Ki'el was a small girl just starting her teenage years, in what remained of a tropical coastal fishing village. She had grown out of most of her naivety when she returned home after her boat was sent wildly off-course in a storm, to find the town brutalized by raiders, her family and neighbors kidnapped, killed, or in many cases... worse. It had taken her several long weeks to properly bury everyone, and now two years later, she still was not done mourning.
It was a quiet life, because she was the only one left, but she had no reason to think that her life would be better away from this place. Over her youth, she had visited all the islands in this part of the archipelago, but aside from when she was blown away, she had never left it. With no remaining maps that she knew of, to go searching for another chain of islands would be suicide.
She spent her time on a number of different things. She fished, of course, every day, and she gardened enough to ensure that she could put fresh flowers on the graves every few weeks, and to ensure that she could eat vegetables every other day. Fruits were easier, since there were orchards enough and they were healthy, if untended. She practiced what her uncle had taught her of staff fighting, and she practiced what her grandmother had taught her of qi cultivation.
She also cared for the few pets that had survived the disaster, and perhaps it was this that changed her fate.
None of the animals were great beings, of course. Any creature that would have stood beside its family was killed along with the humans, and Ki'el had buried them with their families, whatever she had thought of them in life. There were two dogs remaining that were total cowards, a cat that had once been selfish but was now too traumatized to do more than slowly waste away, never desiring or accepting her touch, and a number of wild animals that had grown closer to her after she failed to shoo them away from gardens or food fast enough.
On this morning, though, she ate a thin salad as breakfast, then set out in her boat to fish. She caught enough, as she usually did, and returned to find a squirrel wandering around the ruined village, smelling things and pausing at each open doorway, as though confused why everything was empty.
It showed too much intelligence to be a natural creature, with too much intent and near-human posturing in its movements, and Ki'el stopped and watched it, but she didn't feel any malice from it, either.
Eventually, the squirrel noticed her, and the two just stared for a long moment, before Ki'el sighed, and walked on past. She made her way to her mother's hut, where she cleaned, cut, and cooked the fish, taking some more vegetables from the cold box under the house and cutting them to accompany the dish.
She set out three plates for the three pets, and a fourth, much smaller plate, she carried over to where the squirrel had been prowling around.
She didn't see it, but set the plate down anyway and retreated.
By midafternoon, as she practiced her staff forms, the squirrel had found her again, and was watching her from a nearby fence. She ignored it until she was done; like most rodents, squirrels would generally flee if you paid attention to them. It was better to appear uninterested, if you wanted to get closer to it later.
To her surprise, though, when she finished, the small, rat-like squirrel immediately hurried over and sat by her feet. She knelt, studying it, but didn't reach out; there was a long moment, again, where the two looked at one another in silence for a long moment. She expected it to flee, but it didn't.
Did it understand? She reached out a hand, and the squirrel immediately jumped onto her palm, still looking at her face.
She had to clear her throat a bit, months of phlegm having coated her vocal chords, before she could ask it, quietly, "Do you understand me?"
The creature cocked its head, then nodded, and she felt a shiver of fear. On the one hand... it was nice, having something here that perhaps she could talk to. The dogs and cat mostly avoided her, even though she fed them, always looking like they were going to be whipped no matter how nice she was to them. She supposed that losing their whole world was as traumatizing for them as it was for her.
On the other hand, she still had no idea who or what had destroyed her village. Was this creature a harbinger of something bad still to come? She almost wanted to kill it out of spite, to ward off any chance that it was leading evil creatures here, but she grasped her staff firmly with her other hand and closed her eyes until the feeling faded.
She was not a monster.
"There is no one else here," she said instead, choosing to believe that this listening creature was some random innocent, or perhaps just a fever dream. "If you want to be fed, wait with the others at meal time. There is not much."
She moved her hand as though to place the squirrel down, but it instead climbed up her arm and sat on her shoulder. She turned to look at it, and it looked back, as though challenging her to injure or displace the fuzzy little brat. She squinted, displeased by the challenge, but eventually just marched back home, where she placed the staff by the door, and then she walked to the pier and sat down on the end, dipping her feet in the water, as she watched the waves rolling by.
