A man in simple, unadorned robes walks over what remains of a fortress.
It is mighty, even in its ruins, dramatic even in its downfall. Even as it lies, gutted and dead, its Heart torn out and eaten, there are still pockets of resistance, bits and pieces of what once might have been called great defenders. Bio-constructs roam the deepest tunnels of the former fortress, eeking out a living bereft of the greater will that drove them, and roaming Daemon-things, their bindings too tight to be broken but just loose enough to allow their continued existence, compete for territory among the ruins.
And always, in an ever-flowing tide, the Pack advances.
The man in simple robes watches impassively as something shaped like a ten-sided die crawls onto the rocks next to him, each of its faces holding a single limb that allow it to move as it rolls. It spares him not a glance, rolling downhill past the ruined wall he sits atop.
It is the fifth being which has walked nearly to his exact resting place and left him unmarked. It is only reasonable this be the case, though.
After all, He Is Not There.
An interpretation of his Truth, his distinction from the world and its rules. He is not at the place where they would see him- he is at the place where he is sitting. That level of control over his interpretation of reality took over a century to complete.
And now, he uses it watch the world change.
This man, who has wandered the breadth of the world, has recently completed a trip from the very center of the first ring out to here, the very edge of the third. It has taken him many months- his master demands results, but the burden of millenia have taught patience. The man in simple robes found his way past a researcher from the Division of Altered Cultivation, following threads from him out to the city of Cragend, which brought about the disappearance of a member of the Feng clan.
Had he died, the man who Is Not There would likely never have been called. To die in such an embarrassing fashion would not demand the personal attention of a man who Is Not There- it would only mean that Feng Gao had fallen so far as to no longer be a part of the Feng clan’s worthy halls, and thus would have required minimal followup except to punish those responsible.
But Feng Gao disappeared.
His candle, enchanted to connect to his lifeline, has yet to go out, but it sputters strangely now, a thing of awkward twists and turns. A corruption of a Feng is a much greater concern.
And yet, no trace of him had been found. No hint of the former Feng powerhouse could be located in the minor mining town where he was last seen.
So the man who Is Not There followed what traces there were.
A thing with the scent of Feng blood on its claws. A thing of human shape, but quite far removed. And not a cultivator, interestingly. A thing connected to the threads of fate he followed from the Researcher.
It meandered for a while- until the man who Is Not There found a strange place in the backwoods of the third ring, between a barely civilized village and a fourth-rate sect. Its name has been placed deep within vaults of his own creation, planted unforgettably into his mind- one never knows where one might find connections. The threads wound between this place and the lives of some of the paltry things in that area, including strongly to a young apprentice of the aforementioned sect, but that is not what drew the man’s attention.
Where once, Imperial maps had shown him a valley, now there was just dirt.
In an area a little over two square kilometers in circumference, leaving behind little but bamboo shoots and upturned soil, there is an empty space. A near-perfect circle of ground that was torn up wholesale, not so cleanly that it seemed to be done with Qi or a blade, but far neater than it should have been. As if that circle of ground that was once a valley under Imperial command had simply uplifted itself and gone away.
And that got his attention once more.
The trail quickened after that, the threads leading him straight towards the wall. He traced every step, every stop, every breathe and moment of sleep or feeding or intimacy that he found on the way, but even still, he arrived at the wall much faster than his quarry originally did.
He got there just in time to see the black thread of fate ripple out from her as the back of her brains were blown out.
Clearly his quarry had tried to sneak into the fortress and been stopped- but there should have been nothing in that fortress, besides perhaps its commander or a Daemon-summon, which could harm a thing that could alter the nature of a Feng Warrior realm, or perform the strange transformation of earth he saw. Even if it had been another Heart he had found traces of, something which the man who Is Not There severely doubts, it should still have been strong enough to protect its champion.
And then he saw the black threads begin to spread through the fortress.
And then he walked into the main unloading dock beneath the compound above and watched, sitting off to one side, the thing which crawled out of what had once pretended to be human.
He has spent the last week and a half reviewing what he saw. He has sat, Not There, for that time, thinking, checking back to confirm what he saw.
Each thread leaves a trail. A part of the weave of what is, was, and could be that makes up the world. The man who Is Not There was once plucked from out of a pool of still mercury, pulled out of that weave and the things he whispered from it, but the understanding of that place of divination never left him.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
He watches the weaving of the death of Fortress City #180 from every angle, over and over, learning the patterns and movements and meanings and depths of the thing his master bade him hunt over and over and over.
He gets up from where he sits, walking calmly along the debris. His eyes track the threads, even as his body appears to pass through the flesh of the hordes crawling over the breach. They cannot touch him- he simply Is Not There in any way that matters except the way that allows him to See.
The man in simple robes walks, and the world changes around him.
The Pack, as they call themselves, are a danger, this is true. It has been… one-thousand, six-hundred and thirty-seven years since the last so-called alliance of spirit beasts attempted to face the Empire, and to this day, their deaths are part of why the third ring is so empty of all but the bravest and most well-hidden beasts. It has been nearly that long again since the wall was last breached, and that breach was sealed quickly, within days.
It has been a week and a half, and still the Pack advances.
There are thousands of spirits beasts crossing the remains of the wall, with some of the stronger members of the Pack corralling uncontrolled Daemons or well-aligned beasts of the 4th ring to the edges of the tide, holding back the reinforcements from fortress-cities 181 and 179. Still, beasts do not make up the majority of the tide- while the heights that even animals can achieve with cultivation are high, they take time and resources to be reached.
