So as it turns out, when you’re immune to neither cold nor sneezing, winter tends to suck ass like it’s going out of style.

Raika spent six years of her life learning to huddle indoors when the winter came. It was a time of warm fires, tea, and heated cakes from a warm pan, always just enough that so long as you huddled close and stayed indoors, things would be ok. Then, she spent the next twenty odd years learning that huddling with loved ones and cozy fireplaces is baby stuff for amateurs, and real badasses just refuse to be cold. She even got good enough that it started to be true; while she still prefers a nice jacket and shawl on a windy winter’s day, she got to the point where she could have bathed naked in a river on the longest night of the year and come off maybe just a touch chilly. For this part of the world, she’s pretty much immune to winter.

Or she was. Now, she doesn’t even have a nice jacket or a shawl, because life isn’t fair and jackets are apparently a thing for rich people now.

Raika starts the winter with two blankets, both thin, the clothes she’s wearing (and has had minimal chances to wash), and stray straw. She got lucky with the alcove she found, it’s true, behind an old building itself wrapped by a few alleyways, enough of one of its walls eroded to make a little cubby one can vaguely curl up into. A broken box left nearby when she arrived and the aforementioned straw and blanket makes for an incredibly cozy patch of real estate; she’s got about a third of a poorly balanced roof, half of one wall, a quasi-tent for some privacy and to pretend to keep the wind out, and as much moldy straw as she can find for that chic in-home rustic look. A paradise fit for a queen, surely.

Unfortunately, even in this private paradise, resources dwindle. Rats, once plentiful in the quiet passing of summer and autumn, eager to reproduce and grow plump, are just as starved as the people that used to feed them, and those that remain are more than happy staying cozy with their litters underneath houses, in the cracks in buildings, and in basements and warrens beneath the ground. Further, neither Li Shu nor Qen Hou have come by since the first snow fell. For Li Shu, she’s pretty sure either she or her master realized the chances of Raika surviving any sort of winter and felt it best to cut contact before things got too sad; for Qen Hou, he probably just got bored and decided to pursue cute healers somewhere else. Either way, what little buffer they provided is as gone as the rats, now.

So once again, the curse of mundanity rises up, and she suffers just the same as any weakling without a pack or a cave to warm oneself in. About a week into the first cold snap, she gives up on begging entirely; the streets of the few areas she can hobble to (and isn’t beaten when she arrives in) are anemic with travelers and merchants both, and the only scraps being thrown out are the ones too spoilt to sell or burn. There’s still some good to be found in the trash that’s collected in the big alcoves near business centers and residential districts, little bits of unspoilt leaves or scraps of skin and char that no one wanted, so why waste time hoping a restaurant or stall has the right mix of pity and disgust for her to give her less of what she’d find here anyways? Besides, the exercise can be good in the right doses. She doesn’t have the stamina or well-being to actually exercise properly, not to her definition, but moving the muscles makes for minor body heat, helps keeps her joints from stiffening up completely, and slowly helps her walk further.

By week three of winter, she can walk almost twenty minutes at a time without needing to stop and rest. She comforts herself that she only just started: she haunts herself with the fact she’s been conscious three months and change and is only barely able to walk twice as far as when she started.

Still she keeps busy, keeping thoughts like that quiet and still like they should be. It really helps with her visualization practice imaging those thoughts being spoken by Feng Gui or Qen Hou, trying to talk as she holds them under boiling hot water. Really cathartic, especially if she focuses hard enough to hear the screams! While the illusory shitheads lay drowning and writhing, though, she keeps her mind on her focus. She can’t tell if sternum or forehead “Dink”ing had any meaningful difference, so she just alternates between them. On her forehead, she pictures the broken note and the impact it creates trembling from her crown down her entire body. From her sternum, she pictures the same ripple traveling down into her heart and then back out into her blood, ever so slightly. She makes the two a constant pattern, now, stopping only to sleep or when exhaustion takes hold; walking, meditating on imagined ripples, and picturing the violent torment of idiots. The three together keep her warm, and the longer she maintains the illusions while walking, the easier it is to keep them up constantly, “Dink”ing on the move.

Interestingly, she starts to notice a difference in the behavior of her fellow homeless and downtrodden. She spent the first three months of her begging trying to avoid getting kicked by street urchins and drunks and trying to avoid them just reaching into her bowl to take what they wanted. Against the kids at least, she had no qualms about whacking the few she could catch with her crutch, but for more than one of the drunks a kick to the teeth dissuaded her a bit. Then she started to get a bit better and learned to aim exclusively for the genitals, and they started staying away a bit more too.

