Xia Hui knew before he could even speak that his father was a foolish man. A good man— but one so terribly blinded by idyll that he couldn’t see what was clearly in front of him.
He saw that at times, his father was also timid. Weak, or perhaps unable to do what he was supposed to. A righteous man, an upright one; Xia Hui commended, but a gullible, artless sucker. From the moment he and his father had that talk, Xia Hui knew that he was the one who knew better. Who knew what needed to be done.
A ruler, his father had told him so long ago that it seemed like the distant lines of a character in a legend to Xia Hui. But he had always remembered the life before the war, the family he had before like this; a ghostly fairytale that seemed a lifetime away. Is one that strives for peace. No matter how unattainable and hard it may seem.
Xia Hui’s gaze soured then. That was not what he was taught, not what he knew, and he had been thrown into his lessons of treaties, politics, and trade relationships only recently. A king is one that must make difficult choices for his kingdom. For his citizen’s wellbeing. A lack of peace or not, all that matters is the security of his kingdom.
His father might have frowned then, Xia Hui supposed. Might have put a warm hand on Hui’s shoulder and looked up from gazing upon the declining kingdom he ushered into mediocrity and told him that Hui’s teacher was slowly ruining him.
No, that wasn’t it. Hui didn’t remember him like this.
He would be warmer. Kinder. His father would smile at him then, ruffle his hair, messing Hui’s straight, groomed black into a frizzy tangle. Correct. You’ll make a fine king in the future, Hui’er. Strong. At least, stronger than me. After, his father would add; You have to be.
Xia Hui shook his head. It didn’t matter. Useless reminiscing about a life he would never go back to was pointless. Memories were for people at peace enough with the present. A luxury, at this time.
The war was over but the conflict didn’t end with it. Always, always; there was more work to be done for an heir destined for greatness. Destined to avenge. He had worked out his escape plan for weeks on end, considering many different variables over the count of many sleepless nights.
He admitted; some of it was escapism from his own reality. Cowardice. Terrors of every kind had stalked his dreams when he had grown slack and allowed himself to sleep; as soon as he closed his eyes, a nightmare awaited him. Dreams of torture. Dreams of his dead family, if he was lucky.
His enemy was not a foolish one, nor a virtuous one. Torture that scarred the mind, but kept the body intact was expected from such an enemy. As soon as he was pulled from his first battle, a victorious one, he was promptly thrown into the dungeons. He was surprised, however, that they had even let him live in the first place.
They should have known better. A Xia would never be tame at the command of another. His dynasty was held in high regard as the only one who wouldn’t submit at the heels of the gods.
His time other than battle was spent writing, at least when his captors allowed him paper. He was a general only in name; no matter how titles they had stacked upon him, and how finely they upgraded his living quarters, Hui knew what he truly was. A prisoner. A trophy and slave of war, if he performed well enough; and behaved well enough.
Xia Hui never would have thought that escaping would be that easy. That he could simply disappear. Perhaps the psychological torture had worked well on him after all. Without him, the army would be compromised for at least a year. And with the victories he brought, peace came also. He knew that peace made soldiers’ blades rust and their techniques remiss.
No more. No descendant of the Xia Dynasty would be groomed into a hunting dog by enemy hands. Hui was glad that it was over, he thought.
Still, it had all felt— pointless to Hui now. All of that fighting, all of those lesions, wounds, anguish was suddenly supposed to be moved on from? To be erased, forgiven, and forgotten? Hui didn’t think he was able to do that. His hands still shook with tremors without the haft of a sword held in them. At times, he heard the sound of dying men; guttural screams and groans that were trapped in the back of his head like how the conch caught the sound of the sea. And when he closed his eyes, the street gutter of red ran like an elaborate tapestry embroidered into a blindfold.
Time healed all wounds, his mother taught him. This too would heal. The horrors would be yielded, and with time, these dirty, bloodstained bandages that covered his hands even when they were bare would finally be shed, and he would be able to take his brother’s hand in his again, and everything would be as it was. As it should be.
His brother. Gods, his brother. The only light left in the world. The only sinless man, the only one pure of heart. Hui was only allowed one more look at him before he left for the war, but he remembered his face as clearly as if he was right in front of him.
