Fa Lian was starting to be able to tell the difference between the rocks that made up the labyrinth. She was sure of it, though the others said that they didn’t see any change at any point. Maybe they weren’t as perceptive as she was. She knew it was a ridiculous thought even as she had it, looking at the back of Ah Dan’s head. Considering the boy could probably see her more clearly with his back turned than she could see him while staring right at him, perception was certainly not the deciding factor.
Maybe it was because she spent the most time of them all staring at the floor. Recently it had been hard to lift her eyes up past the shoes in front of her. Thoughts as heavy as steel weighed her brow and kept her downcast. Like invincible imps, pinching her eyes and poking her mind, questions that she didn’t want to ask floated around her mind. Fa Lian had never had any doubts like these before, and had no way to process them.
In her hands, the Dragon Bo felt cold and lifeless. The strange quarterstaff was no mere creation of woodcraft. It was comprised of a dark red material with no real comparison, there was nothing else in the world like dragonscale. Both soft and rigid at the same time, it was a comfortable thing to hold in your hands - so long as you made peace with the dragon within.
The burning heat that suffused the air around the staff was now frigid. The labyrinth itself was becoming colder as they continued. Ah Dan said that he was making a map in his head, and they all just had to trust that, Lian supposed. The other two were basically attached to each other, and that pair was definitely happy to follow Ah Dan around as a puppy does to their mother, but Lian was becoming increasingly bothered.
“Where are we going, Leader?” While the other two had dropped the moniker, Lian had leaned into it. They had been in the labyrinth for days now, though it was hard to tell the exact amount of time when the light only changed based on the room they were in. “We’ve avoided so many rooms it feels like we’re just going to live in the hallways.”
She was getting tired, in both her legs and her mind, so Lian didn’t have the energy to hold back the spite that coloured her words. What did it matter to her anyway? She didn’t have anywhere to go, anywhere to return to. Dan had taken that from her just by existing. Her mark upon her family’s history was now a large question mark, instead of the tapestry she had assumed it would be.
“Feel free to lead the way.” Ah Dan stopped walking, turned and fixed his silver eyes on Fa Lian. She felt a pang of strange emotion every time he looked at her and she was starting to see that at least a part of it was guilt. The scars around his eyes still seemed angry, though the boy himself looked at her and seemed at peace. His outstretched arm felt like both a challenge and a taunt, so Fa Lian stalked forward, a confused anger within.
Now at the front of the pack, Fa Lian found she had chosen an interesting point to make her stand. There were three paths, all looking identical save for the incline. To the left, the path sloped down, to the right it had a gentle rise. The path ahead looked like even ground. Without any additional insight, nor the willingness to ask for any advice that could be given, Fa Lian made her decision.
“Is this the right way?” Hyun Soon asked from behind, much to Fa Lian’s annoyance. She had chosen the right path, directionally at least. The slight slope did not make their journey harder and if they were to escape from this underground maze eventually then going up made the most sense.
“There is no right way.” Fa Lian emphasised her words with a smack on the floor, the solid Dragon Bo making a loud snap as the butt hit the ground. Fa Lian turned quickly and faced the three others. “Whether it was that dwarf, or my grandmother, or even the empty god themselves who said it, Ah Dan is not the chosen one. He doesn’t know everything.”
“I’m right here.”
“If only you weren’t.” Fa Lian hated the words before they even came out of her mouth but she had no way to stop them. She hated him for the change he had brought to her life. Underneath that was the guilt. It wasn’t his fault, and he bore scars that could have easily been her own. What was underneath the guilt? Something she couldn’t look at. Not now, while there was never a moment to think.
The walk onwards continued to get colder and colder, both in temperature and conversation. If the others were talking, Lian couldn’t hear them. Whatever whispers they might have weren’t reaching her, and they wouldn’t have bothered her anyway. She was Guan Fa Lian and despite how different things looked right now, she was the daughter of a Patriarch. It was her right to lead, and in doing so she would prove that Ah Dan was no more useful or special than she was.
Listening intently - not for whispers - Lian did notice the sounds first. Taking a small measure of joy in the fact that she was the first to hear them and not Ah Dan, she had everyone stop. The sounds of a pitched battle were obvious as they waited just down the hall and Lian listened intently. Up ahead, there was a curve in the hall which led to a larger room.
“What are we doing?” Dan asked from behind her, plucking at her taut concentration. It sounded like more than ten people in the next room. Fa Lian was at the edge of frustration and couldn’t hear his willingness to help as anything other than facetious nose thumbing.
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“You’re staying here. I’m going to see what’s wrong.” Without waiting for response, which she expected would be some form of argument, Lian moved forward.
At the “doorway” to this “room” were two statues. Fine carvings of a humanoid, except instead of a human’s head, there was a stag’s, complete with antlers. Both of the deer people statues had a large stone halberd in their hands, held at ease to their side. Although they were not in aggressive stances, she hesitated under their unmoving gaze.
Like a metallic snapping of the fingers, the clash of weapons dragged Lian out of her stupor and took her attention from the statues. For the first time in days, maybe a week, the Dragon Bo warmed in her hands. At the same moment, her soul stone, hopefully ignored by Lian for as long as she could, also rumbled. While she took the staff’s activation as a good thing, Lian couldn’t help wondering what it said that her mother’s soul stone agreed with the dragon.
