In. Out. In. Out.

The practice of breathing, even when it’s a bit unnecessary, is grounding. Raika breathes in… and out.

And then she looks up at the monstrous thing behind one of the moons in the sky.

The other two are quiet, the vague purple and simple grey of the Cold Sun’s siblings almost entirely nonexistent as it overtakes the night sky. The stars begin to shift and shimmer, ready to bleed out all the colors that they did the last time Raika looked upon the maddening abyss above… but not yet.

Now, in this moment, the geometrically perfect thing in the sky shifts its angles ever so slightly, and lets the thing behind it peek through.

Again, the eye is no bigger than a human eye, the finger only barely longer than a normal human finger. And yet, even nearly at the horizon, even out there in the dark so far above the world, she can see them. Everything in the world can see them if they look up. She’s fairly certain she’d be able to see that slender hand and the eye behind it if she were blind, if she were a thousand miles under the earth. She saw it once, and there’s something of that impossible, endless End behind it that is in her now, and there is an overwhelming weight to the fact that it can always see her, too. She looks up at the eye behind the moon…

And the Eye looks back.

The eye flickers, as if looking at a thousand different things in a single instant.. It moves so fast, so fast, that it looks like it hasn’t moved at all, but for the barest trembling of its pupil- which is now centered, perfectly and precisely, on her. Before her changes she might never have noticed it at all.

Her left arm aches. It screams. If she’d left her Blacksteel in her body, along her organs or bones… mmh. Good that the preparations are working, even if it still feels like she’s getting frostbite in every place that the material still touches. There is a vibration, a frequency, and it runs into her bones, chills the core of her, runs through her veins and makes even her Qi feel cold, feel lesser, carried in part through that entropic material. The pupil is… it’s so vast. It’s so vast, and it’s sized the same as a normal eye and a normal pupil but its looking at her and it is fathomless, it is endless, it goes down and down and dark forever at the End of all, and-

“Alright, that should do it.”

And it’s part of her. She consumed part of it now, in that moment of rebellion, in that infinitesimal fraction of a shard so many moons ago, and-

“Raika?”

It’s still looking at her. It still sees her. The memory of her tribulation resurfaces, a refraction of that same feeling of having something beyond comprehension look upon you and know disgust, but there is no disgust here. It’s empty. There’s nothing there. It is an eye and it sees so much and it is looking at the world but it is not curious or wrathful or disgusted it is just empty, like a doll’s eye, like the eye of a dead thing, like the eye of a thing at the end of time itself, screaming without noise, streaming out into a final death where there is no death just dissolution into nothing and-

And it sees her.

And her arm aches.

And her soul aches.

Along the edges of her broken self, against the jagged shards so carefully put back together into new form only barely balanced, she aches beneath an End.

Without words or intent or judgment or perhaps even awareness, it asks a question that dwarfs anything its shadow could have asked, years ago now. It touches her without motion, without energy, without anything more than the weight it has on reality simply by being and being inevitable.

Are You Ready?

The death she grows out of her body into black steel thrums in tune with the death inside her mind, with that little fragment that just wants things to be over. It is pulled to this thing, like stone to a magnet. It is quieter than it was before, quieter now than it’s been in some time, but…

Something small and cold trembles against her collarbone, worn around a chain, vibrating ever so slightly.

There are no words.

But she says no.

Not Yet.

Behind the impossible eye, something smiles.

Raika blinks. There is color in her vision, the aurora of the stars bleeding it back into the world and washing away the harsher light of the Cold Sun. She realizes that she has been standing very, very still, and has not been breathing as she stares up at what is now only an orbital body again.

“Raika, are you-”

“I’m ok,” she says, coughing once, then again, like the air in her lungs is deader than it should be and failing to make much noise. “I’m… it was louder. Than last time. Looked right at me.”

Li Shu nods, looking up at the Cold Sun as if to verify… but doesn’t say anything else. They’ve had this conversation before. There are myths, old tales of the Cold Sun having something behind it, something that has looked through it. Similar descriptors for it, too; the yawning thing that is Nothing that is the End that is- that is the thing behind it. But Li Shu herself? The others at the festivals, those they’ve asked in the time since Li Shu was told about it? Not like they have access to Imperial or sect records to research with, but whatever that thing beyond the sky is, out of everyone they’ve asked, she’s the only one to have seen it do more than glow a bit brighter before the stars wash it away once yearly.

“Think it’ll be enough?” Raika asks.

Li Shu shrugs. “I hope so. Never done necromancy before, it’s a bit of a new territory for me.”

Raika looks down at the ground, tracking the glow of the ritual circle. It still holds some of that pale, off-white radiance from the Cold Sun’s peak, and both her blood and the blacksteel are changed. The blacksteel’s change is easier to see; from pure night black, it’s becoming lighter and more brittle, less capable of fluid change. Its structure looks more like a grayish salt than anything metallic now, with parts of it that same off-white of the Cold Sun and some grains still midnight black. The blood is… stranger. It’s vibrant, potent, a vividly bright crimson visible even at night, but now its colors seem to come not from the blood itself, as if the air around it has been colored red while the liquid has dulled like it’s been left out to decay.

