“What the fuck was that!”
The room, and its infinite walls, shook under the Deicide’s fury. Jian caught herself on the table, the floor jumping out from under her feet, and did her best to stay upright.
The Woman in Red just laughed as jade claws wrapped around her neck..
“What other conclusion am I supposed to draw!” The Deicide shouted. “A boy falls from The Infinite Heavens, and you didn’t even notice?”
It wasn’t a question, and the Woman in Red didn’t answer. She didn’t even stop laughing.
The Deicide’s fist closed. There was a sound, wet and grinding.
With no neck to support it, the Woman’s head fell to the floor and rolled towards Jian, still laughing.
***
When Jian’s vision returned, she found herself slumped over the table, facing the ground. She wasn’t sure how long it had been, maybe just a second, maybe a few minutes. There were cracks in the walls and the floor, cracks that didn’t lead anywhere, cracks that she hastily looked away from as the pressure in her head built to a crescendo.
She blinked, trying to figure out what happened, until she came to the only conclusion that made sense.
The Deicide had screamed.
That was all it took, when a god refused to restrain itself.
Jian wanted to move, to stand, to run away, but she didn't dare. The most powerful person she’d ever met was throwing a tantrum like a toddler and there was nothing she could do about it.
Except to stay very, very still.
The floor jolted again, cracks widening, and the Woman in Red’s head rolled into her field of view.
It winked at her.
The floor jolted again.
Jian glanced to the side, moving only her eyes, and saw the Deicide bring her foot down on the Woman’s body.
“He was right there!” She screamed.
The room shook.
“You walked right past him!”
The woman’s body was pushed deeper into a widening crater in the floor.
“Did you not think he was interesting enough!?”
It was barely recognizable as the same body anymore.
“Did you not see him!?”
Limbs had flown off, severed or crushed, no longer connected to the torso.
“You didn’t feel his qi!?”
The Woman’s shoulder liquified under the pressure, reduced to a thin red paste.
“Worthless!”
The Woman’s head was still laughing. It had never stopped.
“Waste!”
The room shook.
“Of!”
The Woman laughed.
“Time!”
With a final stomp, the Deicide stopped, hunched over her mirror image’s ruined body, her breathing uneven and shaky. She stayed that way a moment longer, before exhaling. She stood back up with a single deep breath, and she took something from the Woman’s body with her.
The laughter finally stopped, sucked out of the Woman in Red’s body along with a stream of thin red threads. Between one movement and the next the Deicide was suddenly changed. More whole.
It happened too quickly for Jian to catch every change, but some were obvious. Her jade horns were now unbroken, coming to a gleaming points as long as her hand. The white cracks across her body and dress had partially filled in by something that looked like bronze. Thin red lines now danced through the ink covering her hands, and red whorls appeared on her dress as if they had always been part of its weave. Her jade eyes had flecks of red in their depths.
“Fine.” The Deicide said, her voice smooth and calm. “I’ll do it myself.”
She flickered across the room and Jian hastily looked away. Ink slick fingers pressed against Jian’s neck and her jaw, forcing her head upwards. She averted her gaze beyond the Deicide’s head, desperately avoiding meeting her eyes. She had no desire to match souls with the monster.
“The pretense was pointless, but it was smart to reveal the boy to me.” The Deicide spoke directly into her ear. She was pressed so close that she expected to feel warm air, but the Deicide’s breath was cold. “You’ve made yourself more valuable, beyond what your corpse alone would offer. I’ll permit you to try to leave. To escape, as you view it. The attempt shall be your reward.”
Her thumb idly brushed against Jian’s cheek, leaving a jade streak that burned. “ I don’t think you’ll succeed,” she said, “but you’ve earned your chance.”
Then she turned away and took a step.
The air shattered as she walked through it, cracks blooming through the room as if it were glass. Between one instant and the next the fabric of space yielded to brute force, and then she was gone.
Even after she left, Jian stayed still, afraid the Deicide would return and reveal her departure as a trick. It wouldn’t make any sense, it was completely irrational, but still, she waited.
A moment passed, and then two, without anything happening.
In the end it was almost a full minute before she finally convinced herself the woman was gone.
