There is a dead thing beside her.
Matter of fact, there’s a crowd.
They flow in and out of each other like clouds orbiting a vacuum, making it impossible to tell exactly how many there are, but she can glimpse features. Faces, eyes, mouths, limbs, all flowing in and out of each other, like fog in a kaleidoscope. It’s like the wraith that went for the boy instead of her, but only partially formed, as if empowered or recently created.
The faces in it aren’t angry, though. There’s none of the grief, the anger, the dread or despair so common on the faces of the dead, at least those few she’s seen preparing for tonight’s earlier ritual. All of the faces look at her in abject, absolute fear.
But not of her.
Slowly, the figures begin to coalesce, as if crawling out from a mire made out of each other’s ghostly bodies, and one pushes forward. A middle aged man, the back of his head an empty cavity, the front of his belly dripping pale guts that dissipate like steam. The effort it seems to take for him to push forward is monumental, but push he does, a mix of desperation, agony and fear all mixed into his eyes.
His mouth moves, but the voice is so faint, she’s fairly certain not even a Core Formation cultivator could have heard it without having prepared their senses with Qi first. But hear it, she does.
“It wants to talk to you.”
“Who?” she asks. There’s little to fear here besides the unknown; there’s no visible complexity, no depth, no strength to any of the ghosts. They’re all minor spirits at the most, and she’s been hunting worse than them all night.
The specter of a dead man whimpers, the sound like the barest touch of wind.
“No name. No face. All forever, all gone.”
Another ghost strains, pulling itself out of the morass up to the waist, and moans, just once.
“The thing behind the dead moon…”
It fades back, pulled down into the tangled mess, though saying what it did seems to have riled them all up. She can literally see the edges where the old man ghost’s head are dissipating, faster and faster.
“It can’t speak for itself?”
The ghosts spasm, the whole of them squirming and spiraling and-
“I-
“Have
“No
“Mouth
“But
“I
“Must
“Speak.”
She takes a breath, shifting her weight so she’s facing the impossible aberration, keeping its eyes on her instead of the kid.
“It didn’t get me the first time. Or the second. What makes it think I’ll go so easy the third?”
The ghosts twitch, spasm, weep without sound.
“It can’t think. It’s not real. It is forever.
“It is curious.
“We are the dead, and it is the End. We are all it could touch without unmaking, and even now, we bleed and vanish and cling and die and-
“It tells us you have done something new. Please. Tell it what it wants. We don’t want to be nothing. Its touch is Nothing and we are afraid.”
Raika looks up at the Cold Sun. Its light is dimmed by the stars around it, and whatever lies beyond it is currently hidden from view… but there’s a feeling in the air. An ache in her metal arm, in her bones, in the back of her teeth.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t plan it like it happened. It just… did.”
“You have eaten flame and death and made life and-
“It’s not real it’s not here it’s not real it’s not here-
“You changed something of its. It tells us that you- you’re not boring. Not like the thing in the mountain.”
“Mountain? What mountain?”
A half-dozen, half-evaporated arms point towards the impossible, sky-scratching pillar that is the first ring.
“It tells us that it gave you a piece it let you keep a piece and you didn’t die and you didn’t scream and you didn’t rot and-
“Please it sounds like death it sounds like the gunshot it sounds like papa when he was sick please-
“It tells us this place is so small. It tells us this world is skin and bones, drifting out to sea. It tells us that our god lies on a throne crafted from black roots and hungry mouths and that it holds our chains and the chains drink and we bleed and-
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“It tells us you are new. It asks if we think you’ll burn pretty when you die.
“It has no mind and no thoughts but its thoughts are so loud please they don’t fit please I want to go home-
“I didn’t ask for its attention,” Raika whispers. Muscle systems and sharp-edged claws are starting to rise, circulatory pockets of Qi prepped to be detonated into flame, but she stays seated and still. “I’m not here to entertain it.”
The ghosts are silent for a while, but not still. One by one, they tilt their faces upwards, a look of fear growing into terror into horror as their mouths yawn wide and their eyes gape and their ghostly flesh hisses away into nothingness-
Several of them seem to vanish entirely, a void where they previously were. The gestalt begins to fall apart, but those that remain turn their faces back to her. The only man at the front is firm, more solid than most, but even what’s left of him is fading.
“But you have,” they sob. “It sees you from outside the world and it cannot touch but someone made part of it grow strange and grow wrong and it saw through it into you, and you said no. You said-
“Please it’s so cold why is it so cold-
“It told you the TRUTH and you said no, and now you have made something new. Like-
“Like-
“Like a little bug that started painting but it’s so much smaller, it’s not a bug it’s-
“It tells us it likes you,” the old man’s ghost sobs. “It tells us so many terrible things. It tells us that you will End so lovely or you will eat the world and either way it is not alive it is not real it is not here but it is… it is smiling. Oh gods. Its smiling. It doesn’t have a mouth.
“Please. Don’t let me go to this end. Don’t let me. Please. It is waiting behind the door and the door is always there in your skin in your nails in your heart as it gets slower. Please.
“It tells us that the gods are real. Its trying to tell us what they look like. Please. It doesn’t fit and it hurts. It says the gods are worse than it. How can… how can anything be worse?”
