The sound of Jian’s flute drifted over the still waters of the Shallow Sea as she watched the boat slowly approach.
She was seated on a rock by the water’s edge, the hem of her robes almost brushing the pure white sand of the shore. Striga sat in the sand, hidden from sight by the lip of the rock and with her arms wrapped around her knees to pull them close.
Striga wasn’t reacting to the music. She hadn’t truly reacted to anything Jian had said in the past three days. She sat where she was told and ate what she was given, but she did it silently, without the complaints Jian expected from a child her age.
Jian had been trying to pull the girl out of her shell, but nothing had worked. Candy had gone ignored, and music was proving just as ineffective. Taking care of Striga was already proving difficult, and she was worried things wouldn’t improve any time soon.
While Jian enjoyed teaching, candy and music were the full extent of her bag of tricks when it came to actually managing children. Her own experience as a child had just been too different from the life Striga had lived so far.
Less than half a day after Lin died, Jian had already been pulling herself back together, making a plan to get out of the Veils on her own and putting it into action. It hadn’t been a complicated plan, but it had been action, something to focus on instead of the shadows’ whispers. She’d overcome her grief through motion and an unwillingness to look back.
Striga had reacted differently, shutting down and closing herself off, going inactive.
Jian didn’t know what she was supposed to do, not with Striga, and not with the latest challenge the world had thrown their way.
Jian pulled the flute away from her lips and sighed, looking out over the vast expanse of water that she didn’t dare to touch.
They were on an island. A large island, with mountains and forests behind them, but still an island. Worse, they were on a peninsula of said island. There may have been other places they could have gone, other villages or mountain passes, but turning back now would take them past the scene of the crime. It was the Hero’s crime, rather than hers, but she didn’t trust the gods of this land to see it that way. Running had been the right choice, but she’d chosen the exact worst direction to run; a dead end
The walls were bright blue water and open skies instead of dark stone, but she could see the truth of it. She had found herself in yet another prison.
Tired in spirit instead of body, she’d sat down on a rock by the water’s edge and tried to make a decision.
She could see another island, barely a single li away, taunting her with its closeness. Part of her thought that maybe, just maybe, she could leap that gap. But even if she could, she wasn’t sure that Striga’s fragile body would survive the takeoff, let alone the landing.
Even if she forged a boat with her new ability, she knew it would leak Qi like water through a sieve, she’d tested it enough over the past three days. On land that was fine, it would dissipate on its own quickly enough, reclaimed by the World’s Will, but it wasn’t a risk she could take here, for one simple reason.
The sea thrummed with the Authority of a god.
She could feel it radiating from every drop of water like heat, something present but unseen, just beyond her understanding. Despite her growth, she still couldn’t actually touch a god’s Authority, and without knowing how to interact with it, she had no hope of evading it.
She didn’t know who the god was, or even whether they would notice her if she touched the water, but that was part of the problem. She had no idea what kind of limits a god had. Even if nobody appeared to smite her, even if they didn’t notice the Deicide’s mark on her cheek, even if she made it safely across the channel, there was still a chance they could track the passage of her qi long after it would have naturally faded. From there, it would be a simple matter to connect her to the death of the Hero.
Two ideas had occurred to her by then. The first had been to build a sea-worthy vessel from scratch, cutting the logs and binding them together by hand instead of forging them with qi, but she had no real knowledge of carpentry, let alone shipbuilding. They were more likely to sink than sail in anything she made.
Her second idea was even more impractical, but before she could make up her mind to try it, the decision had been taken out of her hands by the shape of a small boat coming over the horizon.
Instead, she let the last notes of her song drift away, waiting as the boat drew closer and a new decision presented itself.
The boat was a small skiff, maybe three or four meters long, and the lone boatman stood in the back. She saw the exact moment he drew close enough to see her clearly, saw how he hesitated, his long oar stilling for a second as he put together her foreign clothes and unnatural features. She had wrapped half of her face in a bandage, forged from her blood to be opaque to even her own sharpened vision. It stood out less than having a glowing green mark on her cheek, but that wasn’t saying much.
The man on the boat was wearing a strange outfit himself, a thin white veil covering his head and folding into long white robes. The veil did nothing to obscure him from her though, she didn’t even have to focus qi into her eyes to pierce it, she could feel the texture of the shadows covering his face as if she were holding it in her own hands. She watched as his face shifted from hesitation to a grimace and then finally a resolved smile.