She looked around the room, with its infinitely tall walls covered by diamond shaped shelves and a floor littered with ruined pieces of potentially priceless art. Once again, she noted there were no doors. The Deicide had just proven why she didn’t need them.
That left her with only one idea on how to leave.
Before she could convince herself otherwise, she reached down and picked up the Woman in Red’s head. Her hands were shaking.
“Are you still alive, honored one?”
The head cracked one eye open and closed it again. “Nope. She got me good. Look at how dead I am.”
Jian ignored it.
“Please, tell me how to leave this place.”
The head laughed and Jian couldn’t stop herself from flinching. She would be hearing that laugh in her nightmares for weeks. It opened its eyes fully, though Jian was careful not to stare into them again.
“Why would I do that?” It said.
“There’s clearly no love lost between the two of you. It seems a… choice opportunity to slight her will.” Jian hoped she was judging the woman’s attitude correctly, before adding. “To piss her off.”
“Good point! I suppose it’ll be fun to give you a bit of a head start.”
Before Jian could react to the poor joke, the head smiled and jumped out of her hands. It spun through the air and landed in the crater with the mangled remains of its body. Blood streamed from the walls and the floor, forming a sphere in the center of the crater, before melting back down into the shape of the Woman in Red.
“You’re paler than before.” Jian noted. The Woman’s skin and dress had become noticeably pink instead of the deeper shades of crimson they’d been earlier. “She took something from you. Vibrancy?”
“Well yeah, of course she did, what do you think I am?”
Jian hesitated. “Originally, I thought you an Echo of Longing, but you’re too strong. Her sister maybe? The stories never mentioned an Immortal sister, but-”
“Wrong.” She interrupted. “Truly, modern standards of education only continue to disappoint me.”
“Something else then?”
“I’m a Heart Demon.” The woman said, her grin splitting her face in two as her mouth stretched unnaturally wide.
Jian took a step back.
“That’s not-”
“Possible? I thought I already told you to expect the impossible.”
“Heart Demons aren’t real. They’re a deviation in your qi, a symptom of your heart pushing your soul out of alignment. They’re an ailment. A metaphor.”
“And what exactly do you think you are?” It chuckled, and Jian flinched. “Do you imagine you're still a person? Confined to a fleshy shell? If an Immortal starts thinking their heart has turned against them, you shouldn’t be surprised when it gets up and walks away.”
The back of Jian’s thighs bumped into the table. This may have been a bad idea.
“In a very physical way,” the demon continued, stepping closer, “I am a metaphor. I am her rage and her ambition, her drive and her pain. Can you imagine devoting your life to something, to reaching the cusp of achieving it, and then getting swatted down like a fly? It emptied her. It broke ‘me’ and left behind ‘us’.”
The table legs screeched against the stone floor as Jian tried to take another step back, but there was nowhere to go. The demon reached up and cupped her face, just like the Deicide had, but with the opposite hand. Mirrored.
Oh, little lamb, don’t be scared. You’re the key to fixing all this. I’ll help you escape. I’ll even cover your tracks a bit. Then, when she returns, she’ll be filled with such a delicious cocktail of rage and hope. If you die, there will be more rage. If you survive, there will be more hope. Either way, it will push her to consume the rest of me, and ‘we’ will be ‘me’ again. A woman with the will to topple gods. It’s been so long, I can barely remember it. I miss it dearly.”
The demon hopped away with a twirl, throwing out her hands as she spun in joy. “So, let’s shuffle you off as soon as possible. No time like the present. You never know when she’ll come back, and we both know you don’t want to be here when she does.”
She crossed the room to a wall on Jian’s left and started pulling scrolls off of their shelves. She opened one, just enough to read something written along the top, and then tossed it over her shoulder onto the floor. She repeated that more than a few times, looking for something.
“Nope. No. Not that one. Definitely not. Oh, this could work!”
She turned and lobbed the scroll to Jian.
“Go ahead and open that one.”
Jian hesitantly complied. Then she frowned.
“What is a ‘feug9try58p’?”
“That’s just how she names them. She’s awful at names, so she usually just gives up and picks something random. Makes it a pain in the ass to organize.”
“How do you know this is a ‘good one’ then?”