The old man’s remains sob, weeping, curling into itself… and the mass spins, consuming it back into the whole, back into the ever-dying mist that is even now fading further.
“You even brought it a new window,” one of the dead things whispers, empty, hollow eyes looking at the small figure across the pond.
The few remaining faces have joined in the weeping. But one of them- the very last one- speaks again.
“It’s waiting for you. Behind the door. The door where everything goes to stay. There is nothing in it of curiosity, nothing in it of happiness- but it is curious. It is happy. It tells us that Change is like Ending and that you will do so much or nothing and it will be waiting behind the door either way.”
Raika says nothing.
For a moment, there is just silence beneath the night sky.
Then… she smiles. She feels the quiet pulse of a flame beyond what flame, of death transformed to hunger transformed to something new…
She shapes her throat to a truer voice.
“I might stop by sometime for a visit.
“But Death does not own me.”
There is a brief, aching pulse from her left arm and her reserves of blacksteel, and then the ghosts are gone. Dissipated to nothingness at all.
She lets out a long, painful sigh. There’s a slight trembling in her hand. Slight. The Flesh twitches and pulses with adrenaline to mirror the fear the Mask demands they feel.
But… deep down?
Two Truths ring. And a third, partially formed before but changed now, still forming, roils alongside them.
With another sigh, she gets to her feet, walking around the edge of the pond to where Jin’s been staring at everything happening with eyes wide as dinner plates.
“So,” Raika says. “How’re you doing over here?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Yeah. One of those kinda nights.”
“You…” he gulps, struggling to get his throat working right. “You’ve… had more nights like this?”
She pauses to think, and… “Honestly? Not really. Got stuck in a beast tide for a week once, and then underground in a magic dungeon for a while. This was new. And kinda terrifying.”
He nods weakly at that. “How… how are you… how did you…”
She shrugs. “Eh. I’m fine. Doesn’t really affect any of my current plans. Just… well. Just scary. And interesting. And likely to be very, very bad in the future.
“But not tonight.”
She sits next to him, sighing as she sinks a bit into the ground at the edge of the pond. Added muscle and bone density and all, lending her a few extra hundred pounds of weight, and the kid actually seems to shiver and come more awake at the way the ground shifts.
He looks out over the pond. Then down to the little crater of fire she set up for him, the Flame gone quite low but still glowing golden.
“What was that?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer for a while. Eventually, though, she sighs.
“I think… I think I was just honored with a visit from a very, very important thing. One that scares me very much, and is… well. I don’t think it quite fits beneath the sky, you know?”
“Not at all.”
She laughs. “Mmh. Fair. So. You saw the ghosts, yeah?”
He hesitates, looking out into the night towards the far side of the pond. Slowly, he nods.
“Yeah. Do they… do they always look like that?”
“Not at all. Usually a lot more cohesive, when they’re big, and still people-shaped if they’re small. Li Shu says that she read somewhere that it’s basically a person’s Qi, the part that touched their soul, thinking it’s still a person. Not sure how true that is, but it mostly fits. The one I killed at your campsite earlier was a lot less messy looking. Which is saying something, cause it had like six arms and three heads sort of melted together.”
“...how come I couldn’t see it then?”
She sighs. “Yeah. Picked up on that, huh. Well… mostly bad luck, I think. Pulled you into a ritual to draw something long-dead back for a bit. An imprint of it that had been haunting me. Figured the safest place for you was behind all the protective formations where no wandering ghosts might come pluck you up, but… well. Looks like you got exposed to a bit more of that thing up in the sky than I hoped.”
“...Am I cursed?”
She shrugs. “Curse is… hard to define. I’m cursed, technically. Qi has a hard time getting in and out of my skin. I find it pretty useful as a shield, though.”
“So… I have a power?”
Raika nods again. “Sure. Better way to frame it. Either way, still my responsibility since I caused it. Sorta roundabout way to do it, and accidental as hell, but that hardly matters much.”
Jin frowns, one eyebrow cocked. “I’m sorry, are you… offering to teach me?”
She shakes her head. “No. What I’m doing, it’s new territory and it isn’t something I’d wish on another person. It took some bad shit to get me here. But… it’s my responsibility that you got exposed to it, my responsibility that you may be able to interact with ghosts now. Might even be a boon for your cultivation if you want, but I can’t cultivate like you can. So I’m no teacher… but I owe you for that. So if you want, you can stay with us for a while.”
The night is quiet. Even the insects remain silent, the strange chill of Endings still dissipating, bit by bit.
“Don’t answer right now. Think about it. And get some sleep. You’ve had a long night.”
The kid stays upright and awake for another hour, maybe, looking out into the dark. But, eventually, he lays back down, huddled close to the fire, wraps his sheets tighter.
Another twenty minutes later, she hears him snoring ever so softly.
Moving quietly, Raika extinguishes the True Flame campfire with a hand of Blacksteel. Carefully, gently, she carries the kid a few miles uphill back to their little cabin, and sets him next to the still-smoldering firepit to sleep.
She stays awake, though. She sits, out on their improvised porch, and looks up at the Night, and the impossible stars that look down from its darkness.