The fishing village was not very accessible, really; it was one of the great mysteries how it had been found and sacked in the time she was gone. She knew that several larger boats had come, perhaps joined to a seafaring ship; there had been plenty of marks in the sand. But the approach to the village was down a short stretch of river with a single bend in it, and a couple trees screening the approach. Only here, on the pier, could you see out into the wide sea that surrounded the island, and then only if you peered past the trees. If Ki'el hadn't known these shores so well, she would never have found her way home, and yet...
And yet someone else had found it, someone evil.
She shook her head, not trying to clear the old thoughts from her mind, just... tired. She let the noise fade for a while, eventually finding the calming sound of the water lapping at the pier and the shores among all the other nonsense in her heart, and focused on that, recalling again what her grandmother told her.
Qi was the nature of the world, and qi had two sides to it--of violence and of submission. She got the 'violence' out of her in her staff training, and she felt that her qi grew a little bit from that, but the real exercise was to submit to the will of the world, and in that submission, find strength.
It was a hard lesson to practice, given what the world had done to her, but in the two years since, she had found a version of it that she could work with. Instead of drowning herself in the stifling feel of death that permeated the village, she sought out the force of the world that she could feel in the waves and the wind, the implacable momentum of things greater than herself. She felt the water and the wind, and could *also* feel those forces crashing up against the trees and the sea bed, and she tried to get a grasp of the great forces colliding, tried to hold on to the sense of both the world's violence and also its submission to great and powerful forces.
And then a squirrel bit her ear.
"Ah!" Ki'el slapped at her ear, but her new guest had only given her a single, warning bite, before jumping away. She turned to glare at it only to find the rat looking back at her, as though challenging her.
However, since she had been distracted out of her trance, she felt--just for a moment--that she could see something. A ring of blue-white power, thin as hair, concealed within the squirrel's spirit, in addition to the squirrel's own qi core, which was far too advanced for such a small creature.
She squinted at it, and it looked back. And then, as if to prove that it wasn't a dream, the squirrel took one tiny paw and traced a circle on the wood of the pier.
She didn't want to believe, *couldn't* believe what she was seeing.
The tiny creature tapped its foot against the pier impatiently, an adorable little act that Ki'el might have laughed at if she had any heart left. Instead, she found her thoughts returning to the image of the circle that the squirrel had drawn. She trusted that it was referring to the ring in its own spirit, but the mere *concept* of a circle did little to explain how she was to create it.
Still, she settled back down and turned to face it, bringing her hands together in between her and the squirrel and letting energy flow in a circle in between them.
In response, the squirrel chittered slightly, then moved a little closer and settled back into an upright posture. Above its tiny little hands, it somehow produced a single thread of shining qi, something... more than simply *bright*. It was solid, perfect, and pure as the cold winds of dawn that raced the morning sunlight.
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Then he bent that rod in a circle, before letting the thread vanish. She considered it, and looked at the squirrel, to find it still looking back, watching her. Measuring her.
On the one hand, she wasn't sure exactly what the creature had done, let alone *how* he had done it. But, on the other hand, she definitely wasn't so down on herself that she was going to let herself be outshone by a common bushy-tailed *tree rat*.
She settled, bringing her hands together, and tried to form a thread of power. All she really succeeded in doing, though, was pushing energy *out*, energy that was neither pure, nor connected to itself, nor really under her control at all. She tried again, and again, but nothing changed.
When she opened her eyes, refocusing on the world, the squirrel had vanished, leaving her alone on the pier. To mark the truth of his presence, though, he had burned a small circle into the wood with his qi, along with a single straight line that started at its center and went out. It was strangely perfect, she noted as she examined the mark, with the circle being smoother than anything she had ever seen, except perhaps the full moon.
She reached out to touch the mark, feeling the faintest hint of intent left in the scorched mark. *Cycle and thorn. Turning and releasing.* She considered that image, her thoughts returning to what her grandmother had said about qi.
Had she been wrong? Was the second nature of qi not submission, but somehow... turning? The qi nature of 'violence' was too close to this sense of 'releasing' for her to ignore the possibility. It was a deliberate choice that changed the world, with no concern for consequence, only intent. But rotating, turning, changing in a cycle... that wasn't much like submission, as she understood it from her grandmother. A bad rhyme of a similar concept, at best.