Xia Hui, as godless as he was, sometimes found himself looking up to the heavens, praying to any god that would listen for the safety and well-being of his brother.
Of course, Xia Hui wouldn’t put it past either god or immortal if his prayers were not answered.
He had to take matters into his own hands for his brother’s safety.
So he picked up his sword once more and swung it like he had swung it a thousand times before— through flesh and bone.
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The immortal must have had a life before this. A mortal one, the one that came before the immortality that struck him so greatly; he must have had a parent, and if he was lucky, he would have two. Siblings, maybe. Passions, hopes and dreams like the life of every mortal promised for themselves.
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But it had been so long that time shrouded his memories in cloudy haze. Time spared him only the knowledge of his name, and sometimes he had even questioned that.
Shao Fan, he recalled. He couldn’t remember the person who spoke the name themselves. Their smooth, melodious voice was the only thing that crystallized and etched itself into his mind.
All he knew now was this bloody game and this pointless explorance of a world that was not able to accommodate him. He knew now that his soul was too faint, too worn and weak. It was easily pushed and shoved and forced in between the mortal souls, still full of crystalline light.
And there he was, with a body too small to hold his own power, and with a soul too weak to bear the weight of his grief.
But then there was the Herald of Light, and he never felt lonely again.
The lotus seal was the only thing that he had left of his friend now; anyone that bore it, he would treat the same as his own descendant. Everything passed.
“I promise,” He swore, heavy with lament and eyes bright with tears. It was the first time in a matter of centuries he felt like this; filled with sadness instead of rage. It was also the first time in centuries that he had ever kneeled to someone. “Promise that I’ll wake up soon. I swear, I will. The Celestials, they don’t like me staying here. They’re beckoning me up. I won’t let them. I’ll hide, and— and I’ll sleep, and it’ll be as if I was dead. I’ll find you again, I swear. Even if it takes me eons.”
The pair never said what they were thinking. The Herald of Light had neglected her cultivation for too long, abandoned it for the sake of her growing and flourishing dynasty. The Herald of Light was a mortal. The Herald of Light didn’t have eons. She knew what he meant anyways. And she trusted in the immortal to fulfill it. She would hang on to this promise. She would take it to her grave.
Like always, she lifted him up with forgiving hands and gentle eyes. “Rise, Fan’er.” She relented mercifully, her eyes hardened with kingly responsibility softening by ever so little. “I won’t allow my first friend to forgo such cold formalities.”
“Even until the end, you torture me with your kindness. I'll miss you, comrade-in-arms.” The immortal laughed, a despondent, humorless smile flashing upon his face. He lifted his hand and opened it to present it to his friend- the only one he ever had the honor of having. A lotus seal, wooden; weather-worn, and poorly painted. The Herald of Light had never gone through with her plan to make her new dynasty’s seal into a lotus, but the immortal had kept it close anyways.
“I’ll know. Make sure they bear this. Your children, your children’s children; your descendants.” The immortal explained to her something she already knew the moment she set eyes on it. “Once I wake up, years, decades, thousands of years from now— I’ll search the whole world for who bears this seal. And I’ll teach them like they were my own.”
And she answered him only with silence, but it was the most amount of forgiving words the immortal had ever heard spoken to him before.
He turned his eyes to the mountain the farthest from the northern town. It was time to start searching, and luckily, the immortal knew where to look.
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The sages had never thought their Song would bring home a friend. The plains of snow were lonely here, and the north of the country was largely feared for it’s lethal conditions and barren icefields. Even ice nymphs did not dare hike these mountains, especially with rumors of ghosts floating around (well, they weren’t wrong at all.)
The sages were more quiet now, observing Xia Song as he went through with his daily routine. His new friend seemed to be a fine one; Xia Yingjie nodded with satisfaction upon finding that his friend was as strong as Xia Song.
It had been 3 months since the two had started getting rapidly stronger and Xifeng stayed in the stronghold. It had been 3 months of endless sparring and training, stepping and hitting; but it had seemed enough for a lifetime.
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The few drops of blood dripped down Xifeng’s chin and into the stone paving of the courtyard. The elaborate etchings soon became tinted with blood; she turned to her friend, Song, coughing and rubbing the bruises that appeared fast on his pale white skin.
