She is not let out of her room.

She doesn’t care.

It is a pretty room. There is a big, soft bed, and a fancy, lovely bathroom, and the rest she does not really see, because it is not really very important at all, is it? It is a pretty room. They will not let her out.

She doesn’t ask them to.

She looks at the shoe, most of the time. Simple thing. A sandal, partially made of wood, partially of cloth bindings. Basic, something easily bought. He didn’t have shoes when they first met, she doesn’t think. Or if he did, they weren’t like this. So he’d gotten nicer shoes at some point. That was good. That was something to be proud of.

But he can’t use the shoe anymore.

The part of her brain that reminds her of that is stupid and unhelpful. And it is all that matters, because it is true. The rest of her brain is also stupid and unhelpful, because it went to fulfill a stupid, childish promise to a stupid child better off without her, and now she gets to see the stain.

It’s in the shadow when the sun goes down.

It’s the wallpaper when the light hits it right.

It’s on her face when she looks in the mirror.

She broke the mirror. It was fixed later when she looked at it, but then she broke it more, and it cut her, and now there is a nice looking wall where the mirror was. She can’t remember the door opening, or anyone coming in, but the mirror is gone now, and it is better.

But when she falls asleep. When she can’t hold it back anymore and falls asleep, against her will, against her pain as she claws at her skin and her face and whatever she can reach. She sees the stain.

She wonders if she’ll see it forever.

It’s a silly thought. She’s killed before, lots of people. In battle, against other cultivators and against mortal armies, uppity villages and terrains that refused to bend the knee and offer proper obesiance to the local sects. The Hungering Roots had never been a particularly active sect, not by the standards of the “true” Sects with their millenia of culture and violence and direct agreements with the Empire, but to even be a sect is to understand that you will be called on to commit violence and to grant resources. So yeah, she’d gone out before.

It’s how she got her name. “Raika the Bloody”. It was kind of a joke, at first, one of those you make when you’re a little scared. She hadn’t had many techniques. The Hungering Roots took her in gladly when they found her, took her away from her family and the winters by the fire and the sound her father made when he was in the kitchen with her mother, trying to get her to sing along, but it hadn’t actually had much that was useful for her cultivation. A few things, sure, all which were “sect resources” and needed to be bought with trials and service and resources brought in and jobs completed. So she did all of them. Everything she could find. Including putting down a few middling armies from some idiot noble children, who got slaps on the wrist as she, without any real technique to her name besides a slightly above average cultivation, slaughtered their “soldiers”.

The first time she’d taken a job to “subdue an upstart army”, she’d walked out of it soaked.

Peak of Foundational Realm. Right before Core Formation. Barely in her mid teens.

They had melted around her fists when she’d hit them. Like sacks of jelly. Like their bones didn’t know how to be bones. Little peasant people, convinced to join up for meager promises. And oh, how they splattered.

Raika the Bloody, they had called her that night, around the fire. She hadn’t killed most of them, hadn’t even made a real dent, maybe a few dozen in the face of several hundred? They’d been wiped out in hours, even hiding and attacking in groups, and she’d done her part, sure, but nothing like the notches the others had shown in their belts that night. But only she had no weapon. Only she had a sect stingy enough and unsuited to her cultivation enough that she knew only martial forms.

A lot of the wounds from that day left scars. The robes she wore never really lost the muddy brown color the blood turned to.

She burned the robes, and laughed with them, and pretended that she’d been able to sleep the next few nights. And then she started wearing the name.

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“Raika the Bloody”. A fearful title for her juniors to worry about, and her enemies to hesitate. A joke to the seniors that had been with her that day. And for her… eventually, it was a way to get used to the faces. To forget them. She wasn’t the person who’d killed those people who had funny masks and simple weapons they didn’t know how to use. She was Raika the Bloody, and she could laugh at it and revel in it because it was just what was.

