A second ringing of the bells meant that trouble had passed and the village was safe. We waited in silence for those bells all the way to Tong’s farm.

Those bells did not ring often. They had rung a year ago when my sister was taken for training in the Emperor’s legions. A Cultivator had flown to retrieve her instead of taking one of the supply ships from the mainland. He had descended like a storm, dark lightning and vengeful cloud cover streaking behind him. The thunder of his arrival cracked louder than the bells could ring. We were forced to welcome him, but that monster brought the weight of the heavens with him and crushed us underneath. We gave him Lyn like a bittersweet offering and rose with relief at his passing. A week later Lyn returned on an airship and the next day she hung herself in her room.

Another harbinger of the Emperor’s will had descended on our village. How many souls would be lost to him?

Sen wore the same worries on his face. He kept looking back during our descent down the valley as if he could will the bells to ring. He wanted to turn back and help Uncle face that terror, but he had me consider and didn’t set me down until we reached the edge of the fields.

Old man Tong’s farm was overgrown. I would have rather returned to my brother’s back than walked through them. Nareroot thorns spiraled through the soil like bales of razor wire. The qi amidst the Floating Isle was strong and our skin was tough, but blood still trickled down my sandal-clad foot after just a brush with a clump of Nareroot. Sen walked expressionless, away from here. Only a brief speared glance for the farm, for the task at hand. I would be little help clearing the crop. The long stalks around us were so much larger than me.

We walked through the fields in silence and care. Old man Tong must have seen his herbs rustling, but he didn’t greet us until his coughs and curses could carry. “I already told the damn mayor I didn’t need any help. Harvest will be ready by the week's end. I don’t need your charity. So go.” Old man Tong was bitter, lonely, and better than this. He had never shunned us before, both my sister and I were frequent visitors. Something was wrong here.

We walked towards an old man shivering on a rocking chair, petting a slack-jawed hound with jowls nearly as flappy as his own. A wool blanket lay on the floor in a clump at the old man’s side. He seemed to shy away from the covering, instead grasping tightly onto a straw hat that had every inclination to fly away in the wind. He didn’t seem to be of a mind to raise it in welcome.

I stumbled forward suddenly. Sen stepped back as his push carried me onto the old man’s porch. He shrugged off my scowl with an annoyed look on his face as if I were the impediment to helping Uncle and not Tong. I shook my head, no apology would be forthcoming. All I could really do was square my shoulders and prepare to get laughed at.

“Hey, you old bastard. We came a long way to help you, so you either chase us off yourself or sick your mutt on us cause were harvesting this field with our without your permission.”

Tong was quick to anger. Blue veins along his forehead bulged at my words. He tilted an angry head in my direction and his hat flew from his fingers in his sudden stupor. I managed to catch it on my chest, giving him an awkward smile as he did his best to rectify who I was. A weird bit of pride rumbled through me. I didn’t think my makeup would actually fool people, but again and again, it did. I was actually sort of convincing.

Sort of. A lot was off. I didn’t have my sister’s shape, her toned arms, her nascent hourglass. My hair was a short bob that wasn’t going to pass for the shoulder-length ponytail she often wore, and I had none of the confidence she constantly exuded. I stood like a willow in the wind, bent, just trying my best to stay rooted.

The difference added up quickly for Tong. When he finally realized who I was, he erupted with laughter.

Tong’s laughter was the worst so far. The old man had no inhibitions left in him and he didn’t even feign being apologetic when his spittle landed on me. I blocked what I could with his hat as the old man fluctuated between coughing and choking. Even his old mutt managed to hiccup onto my sandals. I might just be neurotic but I swear the damn dog was laughing at me too.

Tong wasn’t going to stop laughing or stop us for that matter. Once we realized that, Sen grabbed a scythe and marched off to the fields. I returned Tong’s hat and covered the obviously chilly man with his fallen blanket. He still waved me off laughing, so I didn’t say a word more. I just grabbed my own scythe and went to rejoin Sen.

Iron, rusted, grey. The scythe was greedy for my body heat. Half the trouble with holding it was avoiding frostbite. It made me worry about winter. It was coming soon, and this simple field might be the difference between us tolerating the winter or surviving it.

I should have worried about swinging the unbalanced thing because it only took a few minutes before the blade dragged me face-first into the Nareroot.

“Ow. Could you do this gently? Please. Fu-”

“Shut up,” Sen said, wrenching a spurn from my cheek. “It’s harder to do this with your mouth moving.”