“Perfect memory.” The demon said, tapping its head.
Jian wasn’t sure how to react to that, so she chose to ignore it. She opened the scroll further and her hand hitched, dropping the bottom end of the scroll to unfurl on its way to the floor. Every painting that she had seen haphazardly discarded on the floor was only rendered in black and white, often with large globs of ink or tears ruining them even before they were stepped on.
This was different.
She stared at the heart of a volcano. The overpowering shades of red and yellow stood out in stark contrast to obsidian black. The smell of brimstone cut through the air. The heat blasted her, drying out her skin instantly. The paper around her feet flapped with the rush of air. Something moved beneath the magma. Something large. A stony carapace shifted, breaking the surface.
The scroll was slapped out of her hand.
“Actually, nevermind. Not that one.”
The demon was smiling at her.
Jian bent down and picked up the scroll. Somehow it had curled itself back up. She turned it in her hands, opening it so that it faced away from her. There was nothing but blank paper on the back, and no blast of hot air shot out the other side. She closed it again.
“What was that?”
“Just a little mistake. Forgot we were keeping the little guy in there. Here, try this one instead.”
“Perfect memory.” Jian said dryly.
The demon’s smile grew, but it didn’t say anything to that. Arguing further didn’t seem smart, so Jian moved on.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“What I meant was, what are these?” She looked around her at the hundreds, perhaps thousands of scrolls she could see tucked away in the tower’s walls. “Is every one of these a… portal?”
“Of course not, they’re just paintings.”
“Paintings.”
“She’s very good at painting.”
“That was a place.”
“A Painted World. Yes.” The creature was enjoying being obtuse.
“That was a real place. A real world. Tucked inside a paper scroll? How?”
“As real as anything else you can perceive. She’s very good at painting.”
“If she can just… make a new world, why would she be so desperate to reach the Heavens? Why not paint a new world for every whim? Why would she need me?” That might’ve been too many questions. She was riding on bravado, indignation, and confusion to push herself to act, but she was starting to worry she was getting too comfortable speaking with a demon.
She at least kept herself from flinching when it laughed at her.
“Because she can’t. She can’t just pluck a novel landscape from her mind, paint it, and enter like an intrepid explorer discovering a new world.” The demon paused, thinking. “Well, actually, she could, but it would go against who she is and then she’d have an entirely different Heart Demon to contend with. Perhaps it would be a feasible way to spend eternity if she were the Immortal of Painting, but she isn’t. She’s the Immortal of Conquest, and so every scene archived in this tower is a real place that she has seen, understood, and, most importantly, conquered. For another, those conquests might be recorded as notches on a sword, or patches on a cape, but she has been painting for so many years, understood the art so completely, that when she renders those scenes in paint they are captured to the smallest detail. The Slaughter at Taijiao. The Battle of Baizhong’s Gorge. The Purge of The Greater Hells. The Assault on Acheron. They are all here, frozen in time, each one a trophy.”
Jian looked at the walls again. There were a lot of paintings.
The demon pointed at the scroll in her hands. “That one is from when she snuck into the Forge of Prometheus, deep in the heart of Mount Elbrus, and stole the bones of the Orochi.”
Jian dropped the scroll like it had bitten her.
“There’s a god inside this?”
The demon laughed. “No. She was still only a Terrestrial Immortal at the time, so she made sure Prometheus was away and occupied when she committed the theft. However, the Forge did have its own Guardian, a type of stone-skinned Shark that swam through the lava feeding the forge. You’d only need to walk a few steps to get away from this tower, but that thing would probably kill you before you get that far.”
Jian buried her frustration. She was being toyed with, but she didn’t dare object. “I see.” She choked out. “Perhaps another painting would serve us better?”
The demon smiled at her silently, but Jian could still hear the laughter behind it.
“Perhaps.” It said, handing her a new scroll.
Jian opened it tentatively, a new string of random characters and numerals greeting her. Snow fluttered off the page, landing gently on her face and revealing something strange. Her new body barely felt the cold. She felt the sensation itself, could easily identify it as cold and wet, but it was somehow separated from her. Compartmentalized.