Funny how well it worked. Barely more than a decade after, and she has forgotten what they looked like, under their scarves and homemade masks.

Those stayed, though. The masks. She can remember those, if she tries to.

She wonders if she will forget JiaJia someday, and find the stain where she last saw the memory of his face.

Maen is alive. So that’s nice.

She’s been in and out. Sometimes she talks. Sometimes Raika feels bad she doesn’t say anything back. Most of the time she doesn’t feel much. Maen lived, so that’s that. She got what she wanted, no? Hasn’t been kicked out anyways. A big upgrade, being here at the palace and working with this “Division”, plenty more here than when she left if she just takes it. Probably even if she doesn’t, she’ll still be more by the end of this. She got what she wanted, and she’s alive and she’s here now, so Raika doesn’t need to talk to her or remember the words she says, because that’s-

Well, that’s easier. She can focus on other things instead.

Like the shoe.

Like Taurus.

The stain likes to come up when the thought of him appears. To remind her of the consequence. Of what he’d said. Of what he’d done.

Her eyes on him, deep under the waters, under the mark of the stain, under the blood. She sees what he did. If she lets herself, if she slips, she can see him there, over and over and over, that backhand faster than she could react to or track but ingrained in her.

That cuts through everything else. When she lets herself think on anything else, that memory cuts through, because that memory does not make her sad. It makes her want to rip out both of their throats.

So it is that things go. She is not sure how long she stays like this, seeing what she did, what was left, in every corner. Only the glimpses of something, beneath the quiet, beneath the pain of it, still peek through to measure time with. But time does pass.

And so eventually, she gets tired of just seeing the stain. She starts to think again. She wonders what she could have done differently. Had she known that Taurus and whoever has his collar already knew about JiaJia, how would she have acted? If she’d been more obedient and simply let things be, what would have changed? Could she, in the end, have simply asked to see Li Shu, no matter how much further it tied them together? She’d hoped that by returning, she’d get some goodwill, that by being silent about who she wanted to see and say goodbye to, she could protect them.

But they’d already known. And she’d pushed forward, a half-cocked plan and what she has to admit, now, was probably more pain and fear than logical thought. She had not mastered her feelings and passions; they had mastered her, and she hadn’t even seen it.

Her Truth still chafes, here in the cage, but it is not unbearable. And had she perhaps just borne it, things could have been different.

But he killed the kid. Self-appointed apprentice to a worthless master. His hand reached forward. His hand swept him aside. Runemaster Boriah Taurus.

She cannot forgive herself for how she acted. For what she let happen and what she caused. But that’s easy. She just doesn’t need to. She’s going to hurt anyways, she’s already in this fucking cage, so she just needs to keep hurting and keep letting things happen and then someday- well, who cares?

But Taurus?

Him, she can make pay.

Eventually, that solidifies.

She doesn’t need to heal, anymore. She doesn’t need to go back to how she was, doesn’t need to ape her former cultivator status. She just needs to be stronger.

She just needs to be more.

And then, when she is, she can take the payment that is owed.

She does not know how long she let this go on, how long she needed for this to happen. But eventually, she wraps the shoe in a soft shirt, and bundles it tight, and leaves it on her bed. She gets up, and walks to the center of the room, and sits.

She was weak. She let herself get carried away. And she didn’t see the hits coming.

All three are unacceptable.

So for the first time since she saw the stain, she lets herself fall back into her body. Back into the damaged sections caused by her escape, into the older scars, into the heart once again, and begins to watch what they do. She watches carefully, ever so quietly, and if she ever wants to stop she just doesn’t, because she doesn’t deserve to stop. And punishment is easier to hold to than even a moment of peace.

So she watches. And she learns. And when she finally begins to move her heart again, begins to take the bits of Qi that taste and feel like razors and needles in her flesh and move them, begins to force something to happen- only then does the door open.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there. But when she looks up, she is not alone in the room, and the air smells of wind, steel and thundering hooves.