Now, though, any that she meets tends to avoid her like the plague. Rag-clad and limping along on her crutch, the sound of a broken tuning fork every few beats announcing her coming, rather than get ambushed more often she’s found herself almost alone. On the few occasions where she does run into or see anyone on the streets, even those wearing jackets and clearly walking home or to work, they tend to swerve to avoid her or take a different route. Makes sense: between the broken state of her soul and her body, she can’t be an enjoyable sight, but it’s starting to get a teeny bit hurtful even to her.

So, starving a bit less than anticipated, (mmmh, yummy yummy trash), as fit as she’s been since she woke up (competitive hobbling champ material, she’s sure) and, despite the fun and effort needed for meditation, absolutely bored out of her mind and cold as witch tits, when she hears a scuffling sound the next street over, she pauses and decides to check it out.

It actually feels weird to stop “Dinking”, it’s become such a habit. If she’s awake, she’s hitting herself with a tuning fork and pretending she knows what it’s doing, if anything. In the silence of it, she can almost feel the gaps where the rhythm used to be, and it makes her fidget, holding the fork in her hand and pulling it forcefully back down to her side every time it comes up. She can almost hear her heartbeat, the absence is so loud and silent.

But she can hear the sound of shuffling and heavy, angry breaths more, so she keeps walking.

She turns the corner as quietly as she can, fresh fallen and dusty snow masking the clicking of her crutch or the awkward shuffle-step of her gait. In the alley, one of a series of winding tunnels behind and out of sight of so much of the city, the first thing she sees is scarlet on the snow. Someone is bleeding.

That someone falls to the ground a ways down the alley, the trail of red marking their struggle. They’re young, younger than Raika but not quite a child either, edging their way into and maybe just slightly past where most would be finding an apprenticeship, helping their families or getting married off. Sixteen, maybe? Somewhere in that weird rut between child and adolescent and adult all at once. More notably, they’re bleeding damn badly, a cut on their forehead bleeding as freely as all head wounds do, but visible bruising and bloodied knuckles adding to the spatter pattern. Standing above him, panting almost as heavily with exertion, is a larger man, belly pudgy and soft from long term drinking and lots of it, hair half-balding and skin sallow and unhealthy. They both look malnourished, though obviously the man has compensated with a liquid diet, and he’s heavy enough that the few hits he’s taken in the fight aren’t stopping him from stomping the kid’s head in.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Literally. He’s stomping the kid’s head in. Full body weight of a grown man, coming down as hard as he can muster against the boy’s skull and against the ground behind it. The boy is putting up a fight, or trying to, grabbing at the man’s shoe, trying to squirm away, but he’s visibly exhausted and disoriented, likely already heavily concussed.

A part of Raika stops and examines things. She considers that the guy is big and pissed, she can barely move and hasn’t fought in half a year, the kid's probably stolen from her before, she doesn’t know them or the situation, and, quite frankly, it’s not really any of her business. She wasn’t a justicar or even a particularly conscientious cultivator; what would be would be, and her strength was best suited to the pursuit of more of it.

Of course now she doesn’t really have any strength so-

Oh, yeah she stopped listening about ten seconds back. Most of that analysis played out to the sound of a badly disjointed run, the point of a crutch hitting a dude in his spine, and her good hand, no longer holding Dink, grabbing this guy by his thinning hairline and pulling back as hard as she can.

There’s so many reasons to avoid a fight! And so many reasons why she didn’t! Why isn’t she stopping to examine this?

Shut up, she thinks over the sound of her recriminations and mild confusion, and let me beat the shit out of this dude.

He screams, an angry and surprisingly melodious sound when she yanks. His scalp starts to bleed and she can feel some clumps of hair in her hands, but her grip is still mostly firm, and as he tries to turn and swing blindly behind him, she just yanks it again. Her footwork is fucked, she can’t even lift her right leg enough to properly hop around, never mind secure her stance, so dodging is out of the question. If she falls over, getting up is out of the question too, especially without her crutch, which went flying from under the barely stable hold she had on it when she hit the guy.

