The sky was falling apart.

Chunks of the dark blue sky fell away, leaving only a blank empty void. Not white, not black but emptiness behind it. Dan watched it all from his strange vantage point. It made sense to him that he would stay where he is. Where else could you receive a view like this?

Stood on the precipice of a gargantuan cliff, Dan watched and waited for the world to end.

“It doesn’t end here, little rabbit. Even if you’re so scared that your heart stops, the world doesn’t end here.” The voice of Kumiho was familiar here in his dreams. He would forget it again when he awoke, but that was part of their deal. In the back of his sleeping mind, he was raging against this fact but the sleepy dreaming version of himself had no such issue.

“It’s just… too much.” Dan lamented. He would not show this weakness were he conscious but the version of himself that his subconscious allowed forth was much less worried about appearances.

“Oh yes, it’s far too much for you alone. Which is why you have me.”

“You’ll help me?” Dan asked his question with a heart full of hope. The canvas of clouds above continued to disappear, only the nothing left behind as it crashed into the sea below. A colossal wave jumped, the water screaming into the air as it escaped the impossible meteoric impact of the sky itself falling.

“I will do what I do. You will do what you do. You found Allusia, my little rabbit of jade.” There was a pleasant purr in her words that Dan couldn’t help but chase after. He liked making Kumiho happy. Maybe that was just the dream speaking, not that Dan would be able to tell the difference right now.

“So what do I do?” Dan was trying not to waver, vertigo beginning to wobble his knees as he looked down at the abyss below, the waves disappearing to join the incoming swell.

“As you're told, mostly.” Kumiho had a slight giggle to herself at her twisting of the words. She appeared beside Dan now, her words no longer appearing from nowhere. She wore a soft looking, blue knee-length coat covered in fur. Beneath that, a sheer fabric covered her legs which ended in long thin boots that disappeared into the hemline of her jacket. She did not shiver like Dan did. “Other than that, your next choice will be your own. What you do with the dragon is up to you.”

Something snapped in Dan’s mind, like a cord being pulled taut and released like a bowstring. The idea shot through his psyche with a whistling speed. Fa Lian was in trouble. He remembered trying to help her. The tidal wave kept getting closer as Dan fell to his knees with worry. He remembered not knowing if he had enough inside him to help her.

He remembered the flames.

“Did I save her?” Dan asked. As he remembered the fire, the world did too. The trees in the distance behind him burst to light. The sea in the distance was coming closer, a great hand coming to squash the land and Dan along with it. It boiled, angry and tempestuous in its approach. Dan still felt he was teetering over the side of the cliff, unable to pull back from the impending destruction promised by the wave.

“Not yet, you haven’t.” Dan made to rush away as Kumiho confirmed his fear, but she held his shoulder tight. She faced him towards the oncoming wave. Kumiho gestured forward, her long painted nails aiming straight for the wall of force careening towards them. “The journey ahead of you will save more than just Fa Lian. As you can see.”

Without another word, the world was lost in the continued rain of the sky and the sweeping cleanse of the tidal wave it created. The last thing Dan thought as the world was lost to the waves was that at least the fire was put out.

——————————————————

Fa Lian existed in a nightmare.

This was true while she was awake and while she was asleep, so neither felt like a reprieve from the other. There was nowhere to run from the agony she was feeling. It was all encompassing. A torrent of blistering, blood red fire and herself the fuel.

When she was awake, she blazed like an inferno was rippling just underneath her skin. In moments of clarity, forced upon her by specific blasts of pain, she saw that the room her torment occurred in was a plain one. The grey walls of the labyrinth surrounded her when she was sleeping or awake. Upon those walls is an impossibly large shadow. The source of the flame.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

There is a dragon inside Fa Lian.

Ryong Aang roars at its new confines, stretches its unmade form and continues breaking Fa Lian as it does. Neither girl nor dragon planned for this. It was not expected and the screaming roars of the dragon escaped Fa Lian’s mouth in the form of pained screams and belches of dragon fire.

There is a void within Fa Lian.

Her mother died when Fa Lian was young. She was killed by enemies of her father, but managed to bequeath her soul stone to Fa Lian before she died. The chaos of that night still avoided her inspection, but she had taken the soul stone then and there. It was too much for her at that age. She had needed to become too strong to exist around the pain of it and she had. She buried the constant reminder of her mother underneath the flames of her new power.

There is another inside Fa Lian.

