David
Alice bundled the piles of robes into a pair of pillows for them and passed out almost immediately after laying down on the hard ground. David was unable to sleep. He chose instead to listen to the sound of the Song, which wound about like an eerie cosmic snake, seeping into every thought and infecting his perception.
There was nothing on the high ceilings but little hairline cracks in the stone that had formed after what must have been thousands of years of use. Entire families had been born and had died within these walls which no longer had a name. It had been torn out from the plaque above the door, leaving only a broken pillar and a single smashed statue.
The last members of this temple had been killed with casual violence. Their remains still littered the floor with their love, their hopes, their dreams, their lives snuffed out like the flame of a candle. And it had been done by someone who could put a strip of metal a yard deep into solid rock, someone who could dig into stone with what looked like their bare hands.
Alice took even breaths in her sleep and did not dream aloud.
Surviving the temple was a wall of many windows where two sets of eighteen stances had been carved in bold lines, stances which Alice had learned before in different orders.
David had always been a fan of meaningless patterns and hidden significance, so he looked at them in different orders. The odds, the evens. Numbers with cultural significance - the first, the third, the fifth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the thirteenth, the seventeenth. The Fibonacci sequence - the first, the first again, the second, the third, the fifth, the eighth.
Nothing changed.
Nothing he thought of made any sense at all. It was a little disappointing. There were many stories like this, where some plucky young hero would find the teachings of the monastery, lessons from another space from another time, solved with the power of coincidence and luck.
And intuition.
There was something intuitive about the way the marks on the wall were carved, something that seemed so absolutely true about them, something like the Song.
David thought of how deep in the wall they'd found the sword which had been the end of the Lovers and imagined how the carvings had come to exist on this stone wall.
Alice was trained in many martial arts styles but the school she'd learned first as a child, the school that David's mother had enrolled him in for six months, was Wing Chun, the Dance of the Eternal Spring. He'd always regretted quitting after he grew older and learned to appreciate the origin story. It had been named eponymously by the ancestral founder of the martial art in the heyday of the Qing dynasty, in the eighteenth century.
The founder had been a fifteen year old Yim Wingchun, receiving the final wisdom of one of the five great elders of the destroyed Shaolin Sect, the abbess Ng Mui, who had condensed down a thousand years of martial arts tradition and taught it to the young girl. It was a good story, one which the instructor told every new student, so he'd heard it a few times.
He could almost see an old woman in his mind, with her hair as white as snow and her heart hardened by betrayal and disappointment, angrily carving the pairs of dueling figures into the stone as a young girl who looked like Alice, of course she did, looked on.
But this wasn’t a story like that. This wasn’t a story with a happy ending, where teachings were passed on and secrets were whispered from the old to the young. This was a story with anger and hopelessness.
Someone had seen what happened to this temple and had written on the wall a final, unbroken proof that there had been something here - a lesson learned, a tender experience or even just a solemn memory.
David wondered if he could have left something behind in that dead Library, something to indicate that he’d grown up there, that Alice had worked there, that Mr. Watterson had raised a generation of children to be curious about the world in its walls.
But something like these carvings was beyond him. He considered the marks - trying to put together that swirl of angry emotion, the echoes of long forgotten analogies.
The more he thought of it, the more he heard the Song and the more he was sure that they had been drawn with a sword.
David stood up quickly, then regretted it immediately because Alice made an angry noise. He'd possibly woken her. He stood completely still for a few seconds until her breathing returned to normal, and then walked as silently as he could towards the carvings.
He tried to trace over them with his finger, with a hand, but it didn’t feel right at all. He needed something like a sword.
David’s mind immediately wandered to the sword in the stone, in the bones, the end of those two who had lived once. But there was no way forward - Alice had tried to remove it but she could not even get it to shift enough to disturb the remains of the lovers.
But there was something - not a sword, but something of length. There had been a flute in one of the rooms.
He almost didn’t bother. Flutes were not swords. But he had grown a little bored and there wasn’t quite anything else to do but lay back down and listen to the sound of the Song. Feeling supremely stupid, David stepped quietly towards the first room they'd found on the left wall and opened the door with a creak that he hoped wasn’t loud enough to wake Alice. He’d already come close to doing so.
On the bed was the stone flute, which they'd found stashed between the mattress and the wall, the final keepsake of someone who had surely died in their own home. Did they practice the flute late into the night, to the annoyance of the other disciples? Was the instrument discouraged - hastily hidden away between the bed and the wall when someone came to visit? Perhaps the disciple had been absent minded and had lost it in their own room?
He picked it up and examined it. It wasn’t a sword but it was the closest thing he could find which even resembled one geometrically.
David closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. It didn’t creak when he was closing it, though the click still echoed through the halls. He winced. Armed with the flute, David stalked back to the wall with the windows.
In the first carving, there was a deep well in the stone, as though someone had stabbed into it angrily. David could almost see them, sword outstretched and leaning forward, trying to coalesce their thoughts before starting. He tried to imitate that pose from his imagination. It didn’t seem quite as stupid now - someone had stood where he was - maybe further, maybe closer, and David knew that they had thought for a long time.
The Song pounded in his chest expectantly as he began to trace over the carvings with the flute, letting that intuition guide him.
He traced over the head of the first figure in the first carving and the Song roared, louder than he had ever heard it as he replicated the mark.
He chose a second stroke from the figure without much thought and did the same.
The Song sputtered to a halt - out of rhythm, out of meter, out of time, in the wrong key.
This was not the second stroke.
He picked a different line in that first figure and tried. Nothing.
And then the third, the fourth, the final. Still nothing.
David took a deep breath. Why had the Song returned to that steady, rhythmic thump that had not stopped suffusing his senses since he’d heard it the first time?
He leaned into the first mark again and Listened, then picked the first stroke yet again and he heard it change in that same way, heard it rise. After tracing it over carefully, he picked a different line and it continued - unbowed, unbent, unbroken. This was the correct path.
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David looked at the entirety of the wall in chagrin. Every single line, every single carving would have to be done in order from start to finish, he already knew. But something inside him could not let the matter rest - he knew that it was too important to stop. It would just be too disrespectful not to listen to this final story of the dead temple.
As he passed over the strokes, he could feel when he'd made a mistake easily. The Song would break in rhythm and he would have to start over - but each time he learned which stroke had been incorrect.
When he was finally satisfied with recreating the first figure, he moved onto the second within the first pane and discovered that it was incorrect, no matter which way he began.
David frowned.
There was a small mercy here. Every single carving had an easily identifiable starting point at least - one where whoever had done this had leaned into their sword and thought about what they’d wanted to draw. He shuddered. It could have been much worse - each figure could have started without pause, without that preponderance that left that first, deepest gouge in the stone wall, in every figure.
Perhaps it was more than a small mercy. Every figure had been formed with five strokes. If he did not have that starting point in every carving, it would probably take a week to work through them. It would have been far too easy to give up on this as an entirely unreasonable project.
He found the second figure to have been carved in the tenth frame counting from the left. He had already traced over the first figure twenty times by now and felt as though he could do it with his eyes closed. David would likely never forget it.
He picked a stroke in what he knew for certain was the second figure and the Song slipped from his grasp. It had been incorrect.
David took a deep breath and leaned into that first marking of the second figure and heard nothing.
He had the strong urge to throw the flute through one of the windows for a few moments, then walked in a measured clip back to the very first figure and started over.
David now knew that there was an order to the carvings and it was the order by which they had been created. The creation had not been a sword form unto itself like he might have hoped, though that was unsure because what he held was simply not a sword, but its proximity to the shape of a sword seemed to allow him to at least divine the order that it had been carved.
But if he were to make a single mistake in retracing any of the figures, he would have to start over from the very beginning. Five lines for thirty six figures was a hundred and eighty strokes. He decided that if he was working on, say, the ninth figure and then suddenly forgot the order of strokes in an earlier one, he would scream - Alice’s sleep be damned.
It was time to start again.
David worked late into the night and took great care not to forget, if only for Alice’s sake. By the time he had divined the eleventh figure, he realized that perhaps this was an idle worry because when he started over, the Song all but guided him to the correct line - encouraging him. That fear of getting his wires crossed and backsliding had not happened a single time. David moved onto the next figure and, as he expected by this point, picked the wrong one.
It was time to start again.
After what felt like hours, David came across yet another insight. Alice had made an assumption which was incorrect.
The wall carvings were not two separate forms of eighteen stances apiece, but a single form of thirty six. The order was completely nonsensical - it did not follow any pattern of mathematics or culture, but the sound of the Song and the whim of its creator.
He did not know how long it took to reorder the carvings properly but the first red light of dawn began to peek through the windows as he had traced over the thirty fifth carving and he knew which figure was the last. After the first marking, he immediately picked incorrectly out of the five final choices.
Without a pause - in a practiced, practiced habit, he strode back to the first mark of the first carving and leaned forward, letting the Song rush over him. David had been exaggerating in the space of his own thoughts when he believed he could trace over the carvings with his eyes closed by the time he’d discovered the tenth figure. After the twentieth, he found that this boast was simply fact.
He closed his eyes, listened for the song and followed it through the five carvings. Twenty eight paces to the second figure. David had taken these exact steps more than a thousand times now. His eyes did not open as he followed them, choosing to hear nothing but the song.