“Just take it slow. Ow. It’s not like we have somewhere to be.” We had barely made any progress, mostly due to me falling whenever I swung the scythe. Whatever Tong was growing was tough. Harvesting these plants felt like chopping down a tree with a pair of rusted scissors. Worse even. You could sink a blade into a tree at least. Swing at these and the stalks would bend back like a rubberband and fling you into the Nareroot.

“Uncle needs us, and you falling into this stuff is just giving that Cultivator more time to have his way with him.”

“Have his way with him?” What on earth did Sen think Cultivators did? “Sen, Uncle is going to be fine. The village isn’t on fire right now, so we’re not having danger. Uncle’s probably having tea with a lost Cultivator and beseeching him to go home. Us barging in there isn’t going to speed it up.”

“You don’t know anything.” Sen tore a root out of my face and my eyes watered at the sensation of raw flesh out in the open air. “Look, Lin. You’re wasting time and you're just getting hurt. Why not sit with the old man and just let me work?”

I hated the pleading look Sen was giving me. I wasn’t as strong as him and Lyn but I wasn’t a weakling. I could lift the scythe with effort. I just couldn’t swing it.

“Just teach me how to do it. That’s why I’m here right? So you can teach me how to be a man? So show me. Show me how to harvest this field and then I’ll do it while you run off to have tea time with Uncle.

Sen pressed his hand to his forehead. “Fine.” He stood up and spun the scythe behind him with one arm as if preparing a pitch.

“Watch closely.” He looked at the nearest herb like a headman looks at necks, stepping around it as if one side was coated in armor while the rest was tender flesh. He didn’t stop until he was facing me, and I instinctively scuttled back before he cut both the stalk and me in half.

A glint flashed in Sen’s eyes, and a teasing smile flared on his lips. He took one step forward and the scythe disappeared.

It took several moments of blinking before I saw the blade again, shimmering in the air despite a layer of rust flaking off the blade like snow. It was right beside my head. I felt at the tip of my nose but nothing came away red. As I stared at my hand, the herb finally split and fell to the floor. Sen took the fallen remains and shoved them into the basket on his back.

He smiled at me. “Did you see that?”

I shook my head. He shut his eyes tight and crossed his arms. “Lin, come on. Pay attention for once. That was a basic form.” His eyes did not get softer as I failed to comprehend. “Mantis form? Pierce the Horizon? Lyn did this exact strike a dozen times a day.”

“I never saw what she did. She moved too fast for me.”

“You have to move fast to chop these things down.” Sen knocked on a herb. A hollow thunk resonated within. “Our blades are dull. This hide is strong. But all things fall before a cut that’s straight and true. That’s the wisdom behind the Mantis form.”

I finally nodded my head in the hopes that he’d stop talking and we could go back to him doing all the work while I pretended to try my best. Unfortunately, he didn’t register a shred of authenticity on my face.

“You’re not getting any of this are you?” I gave him my best smile but he just leaned on his scythe getting annoyed. “Hey, it’s not like I’m not trying. I genuinely can’t see your movements. They're too fast for me, you’ll have to go with something I can handle.

“A toddler could handle this,” Sen said under his breath. “A toddler would be more useful.” He squished his face chewing over what I said like a puzzle to solve. “Okay, we’ll go with brute strength. Do you know Bear form?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I shook my head.

“Deer then. Should be easier considering your build.”

Again nothing came to mind.

“What forms do you know?”

I gave him my best shrug.

“The heavens forsake us. What the hell are they teaching you in school?”

“They taught us the forms, but we only get to practice them by sparing, and BaoBao never lets me land a hit. When I try to practice the forms on him, he just beats my ass.”

Sen released another sigh. One almost as long as my speech. “I can’t believe my brother is a goddamn training dummy.”

“That’s a rough way of putting it.”

He didn’t look much at me as if he’d catch depression just by looking at my pitiful figure. Instead, he closed his eyes and thought for a long moment while the herbs bristled in the wind and the sun continued to sink.

The bell still hadn’t rung. What did that actually mean for Uncle? I couldn’t imagine him ever being hurt. Not even by a Cultivator. Not for no reason. But my brother’s concern was genuine, and he knew much that I didn’t.

Sen stayed deep in thought. The light cascaded over him as he leaned on his scythe. He could have been a Cultivator deep in meditation. Stories said they meditated for hundreds of years at a time just to break through the next stage. That’s why even though they were legion I so rarely saw them. They were deep in training, and it was sacrilege to wake them. I hope I wouldn’t have to wait long for my brother to come to a decision.

“Okay. Here’s what we're doing.” Sen jerked as if he hadn’t been masquerading as a statue for the last couple of minutes. He peeled a leaf of one of the herbs and put it in his mouth. He plucked a second one and handed it to me. “Chew but don’t swallow.”