A passenger who forced their way inside. Guan Ah Dan had done that from the start, she thought. He had made her problems his problems when he didn’t need to. No one had ever done that, not in the way Ah Dan did. Certainly she had known sycophants but Dan wasn’t like that. He helped because he wanted to. She still didn’t know why he did but she finally believed that there was no malice in it, no ulterior motive waiting to appear.

It seemed strange once she thought about Dan for it to have taken so long for him to come to mind. Once he did, she noticed it more clearly. She must have been burning, alone in this grey room, for days now without seeing it.

She could see him now. He was tall, a look of proud confidence on his face as he stepped through the unending flames of Ryong Aang’s fire. He appeared and the fire dispersed, pushed away by his aura. He reached her pyre and touched his hand against her face.

He felt like cool, quenching water as the vision of Dan in her mind melted away. Lian understood that it wasn’t actually Dan, but his kind and delicate mana instead. It danced through the burned and ruined parts of Fa Lian, her physical and her mental alike, and soothed them. The burns were brushed away like they were simply painted onto her. Her chest opened and allowed her to breath for the first time, a pressure disappeared from her head and her thoughts returned to herself.

She was not a piece of kindling, but Guan Fa Lian. There were many things that Guan Fa Lian could be. She had chosen to be strong long ago and it had once served her well. That strength was hard to find, no matter where she looked. Instead, her eyes seemed to constantly find him instead.

Maybe, Fa Lian thought as peace from the pain flooded her body with restful energy, maybe I can let someone else be strong for once.

———————————————

Shade did not notice the creeping molass of fatigue creeping over him as he fell asleep. It seemed a little strange to him that he would be talking to a dead man but then again, the dead man had been on his mind a lot.

“If you were going to kill them anyway, you should have just let me do it.” The blue skinned Shazaar sat in the chair facing Shade’s desk with his feet casually propped up and a loll to his head that was slightly sickening. He raised his hands, each of them dripping with blood. “Mine were already dirty, remember?”

“I’m not going to kill them.”

“You killed me. Why stop there? Make your mother proud and become the man we always needed you to be.” Shazaar morphed as he spoke, first in his voice and then in form. Shade shrank away as Shazaar was replaced with a collection of shadows. Whispers stabbed out from them, unclear admonishment of Shade and his choices.

“So many died for you, and you run.”

“Abandon another post, no one will notice.”

“Can’t stab your way out of this one, son?”

The final voice shook Shade the most. He never dreamed of his mother. Somehow hearing her voice specifically shattered the illusion of sleep. The shadows congealed before him and took on a more specific shape.

Her skin as black as night, as though light itself were not brave enough to touch her without permission. Tall, a powerful frame that commands both respect and attention. The wispy shadows around her became a form fitting dress before accents were added, dark purple and blue on a backdrop of pitch.

“I’ve missed you, Shade.” Her deep voice rasped against Shade’s ear and made him long for home. Such was his mother’s ability.

“Using the holy relics to bother your son? You really have gotten desperate, mother.” Shade found his voice quickly, the haze of the dream falling into a comfortable existence in the background of their conversation. His mother and himself focused in definition while their surroundings faded into an oil painting-like facade.

“Now, now, Shade. Be polite.” With each word out of his mother’s mouth, pressure grew on Shade’s head. Gravity itself worked alongside her words and weighed him down. Shade made his back as rigid and solid as possible, defiant in the face of his mother’s authority. “You need my help, I need your’s.”

“That’s always been the way,” Shade spat with all the ferocity he could muster, “tell me what you want so I can wake up and deal with the problems you’re forcing onto me.”

“Your problems are your own. The fact that you cannot put them to bed is my only failing, for not teaching you enough before you left.” A true sadness settled into the blue eyes of his mother, the woman called succubus queen by the church of the empty god. “I want you back, son. Stand aside me and your siblings again. Please.”

“Would we still have war if I did?” Shade continued his defiance in the face of her power. His stubbornness here was valuable. Despite what she said, the queen of the wastes did nothing for anyone but herself.

“Yes,” she answered, the melancholy in her eyes only increasing, “but perhaps you would be on the right side. Goodbye, son. I hope to see you again.”

When Shade awoke a few hours later, his conversation with his mother had replayed dozens of times in a dozing mind. The correct choice was not obvious. Shade was continually finding that it never was when you were in charge of people’s lives.

He splashed his face with cold water from the basin in his washroom. He shaved the small amount of stubbe that had appeared over the previous two days of work. He dressed in the most recently washed clothing he owned. He shined the marks off of his alternative work shoes. Then he left his small home above the constantly noisy tavern and centred himself.

Today would be the day that he got answers.