“What match does this make?”
“As of this month? 5th.” Song answered monotonely, like the click of a counter. He tried his hardest to suppress his ragged breathing; it embarrassed him, knowing that he was out of breath after a simple 7 minute sparring session.
“But the month’s just started?” Xifeng stated, her eyebrow arching in question.
“Exactly,” Song groaned, leaning his head back on the rock he was resting on. “We need to cut down on the sparring and increase the training, Feng. Please. My ribs can’t take it anymore.”
She knew it to be true, but she still frowned and wrinkled her brow. She liked fighting with Song. It was fun; she had never before seen a person that could actively plot and scheme in the middle of battle— whose blood didn’t run hot with the sensation of violence. Though she was physically stronger, she felt that in the long run, Song would surpass her.
“Why don’t we try– learning? Replace all that sparring with some reading?”
Xifeng furrowed her brow even more at that, and promptly hit Song on the shoulder. “Don’t say stuff like that. Papers give me nightmares.” She shivered, chills running up her spine from the memories of the immortal giving her piles upon piles of manuals to study. “What do you even learn from those books?”
Song dipped his head, now looking straight at her. “Each manual has a martial artist’s careful consideration, beliefs, years of experience in every single inked word. It’s like looking upon someone’s life, or their passion. I have seen them sometimes, the authors of those books; appearing before me like the visions of the sacred priests. They are sweating, bleeding; but still they swing their blade, or stab their cudgel. Ghosts of the pasts, from books written centuries ago.”
Xifeng stared at Song for a while. She sighed, and relented. “What’s with that?”
“With what?”
“With the way you talk. Sometimes, it sounds as if you’re so old; you’re too wise for people our age. Too tired for our age either.” Xifeng answered, something like worry flickering in her eyes. “What happened to you, before this?”
“That was uncalled for.” Song only said in return, and fell silent. After the silence– the long silence that seemed would go on for ages and ages, Xifeng heard Song speak again, quietly, under his breath. “And I should be asking the same of you.”
“Same of what?”
“Your eyes. Green as they are, they’re like hard flint waiting to be struck.” Song said, more bluntly than he had originally planned. “There’s never light in your eyes unless you command it to be. What we should be asking is what happened to you.”
Xifeng was quiet. Then, she quietly uttered; “Fuck you.”
“Well, unless we talk about it, I guess we’re at a stalemate in this topic. We’ll have to put this aside.” Song said passively. Xifeng scoffed. Typical of Song, the cunning fox. He had only said such a thing to shut her up, not from actual concern. This time, her own psyche not the heart voice spoke; He's not sincere. Expect betrayal soon. Oblivious to Xifeng's train of thought, Song shrugged it off and stood up, brushing the dust from his clothes.
Don’t tell him. What happened that day, who I am. The voice implored suddenly, squirming like a mass of worms under her heart. She lurched, holding back the bile quickly rising in her throat. Why now? After 3 months of silence, she knew the sensation of her arteries being wrenched once more. Mortals are consumed by fear by people like us.
She tried her best to ignore it, but she forgot that whenever she tried not to hear them, they only got louder. No, she thought, I would never. I don’t even know— I don’t remember what happened that day. She was telling the honest truth. Whenever it was brought up by the immortal, she had only felt haziness and uncertainty. She had assumed, at the very least, that her village was burned to the ground because when she rose, she had piles of ashes fall from her. Cultivators, she assumed. All she had were assumptions, and she was left with nothing else.
“Hey. Hey,” Song said, distantly; Xifeng heard it as if he was a thousand li away. “Xifeng!” He yelled, and Xifeng felt her face run cool with a sudden breeze, and a loud slap rang in her ears. When her eyes refocused, all she saw were Song’s two hands taking up all the space in her vision.
The voice turned quiet.
His hands returned to his sides, and he held one out. “Training. I would prefer to get it all done today.”
She nodded, and stood up from the ground, using Song’s hand to lift herself up. Unusually, the hand had felt warmer and softer when it wasn’t being used in a fight against her. Perhaps this was the ‘study of the soul’ the immortal had always talked about.
Xifeng bowed her head slightly. Maybe going without spars wouldn’t be too bad, for the time being.