Rounding the corner as stealthily as possible, Lian chanced a glance backwards. The sheep were following at a distance she was happy with. Once last signal to them to stay before Lian entered the “room”. Lian had never seen a space like it, even in her visit to the capital of the Shin empire in her youth. Then, as she dove behind a pillar as quickly as possible, she gaped.
With a collection of what must have been hundreds of pillars, a huge stadium surrounded an occupied battlefield. Covering an area at least half of a mile, the floor was a compact mix of sand and dirt. In the middle of this grand space, still a fair distance from Lian herself, a cacophonous battle was raging. Still, the massive ringed arena seemed far too quiet for the amount of seats there were. Lian felt an eerie chill creep down her neck at the sight of all those empty places. What is this place?
An arena of death, she quickly decided. The scale of the combat she was now cowering from made the huge zone feel far too small all of a sudden. Showers of sparks and bursts of sound and heat exploded seemingly at random in the sky, on the ground and anywhere in between - so long as it remained within the circular stadium.
As though reacting to the surge of power from around her, the Dragon Bo ignited. She was quickly reminded that she was not the owner of this staff, merely the wielder of its power. The dragon within had no master, and right now, it was feeling challenged and aggressive.
Good. So am I.
Lian gripped the increasingly hot shaft, her hands started to singe and her skin boiled. She responded with gritted teeth and ferocity. There was a trial every step of the way, apparently but Lian had never failed at anything in her life and she wasn’t going to start now. With gritted teeth and the resolve to prove her own worth, she planted the dragon in the soft ground, never once letting go of the burning scales.
A battle was raging within and without. What was she to do? The fire raging in her mind said to both run and hide, while a draconic, competitive voice in her mind was also screaming at her to jump into the frey and prove herself. Indecision bubbled and boiled within. Then, Lian asked herself “what would Dan do?”
And did the opposite.
An inferno leapt from Lian, a gout of flame erupting from the tip of the Dragon Bo and her own mouth at the same time. Feeling every bit the dragon that she held in her hands, Lian turned the gout towards the raging battle, intending to interrupt and force attention onto herself. Guan Fa Lian the lost human in the labyrinth would have happily been ignored, but she did not feel like that person right now. She felt like a dragon.
If she could see herself, she would have seen that her green eyes were illuminated. That around her eyebrows and down to the ridge of her nose, her skin became redder and harder. Her dark, straight black hair began to rise as though pushed by an updraft, itself igniting into a dark storm of flame.
Fa Lian saw none of this. The temperature of the weapon in her hands became cool once more. Unbeknownst to Fa Lian, a trial had been given to her and she had completed it instantly.
The only one capable of seeing the dramatic change in her was Ah Dan. He and the others had crept into the room moments after Lian had turned to see and now watched in a mixture of confusion and horror. To his mana sense, Lian’s usually dark aura had exploded with light. An inverting of her normal appearance to his sight, it worried him greatly. However, interrupting her right now was a much more terrifying prospect. Ah Dan could only hope that Lian knew what she was doing.
As Lian’s dragonbreath alighted the battleground around her, the thunderous clashes of weapons stopped quickly. At once, four figures dropped to the ground, the combatants ceasing their activity to see this new development. Humanoids they were but no humans were amongst them. There were three males, two demons and a dwarf, and one very tall woman.
“What do we have here? We booked the space, troublemaker.” With an exotic accent, one of the men spoke. His voice trilled and he rolled his r’s, but it was not the man’s speech that stopped Lian in her tracks and caused her to narrow her eyes.
The man was a demon. She had seen a few of their kind over the years and had avoided them as best she could. Bedtime tales from wet nurses about how a demon might eat your toes as soon as look as you had kept her on edge, even around dignitaries of the wasteland bordering Guan lands which the demons call home. She knew that they were not monsters, but tensions had never been easy with them either.
“I asked a question.” With the last word of his sentence, he raised his voice. The force of his final word buffeted Lian, pushing her back enough that she had to brace on her back leg. This brought a snarl to her lips which she did not try to hold back. In her hands, the staff rumbled in approval. A dragon does not cower.
“I am Guan Fa Lian, daughter of Guan Po Dia.” With all the pride she could bring to her voice, Lian introduced herself. “You are the first people I have met in this evil place that might be able to assist me. I am looking for my brother.” Upon hearing the words “booked the space”, Lian had realised that this must be territory of some kind and that it might be possible to finally find a lead to her brother.
Not that she had gone about it the right way.
The group scoffed as one, a collection of laughs all expressing the shocked surprise of an adult being told what to do by a child. The woman stepped forward confidently. She was a collection of muscles doing its best job at pretending to be a person, Lian thought. When she spoke, the high pitch of it surprised Lian.
“You’re interrupting practice.” The woman was tall. Her features were beautiful, now that Lian could see them up close. She was too angular and statuesque to be anything other than an elf but Lian had thought elves were meant to be flowery and waifish. Not brutish and terrifying. “We don’t know your brother.”
“Maybe we do, maybe we don’t,” the pale blue demon spoke again, “either way, we don’t give out freebies to kids. Run along back to the city.”
“City?” Fa Lian nearly snarled again, sucking in air through fiercely clenched teeth. Ah Dan stepped out from behind one of the pillars, putting the whole group on edge and taking control from Lian once again. “Do you mean… Allusia?”