In the end, Raika does go to the Cold Sun Festival of Paleblossom city. It’s not nearly so prestigious as the full name might imply, but damn if the city doesn’t do all it can to go all out. The city, so long cold, quiet and delicate like its namesake lights up like it’s in bloom, breaking through the soft white snow so common to its area in a riot of blue, purple, gold and red.

All along the streets, streamers are placed, flags waving in the winter air decorated with images of lotuses, paleblossom buds, orchids, and other flowers special to the city, effigies to fluttering red robins and bright, colorfully-plumed rainbow herons that can sometimes be glimpsed in the depths of the frozen woods nearby. Small fairy lights, which can be imbued with minute drops of Qi from even normal folk, float and flutter about, their paper shells sometimes shaped like birds, butterflies, or running beasts, sometimes just the base little paper lantern shapes, and snow and slush both have been cleared from all of the paved roads which weave through the city. Stalls, markets and stores are all bright and open, merry lights fluttering within and fragrant smells wafting out in all directions as gifts of silk and jewelry, flavored ice-cones and toasty-warm mooncakes, and warm tea and sparklers are all hawked by smiling vendors, overjoyed by one of the busiest nights of the year. Even in a city designed around cold and living huddled close like Paleblossom, winter isn’t a natural time of activity for humans, and so only now is the gentle quiet of a sleeping city banished behind the screams of happy children, the singing of drunken voices and the laughter and chatter of moving crowds. Overall, it’s a gorgeous display, not as ostentatious as places on the central plateau near the capital but beautiful in its own way, and somehow warmer for being something so accessible to all.

Well, to most. Still, Raika can’t help but admire the city as it changes, even her blurry eyes able to take in the sights and enjoy the beauty of the vivified city glowing in all its colors and symbols of culture. It’s a gorgeous sight, and for once, her begging bowl is nearly full, coppers damn near reaching the brim and ensuring she’ll be able to eat for a good week or more. Between that and the practice she gets tuning out the crowds to the tune of Dink and the pumping of her own blood, the whole experience is more than worth it, without even factoring in JiaJia’s smile when she caved and told him that yes, fine, she’d go to the festival. He's a good kid. It’s nice in a way she hasn’t really had in a while, and hasn’t allowed in even longer. Not the heady thrill of victory or bloodlust, not the close companionship she misses, not the glory of the peaks or of surpassing the valleys; no, she is simply here, in this moment, breathing cool air, looking at beautiful things as people are happy around her. It is a joy she hopes to have a lot more of in the future, if she can find a way to. It would be such a pity to lose this moment, smelling the warm stalls, listening to children laugh, looking at people living life with love and what beauty they can make. She'd rather not lose this, and since she's aiming for something impossible already, what's one more?

It is in this moment of peace and contentment like she’s never felt before that she takes in a breath, deeper than any of the last six months, and feels a rib creak and pop into place more properly, the painful “pop” and twang of pained muscle and tendon ringing through her like a symphony. She takes the vibration, tapping her knee with Dink, and adds her heartbeat to it, the breath in her lungs stirring as her body tingles all over. It was a while in coming, but she wanted to wait for when she knew she'd be strong enough to survive a floating rib if it failed.

Survival is an act of will. Death is the will of heaven, and torture the lot in life of all who cannot defy it.

And yet in this moment, in this beat of time, life is simply… good.

She smiles, softly. She could do with more moments like these. A bit ironic, to have something that feels so right only now, when she has so little.

Eventually, stretched and tingling from swirling Qi, she opens her eyes and exhales. Some of the Qi she was using flows out with her breath, smelling and tasting like rust and old blood. Probably better off without it, honestly. Maybe that’ll be her next project; replace what she’s got with new, better vibes, reintegrate breathing in a new way.

Then she blinks, surprised, her smile returning in fuller force as she catches sight of Li Shu in the crowd.

Raika’s at the edge of the courtyard, against a little overhang wrapped in a few different candles and a colorful banner decorating the walls above it, while Li Shu stands closer to the center, eyes wide like a little kid as she stares in wonder and laughs at something only she can hear. The younger woman almost skips as she moves, and while the weight of her Qi lets people know she’s coming and allows them to move out of the way, she never swings it or pressures anyone, happily avoiding people mired in conversation or pausing before crossing the paths of those running by. This might be a different sort of vision of good, but Raika can’t help but smile at the sight of her. This, too, is good. And, luckily for her journey, she’s not hesitant when it comes to acting, a fact Raika reaffirms by raising her arm in a soft wave towards the healer when she thinks she might see it.