Relieved, she allowed herself to relax as he continued towards them, the long oar moving smoothly through the shallow water. If he had turned to leave them, she might have been forced to jump the gap and steal his boat.
If she had, she wasn’t sure she could have let him live.
Even if he was friendly, even if he was helpful, he was a witness now. He could give someone their descriptions, could point more Heroes in their direction. He would be too dangerous to leave behind on the shore.
But-
She glanced at Striga.
She didn’t want to kill him. Killing Alceste had been a tragic necessity, the inevitable result of Erichthonius’s choices, that was a fact as far as Jian was concerned. However, if she started to kill people for convenience, because it would be easier rather than necessary, then something that should be a simple fact might start to feel like a lie. At the very least, she didn’t want to kill anyone else in front of Striga if she could avoid it.
If she did kill him, it would be out of sight.
When the ferryman had crossed half the distance between them, he lifted a hand in greeting and called out, his voice carrying easily across the water.
“Hail stranger. Don’t stop playing on my account.”
Jian smiled, slipping cheer onto her face like a mask, and raised her own hand in response.
“I can’t go giving away a full concert for free now, but I promise I’ll play your ear off if you can give us a lift?”
“Oho, someone who knows the value of music then. No wonder you’re so talented, if you’re a professional. I was worried I was following the song of a siren for a moment there.”
“You flatter me, but I’m barely an amateur.”
“Surely you jest. An amateur compared to who? Orpheus?”
“There are Immortals of Music out there who have practiced their craft for hundreds of years.”
“If you’re comparing yourself to the likes of the Muses themselves, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”
Jian laughed, hating the conversation already.
“Don’t worry. I’m just giving myself an excuse, in case you find my performance lacking. I know I don’t hold music close enough to my soul to be truly great and don’t want you to set your expectations too high.”
The man chuckled.
“Well, now I know you’re not a professional. That’s far too much honesty. You’ll have to work on your sales pitch.”
The boat came to a stop a few steps from shore, the bottom of the boat just kissing the sand. The man’s eyes flicked to where Striga huddled in the shadow of the rock and back to Jian before giving an impressively precise bow.
“Still, I would dare to say something falling short of divine would still be a joy for a mere mortal. I’d happily welcome you both aboard for a time, a gift given and a gift received.”
“Thank you.” Jian said, mirroring his bow. She hoped the culture was similar enough to her own that it was the right thing to do. Better to come off as too gracious than rude.
She hopped up onto the boat in a single smooth step, avoiding the surf. She spun on the low railing, crouching down and holding her hand out to where Striga sat.
“Come on, I’ll help you up.”
Striga stared at her blankly for a moment, long enough that Jian began to grow worried, but eventually she stood up and walked to the boat. She ignored Jian’s offered hand completely, trudging straight through the water and clambering over the edge on her own. She sat down near the front of the boat and wrapped her arms back around her knees, a small puddle of water soaking into the wood around her.
If the ferryman found the interaction strange, he didn’t comment on it.
“Where are you headed?” He asked instead.
“Right now? Wherever you are. No need to go out of your way on our account. What port calls you, ferryman?”
He turned his head forward, his features softening under his veil.
“Ithaca. Always, Ithaca calls me home.”
“I admit, I have not learned the lay of the land. Where does Ithaca lie?”
“Ah, far West of here. I have a long journey ahead of me yet. I hardly expect you’ll want to accompany an old man so far, but there are a number of ports I could stop at on the way. Siracusa, Korinthos, Gnosis, and Lothica all lie on the path west. Someone of your talents would find welcome in any of them.”
Jian kept her smile to herself.
“I’ll need to get you to show me a map at some point, but perhaps I should practice said talents now, lest I grow rusty before we make land.”
Jian leaned back against the edge of the boat, shifting her weight minutely to keep the narrow boat steady, and began to play.
Despite claiming, and knowing, that she would never be a true master, she still enjoyed it. She was planning to live forever, and had long realized she would need to fill those days with something beyond fighting. She had practiced in the hours where her body and soul were recovering from the rigor she routinely put them through, and she’d practiced long enough to recognize music as a powerful force. It could attract a crowd, bring down guards, pull people together, and set a mood.
Most importantly, it could delay a conversation.
She watched the water and thought in the spaces between notes, her body playing the song by rote. It shouldn’t be too difficult to get a more detailed description of the geography. She could feign interest in one of the other cities on the path, have him drop them off nearby and begin traveling to Lothica by land.
