It’s dark.

It’s the first thing she notices when she wakes up. It’s dark, and it smells like blood and dust.

Slowly, Raika tries to get a feel for her surroundings. She’s either too groggy or too concussed to properly tell by vibrations, which… comes as a surprise. She’d gotten used to being able to sort of assume the location of things. She tries to open her other eyes, but finds that three out of five have been damaged or ruined in some way.

And, what’s worse, she realizes she doesn’t have the Qi to heal them.

She sighs, long and slow. Good news; she still has lungs.

She starts figuring out what else she’s got.

Good news; she can still see, even if the angle of her remaining eyes makes it a bit awkward. Their surroundings look like a mix of sharp stone walls with sheer cliff faces and bits of rubble. She identifies a column here, a few surviving seats there, but what’s left of the arena is mostly just shrapnel, and its only from a distant, far-above hint of light that her enhanced eyesight can pick up anything at all..

Most of her joints and torso are fused together into a protective shell, her exterior armored to the maximum possible while she shifted her interior to softer padding of flesh and fat. Taran is still with her, though he’s not moving, staying very still, and very, very cold.

Fuck.

Disregarding the damage, she pulls the connecting tissue apart, cracking bone and armor until she has mobility again, crippled though it is. She moves as quick as she can, shaking Taran slightly and wincing at the rattling his guns make as she does.

“Taran,” she whispers. “Wake up.”

Slowly, much more slowly than she’d like, he stirs.

“...Raika? Where…”

“I don’t know. I think the arena was shattered, maybe. There’s some light from above, so… maybe the Crag? I need time to fix my body, but we need to get a move on.”

“I… can’t. Spent too much. Need… need to sleep.”

“Ok. How long?”

He is silent.

She nudges him slightly (sleep, on Taran, looks a lot like death), but he doesn’t move. His flesh, always cold, now feels stiff as if in the grasp of rigor mortis. What minute Qi scent he generally carries is almost completely gone, and even as she shifts, she sees him curl up like a dying insect.

Ok. Concerning. An issue for later, perhaps. He said this could happen, and she’s noticed how the more alters he brings out, the more exhausted he gets, and-

Wait. When did she notice that? That sounds memorable, that’s the sort of thing she should remember. What’s-

Oh. Oh.

“Oh you motherfucker.”

She rebreaks a good two out of four limbs sitting herself lotus-style on the floor, but fuck it, she’s in a hurry. She sits, and takes in a breath that causes almost a full minute-long inhale, and delves deep.

It’s not easy, not without a cultivator’s ability to alter her mental state, but she follows the path from before. Both the fire, which burnt so hot she can’t help but remember its trail, and the bite of the divine beast, still squirming in her gut, act as guides. She focuses down, to the most minute feelings in her body, tracking their changes and the feelings of them deeper, deeper…

There. Something writhes where it should not. Something sits, pretty and polite, like a little pearl in her stomach.

“Now let’s not make any hasty decisions.”

She looks up at Zhoulong, standing in the dark, surprisingly clear against the surrounding shadows.

He doesn’t look well. The sallowness that was there previously is gone, and he seems to have somewhat stabilized, but covering half his face and singing his robes are proof of a heavy burn.

“I mean, look at it from my end for just a moment, would you? There I am, doing my job, next thing you know I’m accused of a high treason I didn’t commit and get my throat bit out. Takes me weeks to figure out how to not get digested in the fucking wasteland of a gut microbiome you got and pop back in to say hi, and next thing I know, I’m still getting chipped away anyways. I mean if you were in my position, I think you’d have done a lot worse than me to try and get out by now.”

She says nothing.

He says nothing.

Eventually the smile fades away.

“It’s not like I did much, to be honest. You’re a right fucking mess, sister. Disassociating hard, building walls in your head just to be in your body- and that’s besides all the guilt you got in there, I mean you should really get that looked at. I mean if anything, I can help. You know where I am now, you’ve got a knife to my throat, really. We could go down swinging, you turn me to mush while I scissor up your brainpan on my way out, or we could just… acknowledge you’ve got an edge on me, and go about our relationship a bit more honestly.”

She stares at him in the dark.

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“Gods damn woman but you are hard to read. I mean your face is half-missing, and mostly made of spikes and eyeballs and teeth right now, which does not help, but I consider myself an expert in bioformic nuances and I’m, like, partially able to read your mind, and I still cannot see past that poker face. Mask in full effect, is she? Hello, Mask. Good to see you again. In fine form you are.”

He sighs. “Seriously. It’s accepted medical technique, I had to study it. If you had meridians you’d be swimming in heart demons by now, and the treatment for heart demons is therapy and internal alteration. And I can do both. You’d honestly only be losing out if you didn’t keep me around.”

“You’ve been cutting thoughts out of my head.”

“Well… yes. But only the icky ones.”