Even through the distance between them, Li Shu notices the wave immediately. There’s something to be said for the senses of a cultivator, able to detect intent and the presence of a stranger, but Li Shu notices the wave in her direction as soon as it happens, like she was on the lookout for something, and her eyes go wide. She stops using her Qi quite as delicately, as is evidenced by the fact the crowd parts a bit easier for her and some looks go her way as people realize who she is, though even still it must be fairly gentle pressure. She crosses the courtyard in heartbeats coming to Raika.

“Raika?” she asks, voice soft like she’s worried the illusion might burst if she’s too loud. “How are you here! Oh heavens, did you find someplace to stay, I’m so glad!”

“Only if you consider alleys and alcoves a place, honored healer,” Raika rasps with a smile. “I’m afraid I’m just a bit too tough to kill for a winter as mild as this to take me away.”

Li Shu laughs, her expression alight. “I’m so sorry it’s been so long,” she says, voice soft. “Master told me I was forbidden from seeing you until I stopped dangling hope and gave you results, and I am not enough of a healer for that yet.” She kneels down, bowing low to the cripple. “I am so sorry I don’t have better news, but I am deeply happy you’ve held on until now.”

…well. There’s something to be said for propriety in times of kindness and honor, like being bowed to by a healer of all things.

Eh. Raika smacks the other, apparently even worse idiot in her life with Dink. Li Shu sits up, not nearly hurt by something so trivial but mouth open like a trout in surprise.

Raika is holding back laughter, smile soft but the eyes behind it warm and a bit sad. “Idiot girl,” she rasps. “I never expected you to heal me, and your master damn well knew that. That path is closed to me, unless you magically gain healing arts to shake the heavens. It was just nice to see you, and you should thank your master for trying to keep you away from any pain from my death.”

Li Shu seems ready to refute it, ready to say something, but instead sighs, long and quiet. “Master wouldn’t be so cruel,” she says eventually, though there’s no life to it.

“Your master is startlingly kind,” Raika says. “This world is cruel and full of destruction for no reason at all. Them hoping to avoid some of it splashing on you is more than most would do. I am glad I am not just a lesson learned, though! It's good to see you well.”

“And you too!” Li Shu exclaims. “You look better than when you left, not worse! What have you been eating? Is the cold affecting your joints too poorly? How are you even still alive?”

“Trash, yes, and like I said, too tough to die. Old Yama the Hungry knows they would choke on me if they ate me, and that I’d bite their throat their whole way down to whatever afterlife they wish to pickle me in or kick me out of.”

Li Shu giggles, even though she looks a bit dissatisfied with the answer. Raika takes the opportunity to Dink against her own forehead, and focuses on her heartbeat a moment to let the vibration and bloodflow stimulate that stinging sensation again. Easier than describing it, anyways, and she's loathe to leave a pretty girl dissatisfied. It’s an accomplishment, and she’s damn proud of what she’s done with so little, but even with all that she is surprised by how wide Li Shu’s eyes get, how she audibly gasps, how she rocks back onto her heels away from Raika for a moment.

The smell of mild, clean flowers and metal purified with heat hits Raika then, a wave of it that makes her nose wiggle until she sneezes. Li Shu’s Qi? The smell seems to confirm it, the cleanliness and softness of it surprising Raika even with all she knows about the young healer, but fitting like a puzzle piece. When Raika sneezes at the intrusion, Li Shu’s eyes get wider, if anything.

“What did- how did you-”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Before she can finish, a familiar purple and red sect outfit steps in from out of view.

“Excellent to see you once again, healer Li Shu,” interrupts the honorable, annoying Qen Hou, all smiles. He looks like he’s dolled his fool self up, long hair in a much more ornate bun than Raika’s seen him use before, the rich brown of it highlighted by healthy tan skin like he’s spent the winter under the sun. “Are you alright?”

Then he sees Raika, and he goes dead silent.

So this is who she was looking out for, Raika thinks

“Qen Hou,” she says with a smile that is all teeth and scar. “What a delight to see you again. Truly an honor this lowly one did not expect.”