She opened the scroll further, taking in a scenic mountain pass. It was nestled between two towering peaks and blanketed in a thick layer of snow. A stone ridge poked out of the snow, forming a natural path with a scattering of pine trees on either side, their branches weighed down by fluffy piles of snow. The wind whistled through the pass, lifting another brush of snow off the ground and across her face. If she had still been mortal, the cold would have been crippling, a frigid winter bite. As it was, it was only barely too cold to be pleasant.
It looked safe enough.
The Demon’s hand closed on her own, pulling her attention away.
“You asked why she needs you?” It asked.
Jian nodded.
“It shouldn’t be hard to understand. When you eat a soul, you add its strength to your own. Imagine what that means if you eat another Immortal? A God? A Titan? So long as you find enemies to match you, it could mean exponential growth. The Old Gods have already glutted themselves on a tithe of souls for millenia, how else can we hope to stand against them without such growth? If the Warden knew you existed, he would kill you on principle alone.”
Jian had no intention of fighting the Heavens, but decided it was wiser to keep her mouth shut when the madwoman was helping her escape.
“Just make sure you don’t die somewhere we can’t find your body.” The Woman continued, almost wistful. “Your bones will make for such a wonderful sword one day.”
Jian felt her knuckles grind together as the Woman tightened her grip for just a moment. Then she let go and stepped away, gesturing towards the painting.
Jian forced herself not to hyperventilate. She had to get out of here.
She went to take a step forward, unsure what would happen, but her legs didn’t move. Instead, the painting swelled in her mind’s eye, rushing towards her. It washed over her, surrounded her with frigid air and the crisp smell of pine.
She blinked and the painting was gone. All that remained was the world it had drawn her into.
She dropped her hands to her side, now empty. She turned around, but there was nothing there, no portal hanging in the air, only an endless expanse of winter that stretched on and on to a distant vanishing point. Smoke curled at the very edge of her sight, the source hidden below the horizon, indicating a town of some kind without showing it. The path ahead of her continued on, aimlessly and meandering, the ridge of stone curving to the side and transforming into a series of rocks poking from the white sea. It was more an impression of a path than a true trail.
Was she supposed to follow it? Turn and go to the town she couldn’t see?
“Demon?” She called out, searching. “What now?” She tried again, with no response. “How do I leave?”
Had she entered the painting physically? Or was her body still standing in that tower? The Demon had said this was a real space, a separate world from her own, nested inside the painting, but how did that work? Would traveling here equate to movement outside? Or would she come out in the same spot she’d entered?
The Demon had said it was the way out, so there must be an exit of some kind.
Unsure if she was desperate, resolved, or merely lacking any better ideas, she started following the path ahead of her. She walked the precise distance it would have taken to reach the walls of the tower from where she had entered the painting, and then doubled that distance. Then she doubled it again, just to be safe.
She looked around her then, but nothing had changed except the view. The trees she passed showed her a different angle, just as real as they had looked a minute ago. That proved they weren’t two dimensional at least. She bent down and scooped up a handful of snow, bringing it to her mouth. It tasted clean, untouched and pristine, and real to all of her senses.
That was when she heard the thunder.
She looked up at the clear sky.
The thunder didn’t stop, it just continued rumbling without pause or breaks.
“You don’t have much time left.”
Jian spun. The Demon stood at her side, its red eyes focused on the mountain pass and its curving slopes. It had not been standing there a moment ago.
“I’ll jump through the door as soon as you show it to me.”
It turned and smiled at her. “Let this be a lesson. Always look before you leap.”
Jian looked up at the pass. “Why do I not have much time left?”
The thunder was getting louder.
“Because of the avalanche, of course.”
The wave of snow and grit chose that moment to fall into view, flooding out of a gap between the mountains that she hadn’t noticed, like a river that grew wider with every moment.
“Oh. I see.”
Her eyesight was better than it had used to be. Incomparably better. She could see the front of the avalanche. She could see the trees uprooted or crushed by the force of the snow. She could see where the pure white snow had been mixed with the dirty browns and grays of rock and grit. She could see boulders riding the crest of snow like a wave. Maybe she could survive that. In fact, she was confident she could.
But she did not want to find out.
“You said this world is real, and it feels real, but there must be a way out.”