I cupped the innocuous green leaf in my palms. These really were unremarkable plants even up close, but if the Emperor thought they were valuable…What would they do to me?

“What does it do?” I asked my brother who didn’t bother to check if I followed his orders before walking away. He started harvesting the plants with newfound vigor, using a technique that was very clearly not Mantis Pierces the Horizon. Instead, he just swung the scythe wildly with one arm and let the stalks fall left and right.

“It poisons you.” He called out at the end of his trail of wreckage. I looked at the little leaf and dropped it in a panic, wiping the remains of it off on my robes. “It won’t kill you,” my brother called from a distance away. “Your body will fight the poison by opening your meridians and flooding your system with qi. You’ll be as strong as Lyn was for a couple of hours. Enough for us to get this done.”

“And the side effects?” I shouted but my brother’s path curved and he disappeared between the stalks of this miracle herb. I poked the leaf on the ground with a stick, lifting it ever so slightly as if it might explode my meridians from a distance.

“Hurry up,” Sen called out from nowhere. “I want to be done by nightfall.”

My brother couldn’t even see me but he knew enough of my cowardice to know I hadn’t taken it yet. I mean, why should I?

He didn’t need me, I could see from his uninhibited progress that he could harvest this field in hours without me. I was an extra. If the ground wasn’t speckled with thorns I could just fall asleep and wait for him to wake me.

He’d feign angriness at my laziness but Sen didn’t expect much of me.

How long was I going to be like this? I found a safe patch of land and sat on my ass. I looked at the nicks covering my arm, my shirt was practically shredded and I’d need to stitch it up when I got home. My brother didn’t need a shirt at all. He walked through these fields bear-chested and didn’t flinch, didn’t freeze, didn’t get nicked because doing any of those things would be trouble for the family.

Sen did everything he could, and half the time I didn’t even bother to try. What was I compared to him? A weird facsimile of Lyn? Lyn at least was loved by the village. She spent all her free time and too much of her nights practicing forms as if puppeted by the Emperor’s will, but she didn’t get absorbed in her training like I did with my painting.

She was twice the workhorse Sen aspired to be, helping as only a Cultivator could. I had seen her lift a broken wagon and carry a lame ox all while exhausted and covered in mud and bullshit just to come home with nothing but thanks and a smile. I don’t think she regretted those hard days at all. That’s just who Lyn was.

If this herb made me like her for a few hours then why not? I took it. I shouldn’t have.

A mint frost encased my tongue, crawled down my throat, and slunk into every crevice of my lungs. I dropped to all fours, my breath fleeing out of my throat. I coughed in silence, dry sores sprouting in my mouth. The Nareroot spurs were all I could grip for comfort. Tainted dew and poison dripped into my guts. Chew. Don’t swallow. Steel jets from fibrous mush cut my gums as I chewed. The serrated blade shattered in pieces on my teeth, drawing blood, freezing slivers into needles peppered across my frozen tongue. My head went numb but I chewed if only to keep my mind alive.

My skin burned with qi, nerve endings that shouldn’t be crept along my veins. Qi that I hadn’t realized was all around me fought to reach the dead kiln of my core, but something was wrong. My meridians didn’t open to the qi. Dams I wasn’t aware of held against the burgeoning ocean outside. If I didn’t take that Qi in, I would die, frozen solid on the inside while my body seared itself on the surface of a dead sun.

But I was no Cultivator. I had no living core to take in all this Qi. I had no control over my body's meridians. All I had control over was my own teeth. I fell flat on my back, still chewing, refusing to swallow, feeling nothing from the sun but burning in its sight even still.

—-

I woke to a gap tooth smile and a bit of drool falling on my face. The drool was, thankfully, not from the old man. Tong’s old dog was just panting, finally tasked with something to do.

The mutt licked me and I couldn’t even defend myself. My arms did not feel like Lyn’s, they felt like the husked remains of a forest fire, moving them still burned as much with memory as with pain.

“Stop, please. Ow. I’m awake. I’m awake.” The dog gave me a sad and confused look as he stopped. Shirking, I patted him on the side, telling him he did a good job.

“Hello from the land of the living, kid. You all in there or has something got you all twisted up?” Old man Tong knocked the side of my head, none too gently. I sadly rubbed the spot before realizing that the pain across my body was there as well.

“Yeah, it’s all me. You can stop prodding.” My mouth felt like it had been strung up with silk, each word I spoke cut into my gums, and the motion of my jaw creaked in my ear.

“Well it’s good you’re all there now, but what the hell possessed you to go and munch on an Autumn Mandril like that? There are Cultivators who can’t refine that stuff. Your sister damn near took to fever trying.”