The ghost flesh she vomited up has undergone the most change. The strange, ashen snow and ooze of it have transformed into something more like a liquid. If anything it looks like congealed spit, or less polite fluids, but where before it was messy, a still-settling flurry, now it seems still, like a broad, snow-white circle of stillness.

“Something happened,” Li Shu says. “Theory holds that it enhances materials aligned to it, like how its shards can be used to make blacksteel. If we have any chance of it working, we probably should do it sooner than later.”

Raika just… nods.

No guarantees it’ll work. No real way to know beforehand.

But they say the best way to get over a trauma is to confront it.

The Mask roils, calculating, checking possibilities, trying to find or understand the best way this could go, the possibilities it presents. A big part of her, almost all of her, wonders if there couldn’t be a less direct way, a more gradual progression of healing that might provide an easier transition…

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Flesh shivers, just once, a mix of adrenaline and fear chemicals flowing through her and melding with the other parts of her, preparing them all to run, to fight, to defend herself…

And the thing that once was Raika but now is only a part reaches out, from deep down inside, from around the scar of surgical cuts and self-imposed trauma, and pulls the scent of tangerines out from it.

Raika closes her eyes, kneels down in the grass (now withered and dead, frozen stiff by the light of the Cold Sun) and touches the circles connecting her and the ingredients for the ritual.

“Jiajia,” she whispers into the night.

Zhoulong, a severed soul inside of her, claimed that she had something citrus scented in her alongside him. In times of high stress, of near hallucination, she’s had visions of a blood-splattered child, the memory of him disconnected during her fugue states but recognizable still. When she’s had to make tough choices, she’s smelled him, that nascent, barely formed scent of his cultivation.

And it was her arrogance that got him killed. Not above all, not by a long shot, no. The Mask especially is more than clear on that front. Taurus killed him. Political bullshit killed him. Fear and a need for control by a world that does not care for its subjects killed him. She may not feel it, but she knows it. But it was her arrogance that put him on the plate.

If he’s here… an unknown spirit, haunting her or somehow kept from moving on… well. She doesn’t know what she’ll do about it. But she needs to know.

For a while, the clearing is nearly silent. Raika closes her senses in tight, the Flesh prioritizing the source of her fear, of her anticipation, cutting out the sound of Li Shu’s and the orphan’s heartbeat across the clearing, of her own beating heart, of the whispering wind and the shifting bamboo.

Something stirs in the pale glow of the circle.

It doesn’t look like anything. A drop, like something fell into it. A ripple, across the white.

The red of the blood flows out, drop by drop, until the crimson of the blood is gone, left as a black liquid in its circle. Crimson flows out across the lines of the diagram, oozing around Raika, coloring the edges of the lines carved into the soil with chalk and knife. The blacksteel stone crumbles, crackles, pieces of it flaking off and turning to something almost similar to the ghost-flesh ash she spit up earlier, and many of those flakes flutter out from its circle. Like dancing on the wind, particles of white and black flow across the air in the lines of the diagram.

The still, pale circle ripples again, like a single pebble dropped into it.

“JiaJia,” Raika whispers.

A third ripple, slightly louder, slightly more intense.

“JiaJia”, the whole of Raika whispers at once, Truespeak thrumming through her throat like a bass growl and humming string at once.

The ash of the altered blacksteel falls onto the circle, inert.

The color of it fades abruptly, falls into itself, leaves the glow of the ritual circle nonexistent.

The night gets a little bit louder. The sounds of animals in the distance. Fluttering birds, far-off beasts, the fireworks of the village so many miles away fading back in like they were drowned out by something.

And the pool of white ghostflesh in the circle moves no more.

Raika breathes out, a short, sharp exhale that hurts leaving her.

Li Shu says nothing, but Raika can hear her breath as the sounds flow back into the circle, as her awareness expands again. She sighs, long and slow, but there’s no weight to it. It was always a possibility, Raika knew that. Who knows what Zhoulong saw, what-

A gasp.

The kid.

Her eyes shoot over to him. She expected him to be unconscious longer, as did Li Shu by the surprise on her face, but the kid is staring into the circle, face pale, eyes incredibly wide, like he’s-

Like he’s seen a ghost.

She turns back, and… there he is.

He doesn’t look like when he died.

The last time she saw him, the last instant she had of him before he died, he was… gone. Both legs splayed to odd angles because his hip and tailbone were part of the paste splattered across the wall. Taurus had just sort of… waved his hand, a return to the classical stories of cultivators who could kill with no effort for the merest slight. There really hadn’t been much left above his knees. In the alley, there had been… fuck. Maybe an eye, in the mess. Maybe not. The shape of the red had imprinted in her memory, now and forever, but the details… she wasn’t in the best state of mind.

He doesn’t look like paste. He’s whole. Complete, all in one piece.

