"...do you think war is easy?”
She waits for them to keep talking. Says nothing. The walls shifting and undulating in the background is the only sign that she’s heard him at all.
“Not all of us are a ravenous plague. Most of us don’t have a thousand years to spare getting stronger. Strength is above all, and we are only strong enough to survive. Those who can’t survive, who would only weaken others… it’s not how things used to be. But now, everyone knows that the only way to survive is to be stronger. Backsliding into weakness will only mean that we die all the sooner.”
“Weakness, is it?” she asks. “To be wounded? To be old?”
Ro Aian stares at her, his eyes hard. There’s defiance there, fury at being challenged like this… but deeper down, she tastes something else. Slimy and darker than even his cultivation, heavier than honey.
“Who the fuck are you to come here and act as if we are monsters for surviving?”
Aurick winces at the statement. Wei Na is holding her breath, her cultivation cycling into her muscles and bones to provide some measure of defense and mobility.
“I’m someone who once was wounded. Who was infirm. Who was broken. That changed. It wouldn’t have without support from others. Who are you to stand in my presence and dare to lecture me on what is monstrous?”
They all feel it when the city shakes. Just a bit. A trembling tension that runs through the place they stand, back to the figure at the center of it.
Ro Aiain does not bow to it.
“We live in a land of predators. Most beasts, divine or no, are not so peaceful as Lord Aurick, and the dangers are endless in every direction. To be slow is to be hunted. To take food from the mouths of babes, without being able to protect them, only hurts the many at the expense of the few. If they are strong enough to take what they need, then they are strong enough to help. If they are not strong enough to fight, or farm, or teach or heal or protect, then they can be strong enough to sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice is noble. Necessary, sometimes. But don’t act like you’re doing them a kindness by offering to feed them to the roots.”
“It is not a kindness. And I am not doing anything. The strong live forever as cultivators, taking in the Qi of the world until they are strong enough to live off their own. The weak die eventually. And we are all hungry. We are all hunted. We live with armored boots ready to step atop us and grind us to gristle. To keep alive the weak is to hurt those who might someday be strong enough to protect themselves and others. So yes. We go to the roots. If I fail to progress, fail to stay strong, someday it will be my turn.”
She stares at him, feeling something like hatred bubbling inside.
“Being weak is not a sin anymore than sacrifice is a given. I have gone through this entire city and found none with wounds from the war. No crippled, no broken, no powerless- because they die to you, rather than to the boot.”
“And in making that choice, they give their strength to others! Protect others! Feed the overgrowth so we are harder to find, so we have more resources to harvest, serving a natural cycle!”
She slams her hand on the table hard enough that it shatters, her own bone turned to shrapnel as the table collapses.
“You don’t get to damn me as an abomination and then talk to me about the natural cycle of eating people.”
The words ring in the air so loud that they hurt. Raika sees Wei Na flinch, blood leaking from her ears, and even Aurick sways back a step, surprised. “...that’s twice now you’ve used it. The Truespeak. How-”
“Shut your fucking mouth.”
He does.
She turns to face the cultivator of darkness and honey, of rich sweetness made in protected darkness. She tastes the sour and the dark beneath it, and finally feels the flavor hit on recognition.
Shame. Shame and hatred, mixed in molasses-thick syrup, like oil beneath the honey.
She takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Takes in another.
“Where I come from, the sick are cared for. The old, protected. Not always. Sometimes not even well. But they are. There is food. There is protection. There is education.
“And yet strength there is not like it is here. It’s not just freedom, to do as you please, good or ill. Strength is violence, and it too is prized above all else. All of that food and protection and education and freedom goes into making the strong stronger, keeping the weak where they are, and finding more to take.
“I come from beyond the Wall. The peace and comfort there exists for their hunger. The growth there exists to make weapons out of the weak, so they might better take. What was once my homeland crawls forth on conscripted limbs and with well-fed weapons into your lands, and they take from you. I have not lived your life, to make your choices.”
For a moment, the room is quiet. She tastes something not-unlike relief in those she speaks to, and not unlike hate, and not unlike pain.
“The world is broken, and maybe, you actually have needed to do this to survive. I don’t know. But I believe you could have done better, that you can, if your strength wasn’t just for the strong. So let me be crystal fucking clear. So long as I am in this town, there will be no more feeding the vines. If they’re so fucking special, they can grow on their own.”