Then, with her obligation to Striga fulfilled, maybe she could find a new path.
She glanced up, past the blue sky to the white wall of the firmament that covered everything under Heaven. There, barely visible as anything more than a splotch of green and blue, hung the First Heaven, Elysium. If there was anywhere in this world where she would be safe from the Deicide, it was there.
So long as she could convince the Queen Among Gods not to kill her that is.
Jian grimaced and pushed the thought from her mind. It was something to plan for in the future, when she had more information. For now, she had to deal with the present, and the ferryman.
It hadn’t escaped her notice that he hadn’t offered his name or asked for hers. Their ferryman had more tact than she expected from most cultivators, let alone a random mortal. He clearly understood her desire for discretion, and if he was heading west to a specific destination then it was unlikely he’d return the island they were leaving behind, so it should be harder for pursuers to find and question him in the first place.
It was still a risk, he was too suspicious for it to be anything else, but she could afford to let him live. At the very least, his soul was clearly mortal, so there was a limit to how dangerous he could be.
Jian pushed away the memory of a delicious soul sliding down her throat and smiled, her song jumping from something still and quiet into something more upbeat. There were advantages to killing him, reasons to do it anyway, but she wasn’t a monster.
She could afford to make her own choices now. Mercy was the privilege of the strong; a privilege she’d earned.
They glided across the still water, under awnings of trees in colorful bloom stretching out from the shore and over sparkling white sand only an arms length beneath them. For a moment, their boat and falling petals felt like the only things moving in the world.
She didn’t play for very long, only three songs altogether, but by the time she finished, they had left the spot where they’d boarded far behind.
She lowered the flute to her lap and spoke into the silence echoing at the end of the song.
“I had heard of Seirei’s Shallow Sea,” she said in the silence following a song, “but I didn’t realize how literal the description was.”
The ferryman chuckled. “Foreigners are always surprised. They always assume we must be exaggerating.”
“Is it really only a meter deep? Never deeper?”
“Never. It’s the most reliable thing a sailor can count on.”
“What about tides? Erosion?”
“It suffers not tides, erosion, or waves. The sea is a gentle thing. In fact, I’ve heard learned men say it isn’t even a sea at all, but a massive river. I’m not sure if I agree with that, but it does have a current just beneath the surface. The still surface and hidden currents are the only reason an old man like me can make such a long journey in a vessel this small.”
Jian shook her head. “It feels impossible outside a Dream, but it’s a bit hard to deny the evidence all around us. I assume there’s a divine hand on those scales.”
She looked at Striga. She almost called her name, but held it in. Better to not use names until they were alone again.
“Child, you know all the gods of this land. Can you tell me who claims the Sea?”
Striga stayed silent, unmoving.
Jian sighed and the ferryman coughed into the silence awkwardly.
“The young lady can of course feel free to correct me,” he said, “but Okeanos is the patron of the Shallow Sea. He is the bounty that connects us and the boundary that defines us. His body flows eternal, pouring endlessly over the edge of the known world, separating good from evil and protecting us from the madness of the Deep Sea.”
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Jian frowned. There was a lot to unpack there. She’d been told Seirei was on a plateau, but could an entire sea really be-
“Why?” Striga croaked, her voice hoarse from days of disuse. Jian’s head snapped towards her, all other thoughts forgotten. The girl coughed a bit, clearing her throat, before continuing undeterred. “Why did this knife cut him, when mom’s feather couldn’t cut you?”
Striga’s hands were shaking, but in them was the bronze knife Jian had given her, her knuckles white from how tightly she gripped it.
Jian’s eyes flicked towards the ferryman and back. It was inconvenient timing, but it shouldn’t make much of a difference if he overheard anything. She could evaluate any information spillage afterward; for now she’d take any opportunity to get Striga talking again.
“Cultivators or Chosen, Qi or Pneuma, whatever you call it, this world has an energy flowing through it. Once someone has enough energy, it exerts a pressure on the world around them. That pressure says “this person is something more”. It tells the world “this person is stronger” and metal crumples under their hands. It tells the world “this person is faster” and the wind struggles to keep up. It tells the world “this person is tougher” and blades chip against their skin. To someone like me, a sword without qi is like a shadow of a sword on the cave wall; it won’t cut me even if I press my hand against it, because it’s less “real” than I am.”
