It was warm, and it was dark.

Everyone started someplace warm, and dark, and swaddled. At least every person, maybe there were not-persons born from cold eggs of stone. Kun Si wondered if she had died, was this where everyone went when they died?

Warm and dark and safe again.

It was so easy to lose yourself in it.

“Hello again, Kun Si.”

The first thing she saw was Qin Xiulan’s face. Her vision had suddenly returned, as though someone had removed a blindfold. Kun Si still found herself unable to move, whatever was drowning her in such pleasant warmth was also entirely restricting her movements. Studying herself, she found that she had been tightly wrapped in Xiulan’s robe, and her fellow disciple was adorned with only a dull gray tunic. The modest attire was not enough to diminish her beauty, and the drabness of her wear only served to accentuate how striking her features were.

“Hello, Qin Xiulan. I thought I had died.”

“Don’t you mean that you thought I had killed you?”

Xiulan’s eyes were bore deep into Kun Si’s, their pale gold gleaming with crimson.

“No, I simply thought that I had died.”

At the words, the wicked light in Xiulan’s eyes abated. Her face settled into an easy smile and she reached into what seemed to be thin air before producing a small pouch. Kun Si quirked her head to the side at the apparent immaculate conception of a water skin. Xiulan caught the movement and gestured toward a smooth metallic band adorning the ring finger of her left hand.

“Spatial ring.”

Her erstwhile foe and now-while caretaker raised the pouch to Kun Si’s lips and let the contents slosh into her mouth. She would have preferred water, but instead she was met with a bitter almost caustic liquid. Despite its lack of heat, it seemed to scald her insides as it went down. Kun Si’s face twisted into a grimace, but it was quickly replaced by a placid smile as a pleasant sensation spread throughout her body.

“Drink your medicine properly.”

Xiulan’s voice had lacked its earlier commanding air, but it naturally returned when the girl was giving instruction. Less suggestion or even order the words were closer to edict or decree.

“Okay.”

Kun Si was quite comfortable, she saw little reason to protest when she was so delightfully warm. Xiulan sank to the ground beside her, leaning her back against a wall that seemed in a state of desperate disrepair. Cracks spiderwebbed their way across the surface, and as Kun Si wheeled her eyes around the room she found that the entire structure looked just inches away from collapse. This wasn’t the house that they had been assigned, as shattered as it had been by Xiulan’s final attack; that place was both more spacious and more secure.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, you know. I was too injured to defend my territory so we were forced to retreat here.”

Was her face so easy to read?

“Yes.”

Xiulan so easily anticipated her thoughts. Kun Si thought of mulberry trees, and sharpshooters, and the way that sun poked through the trees.

“You’re not thinking of anything important now.”

Kun Si guessed that was true.

“In any case,” a flick of wrist and the silken swaddle that had so snugly protected Kun Si flew off her person and returned to Xiulan. The garish wound that wound its way down her entire torso had mostly closed, though there was a fresh pink scar in its place. All her miscellaneous injuries had largely healed.

“Thank you.”

“There’s no need for verbal thanks.”

Xiulan’s look soured.

“It was, at best, a draw. Without the life-affirming abilities of my father’s cloth perhaps I would have lost.”

A smile, half-predatory half something else entirely. A baring of fangs, not in anger but in a sort of primal hunger. An anticipation. Xiulan grabbed Kun Si’s chin, and forced her to stare into her eyes. They had that same mad scarlet gleam they had flashed so briefly before. A light like a baleful sun, intense and focused and bone-chilling. Kun Si felt warm under that gaze, and drank in its attention without turning away. There was something so familiar in that gaze. She stared into Xiulan’s eyes almost the same way she had stared into Master’s. They had that same mad gleam, she wondered if they saw it themselves. But she saw it, reflected along the edge of their irides. A refraction of their being.

Xiulan was white and gold, embossing a red so deep it ran like lightning.

“It will have to wait until our surroundings have improved to something befitting of my stature.”

Her hand let go of Kun Si’s chin, but their eyes remained locked. Xiulan finally turned away, gazing into the setting sun whose rapidly dwindling light spilled across the dilapidated crawl space they had been reduced to inhabiting. A mutual reciprocal destruction had given them this fate, for now. Kun Si remembered being told that reciprocity was the key to friendship. A reciprocal misunderstanding, a reciprocal destruction.

Perhaps it could only be called friendship.

Xiulan huffed as she kicked the ground absentmindedly.

“I am in no state. And I assume you are little better?”

Kun Si shook her head. Her body felt like her body again, rather than two halves cleaved apart by Xiulan’s red ribbons, but she knew she was incomplete. There was no hum in the air, no feeling that she could grab onto. If she met the Xiulan she had fought previously now she was sure she would die. Just as she was sure she would die when she saw Xiulan standing over her in triumph.

Had it really been a draw?

She would just have to ponder it for a while. For however long.

With her friend, Qin Xiulan.