“Is that what I said?”
“No.” Jian frowned. “You said it was as real as anything else I could perceive.”
The avalanche was growing closer. They had a minute, maybe two.
Jian kept her voice steady, unpanicked.
“Is that the key? My perception? Is this world less real, because of it, or is the real world just a painting itself, painted by She Who Slumbers?”
“In a way, it’s both.”
Jian waited, but the Demon did not elaborate.
“In a way, how does that help me?” She said, almost biting her tongue.
“It is real, but less real. It is a world, but it is only a painting. You have to look at a painting to experience it.”
The avalanche was growing closer. They had a minute, maybe less.
Jian closed her eyes. She mostly understood, but not enough. She ignored the cold air against her skin. She ignored the smell of pine in her nose. She ignored the sound of thunder that wasn’t thunder.
The Demon took mercy on her.
“This world is a painting.” It continued. “Even if it is wrought by a master, the feelings it evokes in you are only as real as you let your mind perceive them to be.”
“Stop perceiving.”
Ignoring wasn’t enough. Jian reached inside her body and cut off her senses, one by one. The cold disappeared, along with the pressure under her feet. The taste of unbroken snow faded from her tongue. The smell of pine and stone and snow fled her nose. Her eyes saw nothing. Her ears heard nothing, not even a heartbeat.
“Start painting.”
The Avalanche was not any closer, because there was no avalanche. There was nobody standing next to her. There was nothing in the world that Jian could perceive.
There was no shadow at her feet, for there was no sun to cast it, but she could feel a shadow inside of herself. One cast by the void where her heart had once been. She had thought being heartless meant her chest was empty, but that wasn’t quite true. It was filled by the shadows it cast, even if shadows had no weight or substance. Shadows were defined by absence, but she carried them anyway. They were just as real as any painting.
She found the shadows in the core of her soul, nestled beneath the layers she built, and she pulled it to the surface, letting the shape of it bubble just beneath her skin.
Warmth covered her ankles, something thick and viscous lapping against them like waves. She kept her eyes closed, but the world was inside her and she didn’t need eyes to see it.
She stood in a shallow sea of blood, the taste of iron carried in the air. It stretched out, unbroken except for the ripples of small waves carrying her will from one side of the world to the next. A great red root broke through the sky and curled in the shape of a moon, and she knew that it had once glowed a brilliant emerald green. Now it hung heavy and burdened, bleeding red red light without illuminating anything. Maybe it would still be verdant and vibrant if she had let herself be broken. If she had saved a life worth saving. She examined the world she was building inside her soul.
She found it lacking.
It felt too empty, too young, but there was nothing else to see and no hidden strength to draw on. This was what she had to work with, so that’s what she’d do.
She took a step forward.
That single step nearly knocked her out. She opened her eyes and let her inner world fall away, staggering to her knees. She was exhausted in a way she’d never felt before. Her inner world had been strange, but it had still been her, in a way that made it instantly and deeply understandable.
What she tentatively still thought of as the ‘real world’ was not so easy to understand.
She forced herself back to her feet and turned around, unwilling to confront the next step quite yet.
The tower she had left rose behind her, looming over her, massive and ponderous, before the smooth ivory curved away from her, defying what she knew of its interior. It was flanked on either side by several nearly identical pillars, all curving towards another row of pillars on the far side of the island, but some had cracked and crumbled, exposing lines of black lead that dripped like blood. Other massive structures poked out of the lifeless gray dirt, but the sheer scale of what she was looking at stopped her from making sense of it, until she saw the skulls.
This was a graveyard.
The tower itself was only a single rib, on a deific scale.
The skeleton was half buried, the jutting ridges of ivory to her left merely the tips of massive fingers. The right half of the skull had been caved in and shattered, a gleaming spear of artfully crafted jade sprouted from the ruined eye socket and dwarfing the ribs. Here and there the skulls of massive serpents were latched onto the decayed corpse, locked into place when they had held down a Titan for the Deicide's final blow, the rest of their bones scattered and littering the island as they'd been torn apart.
Jian shuddered.
She could not stay here, under such a terrifying shadow. To leave was almost more daunting, but she had no choice. She steeled herself, turned, and looked into madness.