She turned back to the edge of the pier and watched the waves, unable to focus or find an answer. Eventually mid-afternoon caught up with her, and she moved on to other chores. She looked around, at times, for the squirrel, but she never saw it.
The next day was the same, though the weather was windy and smelled of rain that never really came. She put out a plate of fish and vegetables for the squirrel, but it didn't come. The dogs sniffed at the extra offering she left, but knew her well enough to know that each plate was for a different creature. She doubted they would let it stay all day, but they didn't eat it along with their own breakfast.
The cat she trusted a lot less, and she scared it away a couple times before giving up. It, too, sniffed at the plate, and even took some of the fish, but in the end, it had too little will to live, itself, to become a glutton. It ended up staring at the plate for a time and walking away, much as it had done when she overfed it at the beginning.
So she proceeded to her staff practice and then to the docks, where she sat and thought about cycles and thorns, and of what her grandmother had said about the nature of qi. In the end, she tried, again, to force out a single thread of qi, but all she got was a slight release of the energy within her, one she could barely control.
The third day was no better, nor the fourth.
On the fifth day, she awoke well before dawn with a strange sense that she had understood something. She scrambled out to the docks, where the mark had been burned onto the pier, and tried to get a sense for what the squirrel had left, although it had gotten fainter day by day.
Soon enough, she was certain of it: neither of the concepts matched the spiritual pressure of the thread itself. It was not simply *released*, nor was it a cycle. She knelt on the dock and considered her own poorly developed core, but that core also contained something firm, which was neither release nor a cycle.
Indeed, now that she studied her own core, the thread was more like *that* than it was like simple released energy. Could she extend her own core out into the world?
She made a few attempts at it, but it was painful and she was certain she was doing something wrong. As dawn approached, she gave up and continued her morning ritual, but it was with an unusual amount of preoccupation.
Cycle, release... and core. But that didn't make sense, did it? The cycle, and the core... the cycle somehow had to be a function of the core, a *method*, while the core itself was a thing, or a place. But how could she create qi thread like the creature had done? Qi thread that felt like a core?
By the time that she got to staff practice, she had stopped thinking about cycling and releasing, until the exercise began to intrude on her thoughts. As she steadied her breathing, however, she found her thoughts drifting back to it.
Breathing out wasn't just a release, she thought; it was clearly a *cycle*. Both in and out, supporting her and giving her more strength. As she moved through the motions, she felt that cycle become a deeper and deeper part of her mind. The power of her breath was stored within her, and released when she moved.
Her exercise didn't end on time, stretching into her meditation hours, and then it stretched on further, until the fading light convinced her that she had truly gotten lost in the motions. For all of that... she didn't feel tired, as she moved on to catch and prepare an evening dinner for herself and the pets. She felt *stronger*.
The next morning, the squirrel was waiting for her at breakfast.
In a way, the creature seemed more suspicious than ever, although she couldn't do anything but trust it. Its spirit had advanced in leaps and bounds; not only had the color of its spirit advanced from bronze to iron and then silver in the short few days it had been gone, but the strange ring she had noticed in its spirit was now too complex to understand. Where before, it had been a simple thread ring, now it held two rippling rings, one of which seemed to dump energy into the world endlessly, and one which seemed to drink the world's energy with an endless thirst.
She glared at it, both intimidated by its clear strength, and also insulted to once again be completely dominated by a common tree-rat, the kind of creature that the dogs and cats she watched over had hunted with abandon in the before-times, before they lost their families and their will to live.
Still, after staring at it and watching it stare at her, she put out food for it, and then studiously ignored it for the next few hours.
When the time came for her staff practice, the squirrel was there, and she found it harder to ignore it this time. Nothing that she did could block her awareness of the thing; she could close her eyes, or focus on her breathing, but the creature's presence cut through all distractions, like sunlight through her closed eyelids.
"Look," she said after a few minutes, feeling a little silly talking to a squirrel so seriously, "I can't focus when you're doing that."
The rodent tilted its head at her as though curious what she said, or why. And yet... after only a moment, it lifted its two tiny little clawed hands and brought them together, and its presence... shrank.
