He sits, lotus-position, on the floor in front of her. His bulk is very nearly comical, and if not for how ostentatiously oversized everything in the palace is, he wouldn’t be able to comfortably fit past any door, much less sit like this in a simple bedroom without his armspan reaching the walls to either side of him. As it is, the amount of space around and between them gives off the illusion of equatable size, the delusion that she takes up space compared to him. If one were to be generous, perhaps they might say it makes things a bit less intimidating.

But then, Raika isn’t intimidated. Not really. It’s hard to be intimidated by a steel trap, or a falling rock. Afraid, yes. Aware of consequence should one mishandle it, absolutely. But she does not feel intimidated.

She mostly feels empty. And, vaguely, like a chain she has placed around her own throat, she forces herself to feel that hate he has so earned.

He does not speak for a long time. In that time, she simply looks at him.

He looks a bit haggard. More late nights writing letters and documents and whatever it is he does in his room, perhaps, or perhaps something simpler, an extended headache. She likes that idea, that so early in her journey to her hands wrapped around his throat, she’s already caused him pain.

She doesn’t speak. It’s hard to talk, for one thing, because she hasn’t in so long. Weeks, maybe. She also worries that when she tries to speak, her voice won’t come out clear because of the pain.

Eyes open, conscious, the meditation put to the side, she still focuses. She still forces her heart to beat, and her blood to flow and cut and bruise and irradiate what it can inside her with what little she has. It hurts, and that’s ok, because she’s earned that.

“Gone mute, then?” the local Head of the Altered Cultivation Division rumbles.

She shakes her head no. But says nothing.

He nods. “Fair enough.”

He huffs a breath. It stirs the curtains on the other side of the room, and Raika notices it shifts something on her, too. On the top of her head, to be precise. Her hair seems to be growing back, curly little wisps of it, just enough to feel wind by. Funny how she hadn’t noticed.

“You’re to be monitored constantly,” he rumbles. “You’ve been confirmed as an escape risk, and doubly confirmed as a valuable course of study. Say what you will about what you did, but it was impressive.”

She says nothing, keeping her gaze cold and locked on him as she feels her heartbeat.

“I would like you to understand that you are not invisible to us,” he tells her. “Your signature is minute, it’s true. Doesn’t read as human or creature, for very different reasons each, which I’m sure Yun Ka will be happy to explain to you. But you are detectable, like any formation or pattern of Qi. Additionally, you were marked when you were brought here. I’m… annoyed that my generosity was wasted, holding off as long as I did, but I was hopeful you’d take hold of the advantages and agree to it more naturally if given a choice. My mistake. I won’t tell you where or-”

“It’s the capsule,” she interrupts. “Little metal pill, left side, bundled under my lower intestines. Don’t know how you got it in there without cutting me, but my respect to the experts who surely toiled for such a technique.”

He hesitates. Just a tiny, tiny bit.

She smiles. It is bright, and cheery, and ever so enthusiastic to be here. “Not to worry, Master Boriah,” she says, tone matching her smile. “I thank you for the opportunity to be guided, and would never seek to lose this advantage by doing something so foolish as messing with Imperial property.”

He is silent for a moment. She keeps the smile for a moment, before putting it away again, face as quiet as the room.

“I am fascinated to learn more about this cultivation method of yours,” he rumbles. “What a thing, to see inside oneself so clearly. It must be dizzying, the complexity inside even so relatively simple a shell.”

She brings out the smile again, equipping it as naturally as any instinctive movement. “Of course, sir,” she replies. “But I find it easiest when one simplifies things. My wisdom pales to your own, after all, and the nuances of the medical arts are well beyond me. It was quite a hassle, being surrounded by so much impenetrable knowledge back in the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect.”

Another pause. “I’m sure,” he says. “Tell me, did your… excursion there bring up any more bad memories?”

She laughs, but regrets it. She thought she’d gotten it right, but Taurus actually blinks, and she senses a slight stirring in his Qi. Something to refine, later.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she says. “I’m afraid that, while I may have briefly erred and escaped the notice of my benefactor to enjoy some night air, I haven’t returned to the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect in… well, perhaps a month and a half? I’m afraid I haven’t been in my right mind, but I’m quite sure I would never dare to cause trouble for a sect under the Empire’s aegis.”

Taurus says nothing for a while. Then, eventually, he nods.

“Just so,” he says. “It is good, perhaps, that you were in such a weakened state that kept you bound to this room.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Of course, honored Runemaster!” she says, bowing from where she’s seated and coming back up with that smile still on her face. “I cannot thank the Empire enough for its assistance in my recovery.”

Silence again.

Taurus… huffs again. His eyes flicker to the side, towards a blank wall, as if looking for something there.

“It’s a good spin,” he rumbles. “Shows you’re playing along. I respect your ability to commit to it, considering your state yesterday. And the last two weeks.”

The smile doesn’t move. Neither does she.

"I don't suppose it would matter much if I told you I was sorry?" he asks.

The smile doesn’t move. Neither does she.

He opens his mouth. Goes to say something. Closes it again.

“Yeah,” he rumbles. “Fair enough.”

He gets to his feet. “You’ve got free range of the main rooms and the hallways. Oh, and the baths. I suggest you make use of them, and soon.” He goes to step out of the room again, but pauses, looking over his shoulder.