In this trance, he went through the first thirty five figures, opened his eyes, and then found the starting point of the thirty sixth and picked the wrong line amongst the remaining four.
That was okay. He could start again and he did start again. Another error amongst the remaining three, of course.
It was time to start again.
He knew the order of the figures in full now and would never forget them, but it still seemed wrong not to trace over the final one. It would be akin to not reading the final page in a book or not playing the final chord in sonata.
David traced over the last stroke a few minutes later and a relief he could feel in his bones tore through him as he sat down without a care in the dust, drenched with sweat.
The slight memory of a conversation he'd had with Alice the day previously came to him, where they'd both implicitly agreed that learning to play a piece by starting the whole thing over every time an error was made was quite possibly the dumbest thing either of them had ever heard of.
And that was what he had done. In order to divine the order of the carvings, he'd replicated the motions by which he knew on instinct they had been carved. Through this, he had not, as he believed he might, made a strong memory of how to use a sword, but rather that the creator of these carvings was incredibly good with a sword. More importantly, he knew the order of the carvings without the shadow of a doubt as he examined the wall.
“You pranked me real good, didn’t you?” The wall didn’t respond. Nice, he was talking to the carvings now, a sure sign of mental stability. David walked over to the swept floor where Alice had been sleeping peacefully the whole time and found a wry grin on his face. She had been sleeping for what must have been ten hours at this point. He put the flute down next to her guqin case - he wouldn’t need to use it again.
Perhaps if he had a sword, the order would have been significantly more clear. Perhaps if he had a sword, he would not have had to trace it over as many times. But perhaps if he had a sword, he would not be as sure as he was about the order of every single stroke in every single figure. He would never know. Some things can’t be taken back.
David found himself in front of the first carving now and realized that his job was not done - not even close. He thought of the way Alice had held out her palm, had brought her fist above her head, the way she lifted her leg.
He tried to imitate that memory as best as he could, as the Song got even louder.
David nearly tripped. His foot hit the ground with a particularly loud thump as he steadied himself. He turned to Alice immediately. Her sleep was much deeper now, she wasn’t disturbed in the slightest. He righted himself and tried again, thinking of the way she held herself, her center of balance. There was exactly one correct way to perform this stance, one way to place his weight.
He held the stance confidently. The Song roared in triumphance, louder than he had ever heard it.
Satisfied, he walked halfway down the wall - twenty eight paces - to the second stance and closed his eyes, trying to remember the way Alice had imitated the carving and found that he might not have been the best at interpreting the carvings as it related to the stances but he was quite a deft hand at remembering how Alice moved her body.
He mulled over that thought with a sheepish grin on his face.
He copied the stances one after another, repeating the sequence from the beginning every time he learned a new one. David was not Alice, who could remember the stances with her decade of experience and meteoric talent.
As he moved through the stances with trial error until he found the exact position in each one which was correct, he could feel the Song settling somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach, just over his groin as he practiced.
Compared to tracing over the carvings, this was easy, this was obvious. The Song was less reticent, more helpful and far more clear. The mistakes he made were far less punishing and his progress was infinitely quicker.
During this process of learning the stances, his mind wandered to the nature of the Song itself and thought of the differences between his own and Alice’s. He had told her in the Library that it wasn’t quite a Song to him that first time he had heard it - just a palpable, steady beat. But as he listened to it without pause, he realized that even his Song was not just his Song - it was many Songs with many names.
And these thirty six stances had one of those many names that was just out of his reach. David was sure this would not remain true because he felt himself getting closer and closer to that name, closer and closer to the sound of this Song performed in full as he learned one stance after another and its name came together in his mind.
As he slipped into the thirty sixth stance, as he stretched out his fingers and formed a fist, with his knees bent forward and his body leaning back, he had the vision of a girl who sat beneath a mulberry tree with low hanging branches, crying in utter silence.
David did not belong in this world and that girl had not belonged under that mulberry tree. In his mind’s eye, the girl looked at him and he could just barely read her lips.
David performed this martial arts form of thirty six stances in full and chose to speak its Name. He could feel something like fate, something like coincidence, something like an inevitable truth because this was just too perfect, too ironic, too much like the Lightning. This was, this could only be, could only ever be-
"The Scripture of the Uprooted."
And he knew now why the Heavens had taken David Ji and Alice Chow to some dead sect on another world and he knew what was intended for him and he knew that the Lightning had not lied and he knew that the Heavens had made a terrible joke. And he knew that he would never see his mother again.
He had stepped onto a ship which would take no more passengers, the last ship to leave the last city before it went out to sea. This was his song, his covenant with the Heavens, his scripture. David was the Uprooted.
David had learned to play a sad song, after all.