Ro Aiain laughs, bitterness in his voice. “Or what? You kill us all yourself? You decide not to help Lord Aurick, and things proceed as they were always going to without you? Or maybe you think that killing me will somehow makes things better, leaving this place without a defender, without a host-protector and my strength.”
She smiles, low and cold.
“You called me a replicator. Why don’t you look outside?”
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His face goes pale. He moves in an eyeblink, his cultivation making his steps feel like he’s traveling through the dark to arrive exactly where he intends. She dissolves the body in the room, closing the entrances, trapping Wei Na and Aurick inside- and then manifesting them, opening the flesh again atop a vast spire that stands nearly to the height of the crystal in the tree.
Ro Aiain is there, and his panicked Qi has pulled others out of where they were. She sees Chu Ari, sees a mass of centipedes and spiders that dangles down from the branches above, sees something that looks like a rainbow growing out of waters and into humanoid form. She sees something like a tiger wearing the flesh of a man, and a person with eyes like sunrise and skin like nightfall, their flesh pulsing to the tune of birdcall and growing wood.
They all look at Aurick and Wei Na, both of them looking for her, and none of them seeing anything but the building she’s made part of her flesh. The whole city roils for a moment, fear and confusion and battle-readiness all rising up. She tastes the trauma of refugees, the fear of new war, the readiness to fight, the willingness to sacrifice.
It’s not evil here.
But it is broken.
She is broken too. But she likes her style better.
She begins to form.
The world shudders. The buildings shake as if caught in an earthquake. The roots tremble as something pulls at them, an impossible weight and reach grabbing hold of the world as she anchors herself. The tree, high enough to hold cloud cover in its canopy and whose leaves are larger than buildings, shakes, the crystal in its trunk screaming out feedback from the friction.
She is broken.
She is not human.
She is herself.
The trunk of the great tree of Singheart grows discolored, becoming red and purple and gold, tainted with streaks of black and white.The crystal’s light begins to dim, the sunlight from above becoming eclipsed by a growing mass appearing on the bark above it. It grows, louder and louder, brighter and brighter, glowing with Qi, with the richness of scarlet-crimson, with the glow of golden flame, with the purple of strange blood and the black of death transformed.
And then she opens her eyes.
Five eyes appear in front. Two humanoid ones, two above and to the sides of them, and one at what might be a collarbone in another body. Black sclera make the impossible radiance of color that spews from her pupils all the brighter, their centers shaped like an eight-pointed star of sharp lines.
Her face emerges, mouth yawning wide, her jaw opening like a flower and full of teeth like swords. Two great horns grow from the top of her head, glowing white and growing like antlers, highlighting a skull shaped to hold strange brains and then spiral them out as neural threads in a halo down the trunk.
Six arms, each of them half-formed from the mass, highlight her reach, her torso growing up and out like a twin fused to the tree at birth, her skin like rich, dark wood and starlit-darkness, patterns of Blacksteel scales running up and down her form.
She stares down at the city, up at its would-be strongest, and sends out a pulse of her will from every tendril she has spread throughout the city, lighting their chromatophores to luminescence.
The city of Singheart glows with every color of the rainbow, feeding back into the scarlet, indigo and dawn-gold, and the Body which radiates it.
HEAR ME, she says, speaking with lungs the size of buildings, and the world shivers before her voice.
THIS WORLD IS BROKEN. THIS WORLD IS WRONG. THE WORLD SAYS THAT SUFFERING IS A GIVEN. THAT STRENGTH IS EQUIVALENT TO FREEDOM. THAT THE WEAK HAVE NO PLACE, EXCEPT TO BE TAKEN FROM.
SUFFERING IS NOT A GIFT. STRENGTH IS NOT FREEDOM, IS NOT PEACE, IS NOT TRUE POWER.
THIS CITY, AND ITS PEOPLE, ARE UNDER MY PROTECTION NOW. THE SICK DO NOT DIE UNWANTED. THE OLD DO NOT DIE FOR THE YOUNG. THE BROKEN DO NOT DIE ALONE. MY STRENGTH IS GIVEN FREELY TO THE WEAK, FOR THE SAKE OF SOMETHING BETTER. IF YOU CRAVE THE OLD WAYS, LEAVE. IF YOU FEAR WHAT IS TO COME, COWER. I AM RAIKA THE BLOODY, THE BURNT, THE BROKEN, OF INDIGO BLOOD AND DIVINE HEART, AND I AM STRONG ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE WEAK. IN MY SHADOW, BE PROTECTED. IN MY LIGHT, GROW TALL.