Jian paused, watching Striga’s eyes. They looked more focused than they had in days, more hungry. She was paying attention now, at least.
“That blade, however, is special.” She said, pointing to the knife in Striga’s hands. “It’s made of bronze and jade, two of the three Divine Materials. Has anyone taught you what they do?”
Jian waited patiently, and after a few seconds Striga shook her head. Jian considered that a win.
“In the beginning, there were only two Divine Materials. It was said that Gaia’s bones were made of Jade, and her veins made of Gold. When someone holds qi in their body long enough, it sinks into their bones, like water filling a cup. Likewise, Gaia’s bones, jade, are the perfect vessel to hold qi.”
Jian cupped and twisted her hand to form a shadow in her palm. With a flourish, she pushed her fingers into that pool of shadow and pulled out a bead of black jade.
“You can store extra qi in jade, and pull from it later. And, when it’s full of qi, it shares the same boost to durability as the person that filled it. It’ll run out of qi eventually if you keep hitting it, but, for a while, it’s as good as indestructible.”
She slipped the piece of jade away, spreading her open hands to show they were empty, before repeating her previous flourish to present a thin golden wire she’d pulled from one of the Lavindas.
“On the other hand, gold is almost the opposite. Blood carries energy from a person’s heart out to the rest of their body. Likewise, Gaia’s blood, gold, is the best conduit to carry qi from one place to another, and energy in motion can be a powerful thing.”
Jian twisted the wire between her hands until it folded in on itself like putty, smushing it into a ball and pulling it out into a thin rectangular edge. She pushed qi into the makeshift blade and sliced her finger, pulling out a glob of blood and shaping it into an identical copy. She ran both blades against her forearm and showed Striga the thin cuts they left behind, welling with blood for a moment before sealing up.
She continued to push qi through the blades for another few seconds, until the blade made of blood began to gently smoke, flakes of blood blackening and falling off before disappearing entirely.
“While human blood burns up when you push too much energy through it, gold can cycle energy back and forth for centuries. Then, when I’m done with what I was doing, I can pull the qi back without any loss. It’s so perfect that the qi inside of gold wire is almost invisible, since no qi leaks into the air.”
Jian closed her hand over the golden blade and brought up her other, drawing Striga’s attention to a bronze gear resting in her palm.
“Which finally brings us to the newest Divine Material, the only one invented by Man. While gold is the best conduit, it can be alloyed, mixed with other metals to make something new. The most useful is called Celestial Bronze. While Jade stores and Gold pushes, Bronze remembers. Celestial Bronze is the Mirror of the Soul.”
Jian bent the gear between her fingers to the soft groan of twisting metal. Once it was folded entirely in half, she started to channel her qi into it. After a moment, the metal began to vibrate and then unfold back into its original shape. A few seconds later, it was as good as new.
“It’s less efficient than gold, vents small amounts of qi into the air around it, but it repairs itself when damaged, returning to whatever shape it’s held longest. Put that together with jade to hold a small reserve of qi and you have a knife worth as much as a house.”
Jian focused on the sound of the ferryman’s breath and the thud of his heartbeat. They hadn’t changed at all during her explanation, in fact his heartbeat had been so steady that it looped back around to being suspicious. He had to be used to dealing with Cultivators, Chosen, or at least their tools.
Something to think about later, when she was done focusing on Striga.
Jian kept her eyes on Striga, trying to gauge the child’s reaction. She’d followed the whole explanation, her gaze razor sharp, but she still hadn’t said a word.
The girl’s small hand came up, pointing at the golden wire in Jian’s right. Jian waited, but she didn’t say anything, she just continued pointing.
“You want the gold?” Jian asked.
After a moment Striga nodded.
Jian chuckled. “Alright, I guess I can’t blame you for wanting the whole set. Here, keep holding out your hand.”
Jian quickly braided the gold into a thin bracelet and slipped it around Striga’s wrist. She pressed on it where the two ends joined, her thumb steaming hot as she merged them together into one unbroken loop. Jewelry was more expensive than candy, but hopefully it would have the same effect.
“There, for now it’ll look pretty, and in the future you’ll be able to turn it into whatever you want. Gold is pretty flexible.”
Striga looked down at the bracelet wrapped around her wrist and, for a moment, Jian thought she was about to thank her for the gift. But when she raised her eyes, they were hard and defiant.
They weren’t the eyes of a scared child. They held a fire, an expectation, like she was staring down the entire world and daring it to react, to do its worst. She opened her mouth and said-
“Ithaca fell thirty years ago.”