“The fuck-“ he snarls, so she yanks again. The kid isn’t moving to run or help, the little shit, but his eyes are pretty unfocused and he’s breathing pretty hard, so fair enough. “I’ll fuckin kill you-“ another yank, this one the last as her hand comes up with a chunk of bloody hair follicles and maybe some scalp. He shrieks this time, much higher pitched, and curls inward to clutch at his head. This, fortunately, puts him closer to shoulder height, which is right where he needs to be to get a punch to the temple and a splatter of free scalp to cover his eyes with.

“What the hell!” He shrieks, trying to both rub at his eyes and also avoid rubbing anything in. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“A lot,” Raika rasps, circling him. She can feel her heartbeat, how it pulses in her and pounds against its cage. It’s still hurt, still scarred, the rhythm uneven and honestly rather concerning, but it beats and it’s loud enough she wants to ask if anyone else can hear it too.

Then he hits her, and she can’t hear anything past the ringing in her ears. Shot to the jaw, hard enough to rattle her (not exactly difficult nowadays) and the reason she’s on her feet is the wall there to catch her on gentle rocks and mortar.

“Who are you?” The man cries, one eye clear of blood and hair, the other still being rubbed at. “You dare? He’s mine to discipline, the little shit! Mine! Don’t you know who I am?”

Hmm. Better not to let this drag on. If he’s talking he’s distracted; if she’s talking she’s about to get hit. She starts tuning him out and rather than hobble, decides to just bodily throw herself at him as hard as she can. She lands more against his chest and belly than on his face, and he seems more surprised than put off balance, but, encouragingly, she finds out he has a beard!

She grabs it, yanks as hard as her fucked up arm can manage, and uses the exposed gap between beard and throat to bite.

There is a minor hiccup, of course; between his frankly annoying panicked yelling and stumbling under the surprise weight and balance-shifting beard yank, he hasn’t thrown her off yet, but she is still missing several molars, most of a cheek, and major functionality in her lower jaw. These factors, combined, do not a potent bite attack make.

Then again, it’s also important to factor in that Raika really, really wants to hurt this dude, and a bite is what she has to do it with. So, using more her neck than her jaw, she drags her canines and jagged back teeth against his skin as hard as she can.

And, like a mortal, his soft, quivering flesh parts.

She doesn’t get a proper bite or chunk of meat, but she breaks the skin and maybe a quarter-inch past it, and it’s more than enough for the man to absolutely panic. Whatever screaming he was doing before and whatever he was trying to tell her about how great he is, half naked kicking a kid in the street, are nothing compared to now. He gives a breathless gasp, like a prey animal that knows it’s caught, and then he falls rather than try to stay balanced. It might have been the smartest thing for him to do, ironically; the impact jars her teeth away from him, and the impact of falling even with his generous cushion hurts everywhere, but her grip, at least, is still strong, and his beard, greasy though it is, remains held fast.

“Get OFF me!” He yells, scrabbling backwards, one hand half waving her away and half pulling back for a strike.

Bad news; the hit is going to hurt. Maybe enough to knock her out, at which point she’ll die. Good news; they’re on the ground now, and while it felt like a million miles away at her pace, she technically didn’t drop Dink that far from them when she rushed him.

So she lets go of his beard. She uses a mostly functioning right arm to block his hit and redirect some of it with old instincts. And she reaches, stretching as far as she can, feeling joints and still ruined ribs and a messy spine popping and straining and screaming, grabs her tuning fork off the ground and shoves it into the cut she made on his throat.

Tunings forks, even one as hard working as Dink, are not designed with violence in mind. They’re not good at stabbing, bashing, anything of the sort, really.

But anything with a line to it can be a lever, and it’s actually not that hard, using one’s full body weight, to lever open a pre-existing spot. Like, say, a cut amongst soft flesh.

He gurgles, once or twice. She can relate.

She still has his blood in her mouth, running down her chin. It’s not supposed to be healthy for consumption, and he’s not exactly an ideal target, but…

In for a copper, in for a silver, as it were.

Over the course of maybe ten minutes, she crawls through the snow to her crutch. Over the course of about ten more, she gathers what she’s got left and stands, using the wall for leverage. Only when she’s on her feet again does she swallow the taste of violence.

It’s still a little warm going down.

She looks down at the kid, who has apparently recovered enough to stare back, if not much else. His breath is still shaky, his hands trembling, and his eyes clearly unfocused. She’s not sure what he sees, looking at her, but the tears, be they from stress, fear or relief all paint a vivid picture.

She just nods at him.

“Ding,” goes Ding as they walk away.