Jin’s nose started bleeding about an hour ago. Being in the clinic of a fortress city, this hasn’t been much of an issue; big sis Li Shu and the other healer that’s been helping to train them are more than capable of giving him a quick burst of restorative Qi or a talisman, at least when it gets so bad it starts coloring the front of his robes.

But no matter what they do, it just keeps bleeding.

There’s far, far more important things to worry about, and the most likely explanation, an overdose of local Qi, shouldn’t be lethal for hours.

Technically, it’s a correct diagnosis. It’s just that… he’s not sure that it’s just Qi.

There are so many dead here.

Some of the soldiers that the healers don’t manage to save, a surprisingly rare few, stick around. They… whisper out from what was once a living person, like a mist, or a… or a sound wave, emanating like a final note. The aura of the room eats away at them, though, faster than anything he’s seen. Arrays and something in the walls themselves break them down like acid on contact, dissolving every part of the wispy fragments of people that touch the ground, walls, anything. What’s left after that seems to shy away from the moments of healing, the instant where death is averted by the strength of the healer’s arts.

But it’s the walls that get them. The floor that eats them alive. Moments of healing, of death rebuffed, push them away a bit, but they don’t dissipate from them, just make them drift further.

There’s so much death here.

He’s been thinking about that, actually. In between placing talismans, holding sutures and fetching materials, he’s been ruminating on death, and all it means. There’s one thing he’s noticed, in that time.

There’s no past tense for being dead. Not really. The act of moving into that final state, sure, you can die in the past tense, but death… there’s only ever death and dying.

There’s only death that is yet to come, and death that is already here. There is no past tense of “dead”, just the action of dying.

That, in particular, made him notice something. It’s not just ghosts and wraiths, not just the dead moving through the world as echo-shapes from where life once was. There’s also the death in people. Right now. Everywhere.

The more he heals people, the more he can see it. The worse the wound, the louder it gets, the sharper it gets. There’s death… in people. It centers around their nails, their hair, their blood, especially the blood that has no oxygen in it, that’s in the arteries heading toward instead of away from the heart. Sharp-edged shadows, like alabaster, like marble inside the body.

If he unfocuses his eyes, he can see it.

Death isn’t just ghosts. It’s not just the absence of people, colored in by Qi.

Sometimes Death is real. Sometimes it can touch you.

Sometimes, if you squint just right, you can see it. The empty shape that the absence of a person fills in.

The soldier on their operating table is open. There’s no ribcage left, and they’re having to rebuild him bit by bit. If he unfocuses his eyes, he can see the Death standing over him, bubbling up from inside his shattered chest. It looks like… like an empty hole, whose teeth are bone and skeletal frame, whose blood is inverted into shadow and flowing outward, forever and ever.

There are ghosts. There are wraiths, ghosts all wrapped around each other in a desperate bid to fight back the End. And there is Death. For each and every person, there is Death.

And then there are the things that don’t come from people. The things that make a single person’s Death seem… small.

He watches as the surgery takes a bad turn. As the final moments of the soldier on the table crawl closer and closer, as the image of what his death will be / is crawls deeper and deeper into him.

And as an arm comes in from the door where most of the soldiers come in from. The door that leads to the battlefield.

It’s not an arm. Not really. It doesn’t have the musculature to pretend to be an arm. No fingers or joints, not really. It reaches through with a long, stretching tendril of claws, of knives, of bullets, of gunpowder and thorns and lightning and broken arrays, of spilled blood and torn meat. It reeks of fire and qi and War, and it breaks and tears and unmakes itself in just the right way to reach out to the soldier’s death.

It reaches the open ribcage, the specter of the end of the young man, and… wears it. The death of the man becomes a part of this larger, greater, more horrible thing, adding to it like a pebble adds to sand on the beach.

And then it reaches down and touches the soldier with his Death, and he’s gone.

Arrays on the table capture a flood of escaping Qi from his collapsing Dantian and meridians, funneling the explosive outpouring of force down into the fortress city itself.

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His Death draws away, now part of the larger and worse thing out there, and in the vacuum it makes, in the vacuum of where his life was and where his Death, very briefly, he sees a ghost. The man torn open on the table, oozing what’s left of his crimson, stands over himself for a single moment.

And then the Qi is drained away completely, and what’s left of the echo of him… goes away.

And then the table is cleared, and they bring in another one.

A hand places itself on Jin’s shoulder, and for just a second, he smells tangerines.

Deep breath. In and out.

He places the talismans and sutures and alcohol and gauze and water-breathing elixirs and painkillers where they tell him to. He starts to see the pattern.

The Death of the soldiers creeps closest to the points where they operate almost every time.

Almost.

At one point, big sis Li Shu points him to a section he needs to hold tight and tries to move off, and he grabs the hem of her robes as hard and as tight as he can. He points to the wound, unable to speak, unable to articulate, staring at how the Death of the soldier, a woman who looks just a few years older than him, crawls and oozes into and out of the closed wound.

