that absurd look on your face and maybe some of the looks you get in return will convince you to spend more time resembling the men of this household.”

She might as well have thrown me off the edge of the Floating Isles. It would be an easier sentence than walking around the village like this. I already didn’t fit in with the rest of our small community. I managed to blend in among the masses while school was in session, but outside of class, I was a weird freak. I sucked at fighting, I had no stamina, and I drew pictures all day. Granted some of the girls liked that about me but the other guys saw my minute popularity and held it against me.

I shivered. If BaoBao saw me in makeup, oh the next few seasons would be hell. He wouldn’t let me live that down. He might not even let me live.

“Mom. Please. I’m sorry, okay?” I started panicking. I looked through the open door at the bustling village downhill. It was early noon and everyone would be outside. “I don’t know what came over me. The spirits must have driven me crazy.” It suddenly dawned on me that there would be actual consequences for what I did. I looked at each of my family members, all turning away from their matriarch as it probably dawned on them exactly what she was going to make me do.

“Mom, if I go out there looking like this then it’ll be all anyone will remember about me. I’ll be a laughingstock.”

My mother nodded. She nodded! “Good. Maybe it’ll drive you to work hard to redeem yourself in everyone’s eyes.”

“But Mom-”

“Lin!” My mom’s earlier rage rekindled. I thought with a familial laugh it would have died down but it was burgeoning all this time. “I should lash you up for invading your sister’s room, disrespecting her things.”

“She’s dead, Mom. Who the hell am I disrespecting?”

The slap across my face didn’t register until I hit the floor. Then the fire burned across my cheek down even to my neck. The aftershock made me stumble and fall flat again. My legs suddenly felt like they weren’t designed for land.

“Shiyin stop this.” The first angry words I heard from my father came to me from behind as my grandmother tried to help me up.

“Do you have something to say, Li Wei?” My mother rarely used my father’s full name like that. When she did so, it meant there would be a fight. Both of them were fire. My mother was an ever-burning kiln, ready to engulf the household. My father was the dormant volcano where we laid the foundations.

I saw my father on his feet without his cane and witnessed the pain and anger in his eyes. The fear of what might happen muted his words for me. “Out.” A small command that could have been directed at anyone, but my grandmother and brother took it for themselves. The stun of the first time my mother had hit me in years kept my feet glued to the floor. “Take your brother and get out!” The eventual shout of his finally put energy in my legs. None of it was needed as my brother’s arms wrapped around my chest and dragged me out of the house.

—

My grandmother decided to take the back entrance into her garden but not before she handed me another bun and some healing salve for good measure. My brother wanted to be as far away from the house as I did, so we made good time for my uncle’s manor.

Alone together, my brother didn’t laugh. He barely acknowledged my existence. Every once in a while he would look down in a brief panic to make sure he didn’t forget me and smile without saying a word. He was too busy with his own thoughts to teach me whatever my mom expected he would.

I couldn’t really fault him for that. My brother was the type of man to take on the whole world on his shoulders. When my father’s leg had really started failing years ago, he took it upon himself to complete our planting and harvest without even my grandmother’s help. Some of my earliest memories were waking up to him already collapsed in the fields and my sister turning the training grounds into the mud with her sweat. They both woke hours before me or maybe never slept in the first place, too busy chasing their goals while I never had much of an idea of what I would do with my life.

I lived under too many shadows to see very far.

My brother seemed to be dead set on becoming the next mayor. He thought of it as his birthright given that our father should have been the mayor if only he had decided not to chase his own dreams on the mainland but to cultivate his family. It was unfair in my brother’s eyes that his layabout of a cousin would be the one to inherit the position, and he planned on challenging our cousin and uncle for the job.

He’d probably get it too. Everyone loved him more than Cousin Lao. Even Lao’s father.

Uncle’s place was a prominent pagoda at the edge of the village where you could oversee everything from his bedroom window. It was built like a citadel, with walls encircling five buildings. His home in the back center at the highest peak, with a warehouse and grain storage at its left, and a library and a community center on its right. We found him in the community center bouncing some children on his knee while signing some papers. He preened when he saw us in, then he got a look at me.

I thought he would laugh at my face. I did not expect him to cry.

“Lyn?” The sorrow dribbling off those lips made me bury my face in my brother’s side. I wasn’t Lyn. I never would be.

My uncle wasn’t in a position where he could wear emotions on his sleeve for long. A mini eternity passed as he looked at me, but eventually, he forced a pained smile on his face. It was hard to buy. Even the child he was bouncing on his knee earlier slid off as my uncle’s fake chuckle collapsed in his joke. “Is this a joke?” He looked between my brother and me with red eyes, and I didn’t have any words for him.

“Yeah. A really screwed up joke, but just that.” My brother said in the bluntest way possible. “Mom was hoping he’d learn his lesson by making him waltz around the town in this getup. It’s not a good idea. It’s cruel. People liked Lyn. They should have to lose her again.” My brother hung the implication that people didn’t like me in the air. “Anyway, she wanted to know if you had any work you needed help with. Hopefully, something remote, please?”