I managed to ignore my aching body enough to rise and scoot off the old man’s lap onto his porch. It hurt to sit but I wasn’t about to show it. “It was just that. I thought it would make me more like my sister if I could handle it.” I looked out at the fields, nothing but a manicured hill now. One last patch of herb still stood in my brother’s way, but he was making quick work of it.

Old man Tong gave me an odd look but he didn’t say much until we watched Sen finish in the fields.

“You know, Son.”

“I’m not your Son.”

“I know I know. I’m glad you aren’t. Man’s a wastrel but I ain’t about to tear into him right now.”

“You’re going to tear into me?”

“Mhhmn. I should. What you did was very stupid. Could have killed you.”

“It didn’t.”

“Not this time it did, but if you keep going on like this, trying to measure up to who your sister was?”

“Why can’t I?” I asked red-faced, reopening old wounds. Why did I have to be her twin? I couldn’t be myself with her memory hanging in the air. I couldn’t do the things I loved without being scorned for not being her, and when I tried, because they forced me to try, I ended up almost dead in a field of poisonous flowers.

“None of us could measure up to who Lyn was, kid,” Tong said with the first bite of anger I’d heard from him. It smothered my own. “Lyn was heaven’s own gift. A Cultivator born to us. To our poor little community. We weren’t meant to compare ourselves with her; we were meant to be blessed by her presence, however short.” Tong looked out past the edge of the village. Floating rocks crashed in the distance. “We were meant to mourn and remember the brief time she stayed with us.”

It’s been a while since I heard someone talk about her like that. After her death, people didn’t talk about Lyn to me. It was like they suddenly realized I was just half a person without my twin standing next to me. They had enough empathy not to remind me of what I was failing to be.

“Lyn came here almost every day, and not just to whet herself on the herbs. She did her morning runs across the Isle and came here last just so she’d be so tired Scruffy wouldn’t think he was an old man when playing with her. That’s who your sister was, and I remember her fondly. We all do.”

If ever there was a way to make me feel like shit.

“But that doesn’t mean I forgot you, kid.” A snarl crossed my face but it shattered against the radiance of a gap tooth smile. “You’re not the Cultivator your sister was, but you light up the place as much she did. I mean look at my house.”

I finally looked up at Tong’s place, at the faded green paint splashed by an amateur, and the hints of blue speckled along the rough half in mistake and half in artistic inspiration. I was young when I painted it, but I couldn’t stop once he let me. The whole village could see Tong’s place at the end of the sloping valley. So I thought it would be the best place to put a mural of the Emerald Dragon splitting the sea. It took me ages to do, and I always thought Tong found the end result as lacking as I did.

He didn’t find it lacking at all. “I don’t get much to do out here than to watch them floating rocks crash and see the odd spirit dance, but being able to sit on this porch knowing I got the whole village looking at my home with wonder makes this waning life of mine just a bit sweeter.” Tong ruffled my head and for once I didn’t mind.

“You bless this world in your own way Kid. Don’t try to be like anyone but yourself.”

I don’t know what it was about old man Tong, but he made me feel even less than a man than I did already. I turned to wipe a tear and he put a soft hand on my back as if that weakness didn’t matter a bit to him.

Tong was a good man, and he let me share the moment of floating toward a setting sun with him. I opened my spacial ring and pulled out the two buns my grandmother had given me. The ring was my sister’s parting gift to me. The village had spent a fortune to get it for her, but every Cultivator needed a spacial ring, even one that barely fit a few buns.

I offered a partially smooshed bun to Tong. He declined. Bad teeth and no dentist in the village could help. Scruffy didn’t mind munching on the snack with just his gums though.

“You know Uncle Tong, I-OW!” I jumped up in pain tossing my own bun. I looked down at my burgeoning red toe and saw the same damn crab from earlier today.

“You! You followed me here of all places?” We were on the opposite end of the Isle. Miles away from home and this damn spirit had the gull to track me here and inflict its revenge. That was almost impressive.

“Hah.” Tong slapped my back and forced a yelp. “You got yourself a friend, Lin.”

“He’s not a friend. He’s a nuisance and I’m about to make him a training dummy for my forms.”

“Heh, heh, heh. Well, you know what they say about spirits. They’re persistent. Give them a reason and they’ll follow you to the grave.”

“I hope to bury this one long before then.”

As I was imagining the tortures I’d inflict on that crab, Sen rushed up to us glistening in sweat. I expected an apology after he tricked me into trying that herb, but he didn’t say a word, just tossed the scythes down and hastily got on his shirt.

“Where’s the fire?” Even Tong raised a brow to his haste.

“The bell still hasn’t rung. Come on. We’re checking on Uncle.”