He says nothing, but his skin goes pale, like he’s seen a ghost. Raika almost laughs out loud at the look on his face, and then decides why not, giving a very hag-like cackle. Li Shu, catching on and catching sight of the look Qen Hou is giving, actually joins in, though she chokes off the giggle quickly and rises to greet her fellow cultivator properly.

“Honored Qen Hou,” she says. “It is good to see you once more, senior brother. I was not aware you would be attending the festival areas outside of the sect.”

Raika rolls her eyes at how obvious the man’s being, and how gently Li Shu is treating him in spite of it, but her ears do catch on something. “Senior brother, is it? I wonder if honored healer Li Shu has gone up in the world recently?”

Li Shu turns back with an absolutely dazzling smile. “I have!” she squeals. “I’ve joined the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect! Look!” She twirls a bit to grab onto the sash and belt around her waist, adding a splash of color to the clean white and red of her healer’s robes. “They were impressed with my skill and asked master Rui Ka if I could apprentice with them for a two year period, to see if I have what it takes to become a proper cultivator!”

Under the scrutiny of the blaring bright enthusiasm Raika can’t roll her eyes without being mean, but it takes a very nearly painful effort to keep it back. Without Qi, Raika has no idea how good a healer Li Shu really is, and she hasn’t exactly had a lot of chance to see her work. Still, it’s not an uncommon arrangement, but the fact it’s a two year contract indicates it really is a trial, and not that the sect is pursuing a divine talent. She can’t help but flick her eyes at Qen Hou and ever so slightly raise an eyebrow, amused at how quickly he starts to blush.

“That’s wonderful, Li Shu!” Raika says instead, bowing slightly from a seated position at the waist. “I’m honored to be in the presence of someone sought after by a sect.”

“Yes, the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect only takes the best, as is their right as the great sect of the city,” Qen Hou agrees, conveniently and noticeably. This time she does roll her eyes a bit. “But tell me, Crippled Raika, how is it that you’ve weathered this winter so well?”

Another eye-roll; they're going to dislocate at this rate. “Wouldn’t you like to know, pretty-boy.”

He blinks, then gives her a growl. “Yes, I would,” he snarls. “Your disrespect does you no service, here.”

“But it irritates you!” She cheerfully rasps. “And I haven’t been intimidated by stray pups since I was a child, and nowadays I'm something far too tough for even the heavens to chew.”

Li Shu’s eyes dart between them, but it seems to hold more confusion than anything. “Senior Brother Qen Hou, it’s incredible, isn’t it? Raika, would you-”

Raika Dink’s against the street before she can finish the sentence, catching Li Shu’s eyes meaningfully. It’s hardly as damning as grabbing at her sleeve might be, but it’s still far more than enough for Qen Hou’s eyes to flicker back down to her, then between the two of them.

“I am honored to show my progress to a doctor of such skill,” Raika says, “but I’d hate to bother the young master here with such meager offerings. Better he wander off and find something more suited to his interests to entertain himself with. Perhaps he might visit the red lights tonight? I can hook you up, I know a guy.”

And who says she can’t be polite or subtle? A masterwork right there.

Qen Hou’s eyes sharpen, the bit of color in his cheeks dimming as he looks down at her. She’s sure he’s hurt people far more important for far less impressive insults, after all; he’s a cultivator, it’s like half of what they do. Li Shu pales too, actually, making her think she might have taken things just a step too far-

And before things can escalate, a yell comes up from the crowd behind them. Cheers rising to the heavens, people crowing and yelping and howling in celebration as the Cold Sun rises in the north.

It is an imperfect thing made from perfect ones. It looks like a collection of disparate shapes forcibly shoved and compressed into an almost-sphere. Pointed, angular tips like pyramids or triangles jut out at odd angles beside impossibly precise lines and valleys, curves and sinuous angles awkwardly crushed into place next to fractals and perfect cubes visible even from the ground so many miles below it. It looks like children’s blocks or perfect, geometrically defined shapes, all shoved into an ill-fitting orb, and even from here, even looking at it makes Raika feel cold.