Day turned to night in an instant.
Jian spun, a blade already in her hand, but she cut through empty air.
A spotlight of moonlight lit up their boat, revealing the absence of the ferryman. A splash of pitch black water surrounding them was the only evidence he might have been there at all.
What was going on?
She cast her sense out, searching for the ferryman, but she didn’t dare use qi to peer beneath the water’s surface.
A howl broke the silence, distant and eerie, and a dozen more echoed in response from far closer. Too close.
Then the water began to glow.
Beneath the placid surface, ghostly arms of white and blue ripped themselves free of the sand and stretched upward like blooming flowers. They lit up the sea for a dozen meters in every direction, fading in intensity to a wispy nothing outside the circle of moonlight, as if their inner light was only reflecting its rays.
As one, they pivoted to face west and reached down, grabbing fistfulls of seafloor.
Jian braced herself, flooding her body with qi, ready to grab Striga and jump.
Then the arms fled.
They crawled away, dragging themselves along the seafloor to the west. They reached and grasped desperately, hand over hand, pulling themselves away. Some moved in clumps, as if connected to a single massive body just beneath the earth, while others haphazardly moved over one another in their haste.
They didn’t get very far.
The dim lights beyond the moonlight's boundary began to wink out, torn through and ripped apart by an invisible force. A new chorus of howls rang out, suddenly all around them, just out of sight, and the water frothed and splashed with movement.
Jian reached out to the shadows surrounding them, straining to figure out what was out there, but whatever they were kept slipping through her fingers. The sound of her blood rushing through her veins filled her ears. The dark was supposed to be her ally, an extension of her own senses, but something out there resisted her claim, kept her from feeling anything but flashes.
Coarse fur and hot breath, a flash of a long flank and the contour of a powerful shoulder, pointed ears and the brush of a tail. She could feel them out there, a dozen, almost two, but she couldn’t hold a single one fully in her mind’s eye before they disappeared again.
A wolf stepped out of the shadows, silent and still even as the sounds of the hunt continued just out of sight. It was massive, easily taller than she was at the shoulder, tall enough that its entire body was held above the water. It looked at her with piercing yellow eyes, and she could feel something else looking at her through them.
Jian grunted as the moonlight suddenly gained weight, pushing down on her as something bigger than her finally turned its eye and noticed her.
A splash to her right was all the warning she got before another wolf leapt at her. She caught its paws on the edge of her sword, its claws held at bay, but she couldn’t stop the sheer weight of the blow.
Waves exploded outward as the boat was shoved down to bounce off the seafloor.
For an instant, Jian was surrounded by walls of water on all sides. They hung in the air, shoved aside and waiting for gravity to reclaim them.
Before they could, she pulled a second sword from her sleeve and jumped. She caught the wolf on the ribs, her sword digging into its flesh even as she shoved its full half ton of weight into the air.
She tossed the sword in her right hand up above them and grabbed Striga from where she was suspended in the air, still just beginning to fall. She cradled the girl’s back and neck, pulling her up as gently as she could to prevent whiplash.
Gravity finally caught up to her movement and water rushed back in, catching the bottom of the boat and tossing it up at them like a cork. It hit Jian’s feet like a sledgehammer, but she bent her knees to absorb the blow and jumped again, dodging the spray of water that followed and pulling Striga even higher.
The sword she’d tossed melted into a glob of blood and spread out through the air like a pane of red glass. She focused and fixed it in place, hanging a few meters above the water’s surface, before landing on it and dropping Striga at her feet.
Sweat beaded on Jian’s face. She’d done something similar in the heat of combat with Erichthonius, creating a static bar of blood to use as a hand-hold, but repeating it on a larger scale was more difficult, harder to visualize. The platform of blood wavered, circular ripples pulsing out from where she stood on it, a visible sign of her struggle to keep it stable.
This was the third option she’d been considering before the ferryman had shown up on the horizon. She didn’t trust the technique enough to cross the sea with it, but right now she didn’t have a choice. Being able to create your own footing was invaluable in a fight like this, so she’d just have to make do.
She whipped the remaining blood sword to her side and it stretched out, lengthening to almost three meters before it rang with the sound of a hammer striking an anvil.
With the second strike, the red color of blood was replaced with gleaming bronze. With the third, a large bladed crossguard sprouted from the end, rippling as blood faded to bronze.