I’d never heard my brother speak so meekly to my uncle. My brother wore his ambitions on his sleeves and my uncle knew how in jeopardy his own’s son’s inheritance was. The two never seemed to get along and there were always hints of a challenge bubbling beneath my brother’s words. But for my sake, he would mask his animosity…It made me feel like a shit stain on his side that he couldn’t scrub off.

Uncle nodded and strode over to me. A heavyset man, he was bigger than me and my brother both. Taller as well. Honestly, he looked like a pear with stubby legs, but he was a genuinely friendly person with everyone but my brother. Despite being the man with the most authority in the village, he kept a well-trimmed and jovial mustache that he just wouldn’t get rid of despite the family’s nagging. That great man put a solemn hand on my shoulder and the weight alone nearly buckled my knees. He didn’t keep it there for long, opting to ruffle my hair instead.

“Nearly scared me there, Lin. I thought my niece came to haunt me from beyond the grave for a moment,” he strained out a chuckle. The first one was not directed at me. “Your lucky your aunt is out shopping. She would have fainted had she seen you, and then we’d have a real mess on hand.” He said with a wink. “Say, speaking of messes I think there is something two strong lads could help me out with.”

My uncle spoke to everyone younger than him as if they were children, even my brother who was well on his way to being a married man got put in that bucket. I didn’t mind it much. My uncle was a good man who cared too much about his people. Anywhere else he would be a crappy mayor, too set on pleasing people to make hard decisions, but there were no hard decisions to make up here. Compared to the mainland, it was a paradise.

Uncle leaned back on his desk, and even the great wood structure creaked. “Old man Hu’s harvest is late. I’m hoping you two can help him finish the last of it by tonight before our next shipment goes out. We’ll need his herbs if we're going to get any sort of manageable allotment this winter.”

A flash of concern crossed my brother’s face and mine. “Is the allotment in danger?” The Floating Isles were heavily isolated from the mainland. The qi here was thick and poisonous to most plants so we relied on trading herbs for food, nails, and supplies. Especially during the brutal winters. Above the mountains, you could choke to death in the winter as the cold froze the breath in your lungs. None of us were cultivators so the emperor’s allotment of warming stones and the cultivator scales to power them were life-or-death necessities.

“The allotment’s always been in danger. More so year after year. The empire is only gets poorer by the decade, and the emperor himself is too weak to stand up to the empress above him, and the GodKing above her. She’s calling for even more resources to fund her wars and tributes. I doubt we even register as human in that witch’s mind. Not only is this winter going to be brutal, but the emperor might retaliate in spring if we don’t make quota.”

“And the farm of one old man is going to make or break quota?” My brother couldn’t mask the contempt in his voice as if he could handle the situation better than my more experienced uncle.

My uncle didn’t rise to the bait. He just shook his head. “No. We’ve eeked by already. Quota is made, but the farm of one old man determines whether we can all stay warm in our homes this winter or if we’ll have to huddle in here to fight the cold.” Uncle took a look around the community center as if doing the hard calculus of how many people he could stuff in and not liking the answer.

“I’ve already sent two men to help Tong out but the old mule says he doesn’t need anyone.”

“Why do you think we’d be any different?”

My uncle stung me with a glance and a clenched face. I said what he was thinking with a sigh. “The old bastard is probably going to have a laugh at my face. Maybe he’ll be in a good enough mood to let us help out.”

“That’s a rough way of putting it, Lin.” Uncle said without denial. “At the very least, putting him in good humor might pave the way for him to accept help later on.”

A sonic boom crashed through the Gathering hall before I could chew my uncle out. The doors blew open with a gust. Thankfully, nobody was there.

“Cultivators.” My uncle's eyes went wide.

“Why are cultivators here?” my brother’s voice broke in sudden panic.

In the time we had spared for a second glance at the door, my uncle had made it behind his desk and was frantically bringing out paperwork and stamps and what looked to be preprepared offerings. He looked up at us, mustache sagging with fear. “I don’t know.” he said then rushed towards the door with papers under his arm. “I don’t know if they’re the Emperor’s or bandits or a bunch of prissy teenagers harassing ordinary folk. All I know is that if they have the power to fly up here, they’re strong, and I need to go out there and make sure they don’t kill anyone, accidentally or not. You two go to Tong’s farm. You’ll be safe there at the least. Ring the bell on your way out.”

Uncle rushed outside shoving a last-minute ceremonial hat on his head. I went to the center of the gathering hall where against the wall laid a rope connected to a bell at the top of the citadel. Its ringing was nearly as loud as the sonic boom, and I could hear horses in the streets neighing as their owners rapidly pivoted them away from the center of town. My brother picked me up in one hand and got me on his back.

“I can walk you know.”

“Yeah, but you can’t run.” We left the citadel like a storm and there was nothing in the streets to impede our path.