Big sis Li Shu tells him he did a good job as she removes the missed piece of something sharp, and gives him another bit of healing to help with the nosebleed that’s dribbling down his chin. He barely notices. He’s too busy looking at all the Death, and tracing the shape of it inside people.

And feeling it outside.

It’s not just ghosts and wraiths. Not just malformed echoes of who once was.

Death is more than that.

He can feel it moving behind the walls. Feel it like ice cubes crawling across his skin from an angle he can’t see.

He remembers the light of a moon that is not a moon, and is forever-cold and speaks with the mouths of the dead.

He remembers the hand still on his shoulder, and the slightest scent of an open, grassy field, mixed with sweet citrus.

He wipes away the blood, and keeps watching. Every moment that he reaches into the Death placed in front of him to fix something is a moment that someone lives a little longer. A moment that their echo isn’t forced to exist. A moment where that same echo, those echoes that look so alive and so afraid, don’t get eaten by the floor or the walls or the room.

They don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve to stop being, to have something like them be again, and that something doesn’t deserve to just be eaten.

He holds the hand on his shoulder with the whisper-quiet thing inside him. Holds the echo of an echo for all that he’s worth, because he can’t hold any more than that. Not as he is. He can’t hold all that Death inside him. It won’t fit.

He looks back towards the door they came from. Back in the direction that they last saw his master. He feels the ice cube on his skin, smaller than the rest but still so much larger than just one Death.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

His eyesight is going a bit red. He’s pretty sure his eye is starting to bleed a bit too.

But he keeps looking. He keeps watch. He keeps his eyes open, and he makes sure that he watches the Death, and he holds onto the echo of an echo inside the winding trails that mark where his soul that he is moves through the inside of him. He cycles every drop of Qi he has, and takes in all that he can fit from what he sees, and adds it to the cycle.

And he starts to hum, ever so softly. He hums to the sound of Death. He hums to the song of what it sounds like when people go away forever, eaten by the room in which they died, touched by a Death bigger than anything that he knows.

He’s so full. But he won’t stop watching.

The dead deserve that much.

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Hey, new orders. We need a fresh deployment.”

“Ugh. Fine. What are they asking for?”

“There’s been some kind of incident with the lower sections. Apparently there was some kind of issue with one of the recyclers, or some sort of sabotage in the arrival hangars, something or other. Messy. Lost something like a platoon and a half, maybe more.”

“So? What’s stopping them from sending down a Captain to deal with it? Hmm?”

“We’ve got three Captains in the whole damn fort, and all three of them are fucking busy. The way the tides have been lately, you know no one on this or any other side of the wall has had a fucking break this week. Peak Nascent Soul doesn’t grow on fucking trees, and you know Garrison Command has his hands full.”

“It’s not like we’re lazing about here! I understand that things are tough, but there is such a thing as giving face! We’re not one of the Bastions, I only have so many Daemon Operators. We’re at capacity for all my Rank Two disciples, and I’m managing twice the workload I should be as it is.”

“I understand, but we’ve still been able to cycle the Rank Ones, haven’t we?”

“...Yes, fine. If you don’t mind juniors with eyes who fail to see the heights, I have a few I can toss your way.”

“...Listen, I know you’ve been short-staffed. But the Colonel has been in the front lines seven days straight, my fellow Captains are about to be recalled for Qi reinforcement and healing, and we all lose face if we have to call in reinforcements. If we deploy some fire-and-forget Daemons, wipe the problem out quick…”

“You still don’t know how to speak to a superior, do you?”

“What can I say, I find you much more appealing as a partner than I do a commander.”

“Ha! You take orders just fine when it suits you though.”

“What can I say, I’m a passionate enthusiast for things I deeply enjoy. And next time we get a break in the tide, I’ll happily follow any order you want me to dance to. But for now…”

“Fine. What section did-”

“-What was that?”

“Something just tore straight through the fucking wards! What the hell was that?”

“I haven’t seen something hit that hard in- oh, fuck.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you cuss like that.”

“Yes yes, I’ll be prim and proper later. Daemon Operator Wai-Ji! Get off your ass! Get me a 6th sphere, now!”

“Wha- are you sure? Without approval from the Garrison Commander or the Colonel-”

“Do us all a favor and cease prattling for a moment, I’m about to be very busy. Someone just summoned a tribulation straight through about half this damn fortress, and the Qi is… fuck. Middle of the damn wave, and they have to do this! Wake up the other Rank Two Operators, Wai Ji, get them on their feet, break open elixirs if you have to! And you, get the Hells out of my chamber, I need your eyes un-molten. Get to the front, now, keep the other Captains supported. I’ll handle this.”

“Ok. I… I’ll be back soon. To check on you.”

“Fine. Don’t- ugh. Just don’t die. That’s an order.”

“Yes sir.”

“Wai Ji! If I have to call your name one more time I’m feeding your ability to piss standing up into a matrix! MOVE!”