She forced her way through the staff practice, unsure of exactly what to say or do about this miracle creature. She did, eventually, find enough inner peace to resume her exercises with breathing and cycling energy, but it didn't feel natural.
When eventually she made her way back to the docks, where she sat and tried to find her center, the squirrel came and sat on her knee. It was weird how little physical weight it had, knowing--and sensing, despite it being muffled--the magical weight behind it.
"Why are you here?" she asked, after a few minutes had gone by, and her fear of the thing had become muted by its obviously benign intent. "I mean... why this place? Why me?" She stopped looking at the waves and forced herself to look at the squirrel, who also had been looking at the waves, and now turned to face her as well.
To her surprise, a voice spoke into her mind.
[ I didn't choose the place, ] it said. [ I was lost, and... well, after going from island to island, this was the only place with people on it. ]
"Why would a squirrel care about people?" She couldn't help staring, and was surprised when the squirrel didn't meet her gaze for long.
[ I am not a squirrel. I am just... attached to one. ] The voice paused. [ I am from very far away, and I don't know where this is. You can call me Sobon. ]
Ki'el studied the rat, suddenly very nervous once more. "From far away? From the Empire?"
[ Further than that, ] the squirrel--Sobon replied. [ A place I cannot return to, I think. You don't need to fear that I will lead someone here. I wouldn't want to, if I could. All I really want or need is time. ]
"Time..." She couldn't help it. Although it was rude, she shivered at the thought of this squirrel becoming even more powerful than it was. Or... it wasn't fair to judge the creature controlling the squirrel by its size, was it? She stared it, wondering if the... *thing* that was manipulating this furry puppet was truly kind, or planning something awful in the future.
[ I come from a place where the awful... where the *barbarism* of this world is in the past. Given what happened here... I understand that you are afraid. But, I am not like the people who did this. ]
That was too easy to say; she couldn't trust him so easily, and she was sure he knew it. But she found herself looking at the docks, and then the waves on the river, and then past that to the sea beyond the trees. Who was she to think--even for a minute--that she had a choice here? With a handful of words and a mark on the dock, this squirrel had changed her entire understanding of qi. If she didn't *trust* it, was she going to try to *stop* it? Rebel? Fight it? When it had taken a deliberate action to reduce its own spiritual pressure so that she was more comfortable?
There was a difference between feeling like the world didn't matter and *actively* committing suicide.
So she shook her head and looked back at the squirrel, who had copied her and was staring at the water, itself. "Why are you helping me?"
[ You also aren't a monster, ] Sobon the squirrel replied. [ ...But the technique you were trying to use the other day was going to hurt you. To *twist* you. You shouldn't use it. ]
Ki'el shook her head at that. Their tribe had little in the way of cultivation resources or knowledge, and yet the adults had built up a steady foundation that helped them fight off storms and sea predators. The hunters, who had the greatest cultivation in the village, had been iron-ranked, worlds ahead of her, and she had sensed no sign of being twisted by their methods. Still... "I... might trust you," she said, "You obviously know what you are doing. But I do not understand, and I do not... wish to forget the lessons of my grandmother. Of our people."
[ I'm not asking you to forget them, ] Sobon answered. [ But if you... if you *do* choose to follow a twisted path, I won't help you. I've seen *monsters*. I won't willingly raise one. ]
Ki'el just looked at him. Already, she was becoming conflicted, more and more. After so long being alone, she wanted to talk, and yet she was afraid; she wanted to trust, but she was uncertain. And she was at once ready to leave this place behind... but not willing to *forget*.
"I don't know," she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, pulling her whole body together into a nervous little ball. "I'm not... I'm not sure..."
[ You don't have to decide today. You have time. ] The squirrel stepped back, still looking directly at her. [ ...but not too much time. Something is approaching. ]
She turned and looked at him, nervously. "Something?"
[ A week, maybe. If it doesn't move any faster than it is now. Something evil on the horizon. ] Sobon gestured in a seemingly random direction. [ It may be *them*. I don't know. They're not close enough to tell. ]
Ki'el didn't need to be told who the squirrel meant. She gripped her legs tighter, nails digging into her flesh, and she already knew she wouldn't be able to sleep tonight, not for the nightmares that would haunt her.