AND IF ANYONE DEMANDS DEATH FOR WHAT YOU HAVE, FOR THE SIN OF BEING WEAK, FOR THE SIN OF EXISTING IN THEIR PATH…
POINT THEM MY WAY.
A thousand-thousand eyes open up across the city. Pupils of every size, color, shape and style blink wide on veins of alien flesh, grown into every nook and cranny of the city. From a dozen places throughout the city, they cluster, and from beneath them, new trees begin to grow, bone-white and bleeding the radiance of CHANGE.
Every eye turns to look at the strong of the city, all of them looking up at Raika in turn.
She looks back at them from many places, all of them one Body, one Mind, one Soul, and smiles wide and full of teeth.
“You’re strong enough to survive the world,” she says, just for them. “I’m strong enough to change it. Got a problem with it?”
A half-dozen cultivators, some of them strong enough to ruin cities and mountains in moments, all stay silent.
She regrows from the floor of the tower she has built, even as it is reabsorbed back down into the empty home they gave her. Aurick is still there, as is Wei Na, her face pale and her breath tremulous. Aurick, on the other hand, is looking at her with something… something like respect.
A Divine Beast, looking at her with something like respect. Ain’t that something.
She wonders how playtime with Dances-Between-Layers would go now.
“Wei Na,” she says, her voice once again human and quiet. “Please accept my apologies for the abrupt declaration. Your name holds honor and weight, and I will be proud to call upon it when I speak to the righteous that give it the respect it deserves. In turn, you are free to call upon my own name, not as payment for a debt, but as a sign of my grief at your loss and my own respect for your strength and care for your fellow tribesman.
“Aurick. You are a part of this place, which has suffered and has survived off its own pain, and you neither spoke of this to me nor changed it yourself. I am not a beast you can leash. I am not a cultivator you can tempt. I am not a child you can impress. I am something new. You are not bringing me into your Pack- you are auditioning to be part of mine. Is that clear?”
The centauroid nods, and then bows his head. “As you say, Apex.”
She turns to look up at Ro Aian, knowing that even if his cultivation is strange, his strength dancing between the Nascent and Warrior realms, he is more than strong enough to hear her.
“If you believe that the strength is righteousness, then bow. If you believe that strength is for the sake of others, swallow your fucking pride and use it for others. And if you’ve got a problem with me, feel free to come at me anytime. Otherwise, fuck off. My oath still stands. Leave, before I decide that I have true and deep cause to kick your ass.”
She doesn’t bother watching him go. She just smiles at the others instead, her eyes warm, her grin wide. She pulls Li Shu through a tendril, feeling her touch on it and the request to for information. She pulls Many-Grasping up and out onto the surface of her being, her eyes wide with devotion, her strength already higher than it was the day before, robes highlighting rather than obscuring many-jointed limbs and the beginning of a Qi presence. She pulls Jin up from where he sits, still holding a dumpling in his mouth and eyes wide, surrounded by the mist and fog of death and the shapes it holds.
The rest of her cult can fucking wait. She’s busy with those she can actually trust.
“So. Aurick. When did you say we were leaving again?”
He smiles, his teeth flat and bright white against dark green skin. “Won’t that be a problem, Apex? Now that you have such… strong ties to this city?”
She cocks her head, curious, making a bit of a show of it. And then she severs the connection between this body and the rest of her.
There is a moment of disconnect, disorientation. She looks inward for a moment, curious to see if it’ll work, or if she just gambled and lost stupidly.
Raika’s Soul looks up, and watches as the Mind… remains entirely the same.
One Body. One Mind. One Soul.
I Am Me, I Am Mine. Why would a lack of direct, physical touch change anything about that?
I Can Change. Where does it say fuck-all about physicality in that statement? Where does it speak of limits?
Against the Feng, she’d managed to make herself into a three part being. Here? Now? She is one, and she is many, and it is good.
“Easily,” she says. “Haven’t you heard? Apparently, I’m some kind of 'Replicator'. All sorts of fun possibilities there.”