She growls at that, forcing her stomach to move just a bit, trying to exercise control over it. “Thoughts about my friends? Memories of allies? As a dog eats its own shit when its hungry, you lie when you speak. It’s not that you need it; it’s just that it’s available. So why not.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, fine. Enough with the melodrama. I’m not lying now. I only did what was reasonable, and you’re only doing what makes sense… but I’m here presenting a third option is all. A little bit of friendly cooperation. Symbiosis. I don’t want to die, you hopefully don’t want to remain a crippled mess…”

She says nothing.

He snarls, and then relaxes into a sigh. He looks… for a moment, he looks tired.

“Just listen. I am not… this. I am more than this, I always have been. You have reduced me to a ghost in another’s mind. What more could you possibly want to take from me? Why, because I did my duty, as the Empire asked of me? Because I accepted the power and role of my birth? Because your little serpentine toy has some scars from where I helped him grow into someone worthy? You don’t have to like me, you rabid animal, you don’t have to apologize, but don’t you dare pretend like I don’t have every gods-damned right to try to survive.”

She says nothing.

“Like you don’t have blood on your hands. Like you’re so much better than me, just because you managed to crawl out of the little hovel you started in. Congratulations! Some of us climbed plenty! And some of us never killed a bunch of random farmers for the crime of, what, asking for better wages? At least when I did what was needed, it was needed, it was for a purpose. You wasted your whole life, and every death you’ve ever caused has been for nothing. Fuck you. Fuck you. What more could you take from me? My body, my safety, my power, my voice? And now you want to kill me because you didn’t know what would happen when you ripped out my throat?”

He stops. His breath is fast, sweat dripping down his forehead, teeth grit. She lets him sit there, panting, for a good few seconds.

When she does look at him, there is quiet in her eyes.

“I never asked for your pain,” she says. “But there is nothing in me that sees a victim in the thing you are.”

The silence sits heavy between them for a moment. He laughs, softly. For just a moment, he looks haunted. Alone. Afraid.

And Raika feels… nothing.

He laughs again, louder. Then he grins so wide it looks like it hurts, pulling open his burns until they bleed into the smile.

“Well alright then. Fair is fair.”

She feels the Pearl begin to stir, and places everything she has into envisioning her stomach as a depthless thing, a place where it falls and falls into itself, vast enough to fit anything and thick enough that nothing can escape.

It doesn’t kill him- despite his fears, she doesn’t actually know how to do that, and any ideas she has relate to having Qi, of which she’s currently empty, save for the squirming nugget left from the divine beast’s spawn.

Still, she pictures it as best she can. Digestive acids washing over him, slowly peeling apart everything he is, unmaking him into nothing but fuel to be consumed.

It is a harsh thought. It is one that almost disconnects, more than once. It feels right, nonetheless.

Still, he does not go quiet.

She feels herself going. Down in the dark, alone, she feels her mind… slip. She feels the Mask take control of her features wholesale, using what dregs of fuel she has to reshape her face into something approaching human. She feels her Flesh roil, drowning in sensation and writhing wetly, angrily, painfully, all sharp edges and dripping muscle. She feels herself forget things, and holds to that awareness, holds to it as tight as she can so she can try and pull those memories back, even if by accident, even if she doesn’t know exactly what they are.

She feels where he cuts on his way down. At first just in her current thought, trying to sever her attack on him, but that’s much too present, much too her, and his Cuts slip off. He cuts into her allies, and she takes note, forces herself to hold to the knowledge that she has more of them than she knows and that she is more cared for than she feels. She feels him cut into her memories, of thoughts around J- around her friend, and she places into iron-clad chains in her mind that there was more good than she remembers there, and that only what could hurt her he does not touch.

It’s not perfect. She’s still losing pieces, the same ones she was just barely clawing back using the clarity of violence… but for some things, there is a price. An exchange. A sacrifice.

Raika lets herself be cut away and forges anchors in her mind, truths she holds to as best as she can. She hopes that what is cut away will be drawn back to them, or regrow someday. She feels the sting of violence on her deepest self, and offers it on the pyre to make sure that she can never, ever be as lost as Zhoulong made her.

And he… falls away from her perception. She thinks she hears him yell something, some oath or perhaps just fear, but… probably all in her head. Perhaps alive, perhaps dead, but the sensation is not unlike watching something fall from the ceiling of a cave where it is latched into dark waters down below.

She remembers he is there, still. Never think they’re gone until you see the body, and sometimes not even then and all that. But it’s enough for now. For just this moment, she casts out the parasite.

And then, she turns away from Taran, to look out into the dark.

She feels her heart beating, taking the dregs of Qi she drags away from the squirming thing in her belly and what’s left in her flesh and making it flow, grinding it against itself as she has for so long. She leaves it be, lets the pain of it strengthen her resolve, focus her mind. The energy of existence scrapes against her cell walls and through her veins, and she lets the agony of it, the knowledge that it will surely grow drop by drop, soothe her.

And then she looks out into the dark.

“We should probably talk,” she says, her true voice ringing out.

At first, nothing.

Then…

“Yes. We probably should,” her throat says with a voice that sounds much more human.

And beneath both, her body ripples, flesh rearranging and bones creaking, a sound of hunger and suffering both.