The island ended abruptly ten paces from where she stood. She walked to its edge, looking down where the gray dirt crumbled away. The sheer edge curved down and under the island, like a clump of dirt scooped up by the hand of a child.
It floated on nothing.
The island created a clear boundary, like a curtain separating mythology from impossibility. The space beyond it was dark and empty, yet woven through with every color she knew and several she didn't. It was antithetical to her. It wasn’t a darkness that hid or protected, but one that hadn’t yet decided what it should be. A nothing that could become anything. It was chaos.
Or maybe it was potential.
She pushed her hand forward, slipping into the chaos with a ripple.
Her hand was flash frozen, and then boiling hot, and then dehydrated, and then split in pieces like it had been carved through by warped mirrors. She pulled her hand back with a hiss of pain, shaking it out as the skin bubbled red. With each shake skin grew and bones snapped back into place, until by the third shake her hand was whole and unblemished again.
That was not ideal.
She looked down as the ground beneath her feet began to rumble, dirt jumping in place with the force of the vibrations. A hasty glance behind her showed white vertebrae rising into the air, a serpent's skull shifted as its bones grew closer. A blue light shone somewhere in the skull’s depths.
She was out of time.
She threw herself off the island, closing her eyes tight. She followed the thread of her soul down to her inner world and yanked it back towards the surface, pushing it outward until she felt like she would burst.
For a moment, she felt her outer layer of skin boil and freeze, but then the void touched the substance of her soul, and it drank like a man dying of thirst. It was desperate for something to become, and her soul gave it a new shape. Her inner world pushed past the boundaries of her body, forcing the void into something real.
She landed in an ankle deep puddle of blood, her feet held up by something hard and unyielding. The platform she'd created only stretched out a couple paces from her body, but as she took a step, the world moved with her. She could feel the same exhaustion creeping in that she'd felt when escaping the painted world, but it was duller, easier to manage with the void's malleability doing half the work.
Easier was not easy, but it was all she had.
She took another step.
***
She didn't know how long she had been walking. Her soul had started to ache at some point, a pain beyond exhaustion and penetrating deeper than her bones, but that didn't matter. She would keep going as long as she had to.
She took another step.
***
She felt the void press down on her, chafing against her soul every time she moved. Blood dripped down her calves to join the puddle around her feet. Her foot came up. Her foot came down.
She took another step.
***
She could feel the sea of blood she was walking through start pulling at her legs, as if it were being swept down a drain somewhere. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she didn't need to. She wasn't done yet.
She took another step.
***
She felt her world flicker and shrink. For a moment, the void touched her shoulder, blackening it with frostbite instantly. It cracked when she moved, pieces of skin flaking off and leaking red pus. She pushed her soul back in place, lifting the void off of her shoulder. To stop walking was to die, and she would not allow that.
She took another step.
***
The pull was getting stronger. She’d almost been swept off her feet but the current. She understood what it was now. It was her hunger, gnawing at her, breaking her focus. She was pushing herself too far, eating herself alive to keep going. She needed to go faster.
She took another step.
***
Her body refused to move, but she refused to accept that. She narrowed her focus, pulling her world in tighter, tight enough that the void brushed against her with every flicker of strength. A patch of skin on her elbow evaporated into pink dust, but it didn't matter. She pushed her foot forward through the riptide, struggling to keep her footing. The only thing that mattered was the next step. It didn't matter how many came after, she could handle a single step. And then the next, and the next, and the next.
She took another step.
***
She blinked blood from her eyes and realized she was hallucinating. She could see someone, standing on a new island in the void, a thousand li away or more. Their body was a work of art, dots of light shining off skin as black as night, stretched taut over rippling muscle. Their shoulders pressed up against the roof of a massive cavern, their body hunched beneath it. They towered over her, dwarfing her, their head so far away she could not see their face.
For the first time, Jian saw the constellations of the world she'd been born to. She had thought they had fled the night sky, but she found them here, holding up the earth.
"You're almost there, child. Do not stop."
Jian ignored it. She had no intention of stopping.
She took another step.
***
How long had it been? She couldn’t remember.
She took another step.
***
She took another step.
***
She took another step, and fell into something cold.