She spun the greatspear in her hand as the second wolf leaped at her.
She pushed her left foot through the platform of blood she stood on, hooking it on the underside for leverage as she swung the spear down with both hands. It smashed into the wolf like a meteor, launching back down towards the water even as the impact traveled up the spear’s haft and numbed her hands.
The platform of blood shattered for a moment, but Jian focused and it reformed half a meter below them.
The fall knocked the breath out of Striga, but she was fine, and Jian landed easily. She looked at the spear in her hands, examining it for cracks. Erichthonius’s weapons had only lasted three “good hits”, but he had been trying to replicate weapons of legend, wells of power far beyond his own standing.
Jian, on the other hand, had just created something simple, but solid. She could feel her qi flowing through it smoothly. Just as potent as her weapons made of blood, but more solid. Weightier, with less maintenance.
It would crack eventually, the forgery breaking to reveal the truth underneath, but it could handle beating back some wolves.
Jian smiled. She wondered what a wolf’s soul tasted like.
Two wolves leapt from the shadows on either side of her and she spun, her spear flashing out. She slapped the butt of the spear into the first one’s shoulder, knocking it down even as she brought the tip around to spear through the second one’s gut, catching it with the crossguard and shoving it away from her.
A third wolf jumped from where it had been crawling under the water, but it wasn’t jumping at her. It got beneath the first falling wolf and let its body be used as a springboard, allowing the first wolf to jump back at her.
She yanked the spear from the second wolf’s guts, but the wolf was too fast, there was no time to swing it around.
So she dropped it.
She held out her hand as a shield, letting the wolf’s teeth sink into it. Sharp teeth split her skin and muscle, grinding bones to pieces, but it held the wolf in place long enough for her fist to slam into the side of its head, caving in its skull and freeing her mangled arm.
She reached out and caught the corpse by the throat before it could fall. Her ruined arm was already healing, but she focused on pulling each and every drop of blood she’d shed back towards her. Even torn flesh lodged between fangs melted into liquid and was ripped from the wolf’s mouth. She didn’t want any piece of her to fall into the water below if she could help it, she couldn’t risk drawing even more attention.
She pinned her spear under her foot as she held the corpse with her good arm and shook out the other, the holes and gashes filling in and leaving smooth skin behind even as the leftover gore melted into the platform beneath her feet and strengthened it.
Her teeth closed over the wolf’s neck and she tasted the Hunt, of running through moonlit forests and the unity of a pack moving as a single organism. She felt the gentle touch of her Lady and the loyalty and devotion that welled up in response. She saw a man kneeling in an open clearing, his heart broken, seeking solace as he lifted a prayer and reached out to a higher power. He offered himself in exchange for a new start, a new form, a new life. A simpler life. An exchange. A contract. A prayer.
Jian dropped the wolf and moved her hand on instinct, pushing aside the stolen memories to pull a gleaming bronze shield from her sleeve’s shadow just in time to catch-
The shield shattered like glass, pelting her face with shards that cut her skin and evaporated into smoke as a white arrow flipped away end-over-end into the darkness.
That was bad.
Wolves she could deal with, even as absurdly strong as these were, but an arrow meant a Hero.
Damn it, she thought she’d have more time. Had the ferryman been a trap the whole time?
She kicked the spear back up into her hand as a new wave of wolves flooded towards her. The sounds of their hunt in the background had started to die down as the pack turned and focused on her, turning the Shallow Sea’s surface into a sea of black fur as they ran and leapt over each other to get to her.
She didn’t understand what was going on.
And that was infuriating.
She stood over Striga and spun the spear in a flurry of sweeping blows, knocking the wave of black fur away each time it tried to swell towards them. A wolf took a bite of her and she took another back, ripping out its soul and feeding, pushing aside the images of a woman crushed by debt and poor choices and letting it fuel her. She moved faster, swung harder-
She felt another arrow cut through the night behind her. She spun, pulling another shield from her sleeve, already knowing she was too late, too slow, to block. She threw the shield instead, using the momentum to twist her body, if she could at least avoid a head-shot then-
An ink-stained hand shattered the sky and caught the arrow.
“Enough.”
The Deicide stepped through a crack in the air, shards falling around her like glass, and the moonlight recoiled in fear.
The white light of the moon winked out as the night sky was replaced by day. Black wolves froze in confusion and turned to run, suddenly smaller and exposed in the sunlight, their divine protection stripped away.