Not cold like winter. Not cold like a wind from an unexpected direction, not cold like ice, not cold like blood loss. Looking at it, she imagines she can understand what the end of the frozen north, where this thing surely comes from, must be. It is cold like the moment where you can’t go on anymore, and lay down to rest. It is cold like the mornings where she could not get up, and simply lay still and shivered until sleep took her again. It is cold like the moment where a dying thing’s eyes stop being eyes and become jelly that will soon rot. It is cold like the moment where you would rather die than exist, and then like the cold of the moment after, forever and ever just a bit worse.

It’s disgusting. It’s a horror. It’s haunting. It’s beautiful. It looks like the end of the world, come bereft of face and bereft of hate and bereft of everything, an absence of things, a void made of marble and perfect lines, and she is so, so, so small.

She’s seen the Cold Sun before. She must have. She’s traveled, she lives in view of it even if it’s far more distant, it’s never been like this, what is this, what is-

There is the most minuscule shift. The Cold Sun seems to tremble. Perfect angles and lines and planes trembling like gossamer thin sheets, like wafers, like ice, like the massive, impossible thing in the sky might somehow be delicate. It trembles, or maybe her eyes do, maybe it’s her that’s trembling in the face of cold beyond even the definition of temperature or warmth or change, but no because there. In the trembling, there is a shifting.

A single finger.

She shouldn’t be able to see it. In the core of her, in the center of all she is, she somehow knows beyond doubt that the finger is maybe twice as big as one of hers, distinctly inhuman but certainly not huge, not something that could be visible to even a Soul Titan realm cultivator and the impossible feats they can achieve, never mind her own damaged eyesight. But she can see it. In a world of strange blurs and indistinct details, that orb of perfect forms and that one finger are defined more clearly than anything she’s ever seen.

The orb, the sphere, the three-dimensional collection of mathematically perfect angles, is pushed ever so slightly to the side, like the cover to a container, like a lid, by a single finger. And behind it, there is something looking through.

Raika understands, for a single infinite moment, what it means to be so cold that freezing does not make ice but marble, shaped in the language of perfection. She understands what it means to see something so cold that she has never been born and will never exist, because there is nothing anymore.

Nothing but that eye, and the living, empty thing inside of it.

And then, there is light.

The stars themselves ripple. The entire night sky, like a blanket of darkness or a sea of perfect black water, moves in unison, and her mind does not have room or understanding or sight to understand what occurs between that moment of perfect, infinite cold and the next. All she knows is that one moment that finger has pushed aside something as large as the sun in the sky or the moons in their sister-orbit, and in the next the world shifted, and then the stars stretched, dancing, and long trails of glowing light like blood or tears are dripping down onto the world. The stars bleed color and light and beauty, a sea of gold and purple and red and green and blue, and as the sky ripples they make trails of color that dance in long streamers and flags across that infinite expanse.

And she is here. She is ok. She is alive, and her heart beats, and that one, single moment where she realized it had not been beating sends a ripple through every inch of her, every cell in unison screaming and then breathing with that one heartbeat and the next.

And the orb of perfection, of true and mightiest impossibility, swaddled now by streamers of star-blood, sinks back beneath the horizon, and is only an orb, and not a door blocking an impossible hole to that thing.

Qen Hou is only distracted for a moment, the maybe thirty seconds between the rising of the Cold Sun and the dancing lights from the stars, but in that moment she smells him. She can smell all of them, each one unique: Li Shu’s flowers and heated, delicate metal, the burnt ozone and lightning and clean-burning plants and magnesium of Qen Hou, the smell of broken stones and running water from a mother and her husband, the smell of sharp firecrackers and clean summer nights from their child, a hundred smells for a hundred people all around, so many she can't keep track-

But not from her. Not from the cripple who saw the moon, the cripple who is crying and whose tears are crimson when everyone else is yelling joyously and celebrating and so very normal.

Qen Hou and Li Shu turn to her at almost the same time, the latter wide eyed and laughing so sweetly, the former still furious but clearly mollified, but they both start at the sight of her. Li Shu immediately kneels, asking what’s wrong, her voice coming from a million miles away, while Qen Hou looks around in confusion, trying to find a source of what caused this.

It’s only because he’s looking around that he reacts to something, moving in front of her and Li Shu both, before an impact blasts through the wall above and behind her and sends her tumbling among bricks and the warm, soft smell of flower petals and suture needles.