But he doesn’t look alive, either. There’s an emptiness to him, not quite that of the thing behind the Cold Sun but similar. A dead emptiness, with very little left in it. One side of his face is numbed, missing, like the first instinct of impact… no. Like when she first saw him. When she first got that fat drunk off of him, when he was beating the kid in that back alley. Her first kill after her crippling, one of the only ones she can safely say she has no issues with.

But his eyes are there. And they look at her. And he gives her a sad little smile.

His lips move, but there are no words. No lungs to push out air, no wind to carry the sound. She’s gotten a lot better at seeing details, though, and what he says is simple enough to read in his lip movements.

Hey old hag.

She sighs, a single, explosive exhale that hurts with how much air is released, how much tension it carries with it. She laughs, low and soft.

“Raika?” Li Shu asks, off to the side. Raika looks over, briefly, and it’s clear by the confusion on her face that Li Shu can’t see JiaJia standing there… though the kid’s eyes are locked to the spectral figure.

She nods her head, once, and turns back to face him.

“Hey brat,” she whispers.

JiaJia… flickers. Like he’s skipping between moments, like the flickering of a flame when water is cast on it. When his appearance is static again, it’s a different look, a different moment. A wry smile, though his eyes don’t look straight at her for this one.

A flicker again, and the first appearance returns.

“Not much left, is there?” she asks.

His head flickers like to shake his head. It’s a bit more fluid, and she notices the ghostflesh surrounding his feet has fallen some, the levels lowered as if to power the movement.

No grudge, his lips write.

She feels like she can’t breathe. Every part of her, whole and terrified and hurting and full of release, feels the lump in her throat.

“Still stuck around a while, though. Kept an eye on me, right?”

He flickers, dances between a few forms, like he’s just a bit out of sync with reality. Li Shu mentioned, in her research, that most wraiths and true ghosts are souls that have not moved on, that draw Qi into a facsimile of life around their grudges and needs… but this isn’t like that. JiaJia looks like he’s peeking through, or a leftover shade, just a few pieces strung together.

But he still speaks, in a way.

Idiot apprentice, he says, his smile like the last time she spoke to him before she went to the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect. Old hag master.

She nods, and has to take a minute to realize she’s crying before she figures out why her vision is so blurry.

“Yeah. I’m… I’m so fucking sorry, kid.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while. There is silence between them, even as the level of ghostflesh in the ritual circle continues to drop, bit by bit.

“I’m so fucking sorry. I… wanted to see you. Make sure you’d be ok before I got carted off to wherever the fuck. In the end, you weren’t and I got carted off anyways, and… fuck, all downhill from there.

“Not all the way. Had some good times. Met some good people. Got a girlfriend now, further proof I’m no old hag. Even got stronger. But… carried you with me. It was… it was my fault, more than-”

A head shake. Aggressive, augmented by the flickering. When his form resumes, the ghostly white liquid floating in the circle almost seeming to swirl up to support him, his face looks pissed. As angry as she ever saw him, which, in truth, wasn’t all that angry. He flickers, turns, and flips a finger up behind her, far off in the distance. Then flickers back to facing her, and… a shrug, and a slightly less aggressive middle finger.

She laughs. And then realizes she laughed.

And then falls back onto the grass, landing on her ass, and laughs again, the sound pained and relieved and loud in the empty clearing.

“Yeah. So my friends keep telling me.”

JiaJia nods, once, as if harrumphing in agreement.

“Am… am I holding you back?” she asks. “Or are you just…”

A look of embarrassment comes onto his face. His form flickers, the nature of him shifting and ephemeral, but… there’s a mix of frustration and embarrassment now, a sort of look Raika recognizes from when she was young. Pigheaded. Not ready to be done.

Raika laughs, softer this time. “Yeah. Makes sense for an idiot apprentice like you. Don’t suppose you even know where you’d go, would you? Back into reincarnation, maybe. You were an idiot, but if all idiots went to hell it would’ve overflowed by now.”

He pouts a bit, but says nothing to refute her.

She notices the ghostflesh in the central circle is almost gone now. Down to the dregs.

“Well… I can’t promise you that I can fix anything. Or help you along. But… if it’s up to you, and you decide to stay… I can promise that if nothing else, I think it’ll be a pretty exciting show. Lots to do. Some… some ideas still forming, but definitely plenty of shit to do still.”

JiaJia flickers, harsher this time, more abrupt, but when it stabilizes, with barely any ghostflesh left, he looks… he looks-

He’s smiling. Like that day, in the back alley they used to meet, where she told him she could feel his Qi moving for the first time.

“Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”

And she breaks the circle.

The last remaining bits of ghostflesh, the ash of the infused blacksteel, the crimson glow of hyper-vital blood all briefly go inert… and then there is light.

A single shaft of it. Like a sunbeam.

A cold, shifting light, gentle in its Ending.

And in that light, like a wind suddenly blew them straight towards Li Shu and the kid, all the ingredients of the circles move, and JiaJia is gone, like a cloud broken apart by the sky.

Raika sits there and just cries for a while. But even with that, she can’t help but smile, and feel like something deep, deep inside her has cracked… and gotten just a bit lighter for it.