Jian took a step back, trembling, and tripped over Striga’s unconscious body to fall gracelessly on her back. Her platform of blood melted away, the focus needed to keep it solid evaporating, but she didn’t fall any further. She sat on the air in defiance of the world’s laws, simply because the Deicide willed it to be so.
It hurt to look at her now, evidence of a change that she had to assume meant Red was dead. The cracks that had once covered her body had been completely filled in by gleaming gold and the weight of her soul hung over Jian’s head like a blade waiting to fall, far heavier than the moon’s gaze had been. This was the Godsbane made whole. A woman who trampled on the World as easily as she breathed.
Violet eyes examined Jian and found her wanting.
“A mere three days and you somehow manage to bumble your way into three different Heroes. You must be trying to get yourself killed, you stupid child.”
Jian felt the jade mark on her face flare and burn, the bandages covering it disappearing in a flash of teal flames.
“You were watching the whole time.” She said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of course I was. It was a pathetic showing overall, but the start of a journey always is. I would’ve let you roam longer if you hadn’t put yourself in an unwinnable fight.”
A part of Jian instinctively wanted to object, to claim that she could have won, to argue that she had yet to show even a fraction of what she could do now, but pride wasn’t her vice. Instead she focused on the thing that truly burned.
“I was never free at all then.”
There was never any chance of reaching Elysium before the Deicide caught her. Her entire escape had just been an illusion. A trick.
The Deicide scoffed. “You’re as free as everyone else on this wretched rock. None of us will be free until the path to Heaven is unsealed.”
“Then why am I here at all!” Jian screamed. “Why let me think I’m free? Why not step in sooner?”
“You’re the one who left the tower. I don’t see why I should shield you from the consequences of your own decisions. I will not have a sword so brittle it cannot support its own weight. Are you so naive to ask for freedom and then complain when it’s given to you?”
“Except they weren’t my own decisions, were they? It was this damned brand provoking every God and Hero in the whole damned world. You almost got me killed, and I wasn’t even the only person to face the consequences of your actions.”
Jian looked at the child by her feet. She didn’t know when it had happened, but Striga had fallen unconscious from the sheer pressure of the qi in the air.
If the Deicide hadn’t pretended to let her go, or if she hadn’t placed the brand on her face for everyone to see, then Striga’s parents would still be alive.
The Deicide scoffed.
“Even when you’re brave enough to speak back, you reveal yourself a coward. I narrowed your options, but you were still the one to take them. Don’t bother pretending you care about the mortals’ deaths. Regardless of who paid it, a price was paid and you grew stronger as a direct result. I’ve seen enough of you to know that’s an acceptable outcome as far as either one of us is concerned.”
The Deicide stopped and looked up, watching as dark storm clouds began to gather quickly overhead, gradually blocking out the view of the sun crossing the white firmament above.
“Still,” she continued, “it appears it was too early to let you galavant around wherever you please. I will prepare a smaller garden for you to harvest; you can come back when you’re strong enough to survive on your own.”
As she finished speaking, the world was swallowed in a flash of light falling from the Heavens. The thunder crashed down after it an instant later, leaving Jian’s ears deaf and bleeding even as the bolt of lightning blinded her and singed her skin.
Jian staggered to her feet, blinking spots from her eyes. The Deicide stood with a bored expression on her face, her tail raised above her head and still sparking where it had blocked the lightning bolt. Her scales were cracked in places, but even as Jian looked they rippled and healed themselves, leaving them whole and shimmering.
“The Queen of Cowards grows impatient. Come, unless you’d rather stay here and face this land's gods on your own?”
Jian’s head was spinning. Too much had happened too quickly, but she knew the score. The only thing that would change if she tried to refuse would be a loss of dignity when she was dragged instead.
“Wait. I have a responsibility to this child. I’ll come with you if you guarantee her safety.”
The Deicide glanced back, violet eyes burning a hole through her before they flicked away.
“Very well, she will make a good lesson. You have my word I will not harm her.”
That wording was enough to make Jian hesitate, almost enough to make her leave Striga behind entirely. She could hope that the Hero with the white arrows wouldn’t kill a child for the crime of association, but she remembered Erichthonius. She remembered the look in his eyes and what the Heroes of this land could be like. She couldn’t trust in that hope.
If she could have one single piece of agency in this scenario, one choice that mattered, this would be hers.
In the end, she picked Striga up and walked through the gate.