“It could have been worse,” he rumbles. “For him and you both. For you, it still might be. You have others that still walk freely in much larger cages than yours. And your cage, if you let it be, is vast.”

He turns to look at her fully, and there is something in his eyes. For a minute, with no scent involved, she can see that thing inside him, the denizen hidden in his Qi, monolithic and world-shattering and wrapped in a veil of flesh and other elements. It looks at her through him, and all three of them stand there, in tableau, for but a moment.

“You should be ever so grateful you can see its edge,” he rumbles, deeper and somehow even less human than normal emphasis on every word. “It’s quite a useful thing, if you know how to use it.”

The words of a slave. A strong one, maybe even an outwardly daring one, to share such borderline dangerous advice. But a slave.

But she sees the thing in his eyes, brought back to her now. The thing that eats mountains and breathes hurricane winds.

She sees in his eyes, for a moment, the attempt at connection. At communication. At, in it's own quiet way, apology.

Perhaps if he’d said it earlier, she would care.

“I will be sure to take your words to heart, Runemaster,” she says, still smiling, still pitched perfectly, bowing once again.

He smiles at that. It’s not a big smile; a glimpse of teeth, and a moment of cold in his eyes. “Make sure that you do,” he rumbles.

He leaves the room, then, and she lets the smile fall back out of place.

It only took a few hours to get it right. Or right enough, anyways. She can feel the muscles twitching, the flesh behind and around them a bit sore from being moved in a new, unfamiliar way.

She makes herself get up, and compared to when she first sat down it is shaky, a bit unsteady. Well enough, good enough to move and get up in the first place, but there’s a jerkiness to it, an uncomfortable twitching that follows even minor accompanying shifts of position.

It’s only to be expected, though. She is still training, after all.

Taurus leaves the room, perhaps having tried to plant seeds, perhaps not, and she follows behind not long after. The healing process has gone fine; whatever her consumption of Qi in her execution did to her regeneration, it’s lasted at least till now, some fundamental change to her body letting her heal from all of the impressive wounds she accumulated in her escape. If she times it properly, she thinks it takes weeks to heal what others might simply hold as scars for the rest of their life. It takes less time if she uses her will and guides the process, amateur as she may be. So, she trains her will.

She walks forward, towards the baths. Her mind pulls at tendons, tightening ligaments and organizing the shape of the joint so that her leg moves as she wills it to. She could simply walk, let her brain send the signals it needs to without any input from her to have her orders be heard, but that would hardly be a challenge, and her improvised survival of her fall showed her exactly how little she’d been exploring her abilities.

Without a mirror, it had taken some theorizing to come up with what face muscles to move to make the right expression, but she’s fairly sure she got that too. Another twist of will, and she’d felt her vocal cords sing, the sound of them pitched a bit higher than normal. She’d messed up the laugh, somehow, or maybe the whole thing and Taurus simply had too good a poker face to show it, but- well. Any practice is good practice.

She takes off her clothes primly and properly, folding ruined, weeks-worn shirt and pants into a neat pile off to the side of one of the hotter pools, before dipping herself in. The movements are fake, artificial, each twist and bend being supported improperly, but she’ll figure it out. Soon. The more control, the more creatively she can use it, the better.

And then she rests there, in the boiling water, letting it scald her skin and start to burn her, her face forcibly kept at exactly the same expression through will and soul and Truth, what little of it is left. The pain is fine. It’s good, even. The last time she felt the most pain was when she was burned alive, and she apparently regrew almost all of herself after that with just a bit of devoured Qi.

The memory of that pain comes back, and tries to bite her, tries to get her to flinch, but that’s ok. She deserves it, and she survived it, so it can come and go if it wants to. Because that moment held more than just pain. She’d regrown things in seconds, enough to move and see, and though it may take days or weeks, now, she thinks back on that. She remembers what her eyesight had become before that fight, a blurry, barely-improved mess over her original crippling. She remembers looking out at Paleblossom city on her first night in this place, and being able to see individual people on the streets below. She remembers how her flesh had acted before that fight, and how it acts now, after.

She looks up at the ceiling above her, decorated as it is in mosaics depicting the sky. She sees the three moons, Lua, Rua, and the flickering green sibling which so refuses to bear a name. She sees the sun, languid, its arms coiling across the sky in long tendrils of ever-roiling flame, lovingly rendered here as if to embrace all the seasons, from the summers where his limbs waver closer to the earth to the winters in which he coils close and leaves all in the cold. She sees the Cold Sun, hidden as it normally is in the corner of the northern stars of the map, its strange geometries lovingly rendered and its pale white light leaving trails of snowflakes behind.

And behind them, the stars. The constellations, mid-act of battle and intimacy, patterns and councils and clusters of them dancing in formation, coiling about each other like endless snakes and equations. She sees the fluttering-wing, the cross and saber, and the coiled fang all lovingly rendered as if the night sky itself is visible on the ceiling above, each constellation almost as alive as their counterparts in the inky blackness of the sun’s rest.

As her skin reddens and her body begins to blister, ever so slightly, she smiles up at the heavens, and then lets the expression fall, taking its pieces apart and storing them back, until her face is still and quiet. Her eyes simply look up at the heavens above, rendered in slavish, loving detail, following the pattern down to the edges of the mosaic as the pain gets worse.

And then, with a small movement of her right arm, she stabs herself in each eye, and sits back against the edge of the tub to see if she can’t make something far more interesting than stone and heavens above.