In place of using unique and precious creatures, transported or teleported through the dead sands by their betters, as cannon fodder, they have instead turned to the worst possible scenario.
Allies.
For every mammalian predator-beast, loping in lesser packs and through rifts in space and vulnerability, there are close to ten thousand insectile creatures working in concert. Swarms of natural bio-constructs, birthed of Hearts yet to be harvested, skitter and crawl and shield the Pack’s more distinct assets, and the air buzzes hard enough to kill a mortal with the sound of beating wings and chittering mandibles. Hive queens specialized in mass production and deployment have been brought into the Pack, but this, too, could be predicted. For all the biological and ontological distinctions between the greater Divine Beasts, their joining to the Pack could be expected.
It is the corpses they carry that stand apart from the rest.
In sweeping mausoleums, carried on palanquins of black glass and spider-woven lace, they ride. In boots of carved resplendence and gilded mercury and gold, they march. In tides of shifting limbs, sewn together and fused at joints and seams, the crawl and lumber and rolls and skitter and spread.
Everywhere the man who Is Not There looks, he sees traces of the Fallen Kingdom.
They could very well be a rogue group, a terrorist faction amidst the failed empire and lackluster civilization rotting outside the walls. They could be a deployment of their forces, captured and forced into servitude or death by some particularly intelligent member of the Pack.
But for every unique and difficult to predict spirit beast walking through the breach and into the maze of trenches of the “city” part of the fortress city, there are perhaps a hundred soldiers of the dead keeping pace.
Unlike the Pack, they have none of their strongest champions on the playing field. A thing that the threads of fate call the ‘Many-Heron” gobbles up dozens of cultivators, every stab of its many fishing-beaks claiming a half-dozen lives, and one of the feline predators that seem common amongst the Pack’s Divine Beast contingent swims through space, switching between two and three-dimensional space at whim to reap a tally of lives. The Fallen Kingdom’s forces, on the other hand, move in synchronicity, their strength coming from how difficult it can be to defend against attacks aimed at the soul and one’s vitality itself. Constructs of artfully rendered corpses, woven together into great beasts that ape at holiness, wander the front lines and protect ranks of soldiers in black glass and gilded armor, swinging blades of pale white marble that reek of the Cold Sun into unsuspecting cultivators who have rarely faced its like.
The man who Is Not There tilts his head as he watches the marble sword of an artfully decorated corpse tear through the arm of an Imperial soldier. The material shears through the arrays on the black and jade armor of the Empire, and the man in simple robes watches curiously as veins of death, desiccation, decay spread explosively through the man’s arm and into his head.
Nothing he hasn’t seen before, but it’s always a lovely vision.
The man in simple robes wanders back into the trenches, following older threads.
He’s reviewed his target’s entry into the fortress city multiple times, but the man who Is Not There is nothing if not thorough. He steps through and over the dead bodies of those too slow to escape, around and across smoking debris that was once the improvised housing of the many that lived in and supplied the city, tracking the fate he seeks.
While the Division of Divination keeps its assets close, and has far more skill than he, that does not mean that the art of Seeing is closed to him.
He replays the events that led to their assignment at the front lines. Sees the allies that the thing he hunts has.
The man who Is Not There tilts up an edge of his lip in what might be called a smile.
His master has decreed that he discover what occurred, and bring to justice those who plotted against the glory of the Feng clan. Fate has shown him all that there is to see, and painted a path to his target.
All is as it should be.
He turns his head to look at the dead and the dying all around. The war rages, tearing wider the breach in the Wall, and until the generals of the Bastion Fortresses or the Blades make a move, neither of which are likely anytime soon, there is nothing to be done about it.
He traces the fate of those around him, marveling at the beauty of all those black threads.
Ah. Except one.
One of the threads on the battlefield grows long, the other colors of comprehension decorating its fabric. He steps through a wall, slipping through the body of a struggling beast pinned beneath a dozen spears and bleeding out, stepping in and around and through a curve in space all simultaneously.
There. Writhing in the dirt, beneath part of a collapsed building which is quickly being worn down and consumed from the inside.
A Daemon. Writhing under the wreckage, a sloppily completed binding allowing it to sip at a part of the world beyond its official constraints. It eats at the stone of the wall, slowly straining and stretching its skeletal frame, the constructed war-body of weaponry, energies and metal.
He tracks the thread that flutters out from it, pushing himself to see the way that it is woven thickly with other deaths, other dangers, more of the war-
Ah. There. A thirty-odd percent chance that it entrenches itself through a civilian center and into the second ring, near one of the anchors.
Hmm. The things he does for the sake of a better world.
Time stops as a halo brightens from a place that Is Not There, shining out onto the world.
He reaches his mind through the machinery of it, the construct of divinity pushing against the world and dragging the thread of fate towards him. With a flicker of will, he molds the destiny of the broken Daemon, cutting away the woven possibilities until only one remains. Now, so long as his Halo holds power, the Daemon will never not turn slightly north in its advancement, ending up deeper in the civilian center and away from any important infrastructure.
Of course, there’s a chance that it’ll never even head inland. Other fates remain open to it. But so long as it acts as the man who Is Not There knows it inevitably will, it will do so according to a proper fate.
He nods. As it should be.
And then he takes a step.
He isn’t gone. That wouldn’t make sense.
He Wasn’t There to begin with.