The field was empty of life. Every cell had been burnt away, every trace of the men and horses gone. The grasses of the plateau were blackened too. Even the flies and the birds had disappeared. It was no longer a living part of the world. Quan felt that when he reached out for the Tiendu: the emptiness of the plot of land where he’d killed them. It was a scar upon the earth, and he’d made it.

They’d come over a rise in two thick rows: a standard cavalry charge. But when they saw him alone, they’d all stopped, confused. They waited for a trap, some sort of counter-attack. When none came, one man trotted towards Quan on his own horse.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Zhao Quan. I’m here to ask you to surrender.”

The man had been smaller, another malnourished peasant pulled into Kalsang’s crusade. But this one had believed in Kalsang’s vision. He’d examined it and seen great beauty. He was not someone who would surrender it easily.

“My men will slay you if you don’t stand down. You and any allies you have hiding out there.”

“No allies,” Quan had replied. “Just me and my word. I’m sorry, but you’ve fallen into a trap you don’t even understand. Surrender now, or you die.”

The man had shaken his head and then turned around back towards his cavalry. As he’d done so, Quan had ignited the fire in his palm: a simple spark like the one his mother could create on a moment’s notice. But where his mother’s control ended, his was just beginning.

It had always been like this for him, as far back as he could remember. Another limb that responded to his thoughts and inputs, just like any digit, any joint. As a child he’d learned its purpose and limits, but he couldn’t control it – for good or evil, thankfully. It was a vestigial limb at that point, twitching and flicking, but it obeyed no commands. Then at six he’d started training to become a Keeper, and when his mind first broke into the great Tiendu, it all made sense to him. The Tiendu was the limb: another set of arms and legs that flexed and shifted under his commands. And over time he strengthened the muscles, toughened the cartilage, and quickened the reflexes. His mind was in control of the greatest power known to mankind, and it moved as gracefully as a dancer’s body, each step and each contortion flowing into the next. It took a moment for him to clear his mind and let the limb take hold of what it needed. But then it was over.

The fire spread out, igniting the very air, manipulated and teased by Quan into the shape and direction he wanted. He thickened the oxygen, the carbon dioxide expelled to a higher altitude, and the fire burnt with a pure blue flame as it ran across the plateau and encircled the horsemen.

They had been too surprised to be afraid, their eyes entranced by the roaring flames even as the circle came complete on their southern flank. It wasn’t until he settled the flames onto the grasses that they started to shriek in terror. Quan fed the fire more oxygen, pulling it in from all around, and soon the flames were ten feet high and they moved in on the fresh fuel under the feet of the bandits. The smartest of them tried to escape early, forcing their horses to try and push through the flames. But that level of heat ignited the beasts too, their legbones turned to burnt mush before they’d even exited the flames. The men atop the horses fared no better, their clothes melted into their skin, the armor and helmets searing to the bone at once. They flailed on the ground for a few moments before their own limbs and faces lit the grass they’d landed on. It was a painful, hideous death they all endured. From the edges to the center, it was the same one, and Quan had done it all. He’d done all the killing.

Now he stood there atop his horse, both lightheaded and unsteady from the thin oxygen left behind, and he was overcome with the terrible quietude of having murdered over a hundred men and just as many beasts. He trembled for a few moments, whether from the thin air or the weight of his actions, he was not sure. For years afterward he would try and remember that feeling, and he could never separate the cloudiness in his mind from the trouble he felt somewhere deeper, in his soul.

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What he did remember afterwards was the act of convincing himself.

He knew he had not needed to kill them. There were a wide range of options available to him, right up to the moment the first of them died. He could have simply shown them his power and again demanded their surrender. He could have started the fire before they’d crested the hill, and not encircled them entirely, perhaps terrifying them into running away. He could have manipulated the air in other ways, giving his voice power and depth: a giant, booming voice from the sky had convinced men throughout history to throw down and pick up arms. He could have not used his magic at all. He could have surrendered and tried to convince them to give up their arms – surely their leader was dead by then, and they could have given their allegiance to someone else.

But he’d killed them. And despite his many options, he knew it was the right thing to do. He’d known by the brief conversation with the leader that he was not going to surrender: he was a fanatic to whatever grand idea Kalsang had placed in his head. He’d known that scattering or retreating the bandits would have just led them back to the camp. He’d known that leaving survivors would have raised rumors that someone like him existed at all – rumors he knew would haunt him right until the moment they killed him and everyone he loved. Everything he knew said it was the right thing to do.

More terrifying still were the things he didn’t know. If he hadn’t acted at all, would the bandits have been able to return to their camp and destroy everyone there? If he’d killed one as an example, would it have been enough? If he’d taken the form of a booming voice from the sky, wouldn’t that just start another, just as deadly set of rumors? Greater than what he knew, what he didn’t know was what convinced him – standing alone on that flat piece of grassland – that he had done the right thing.

He knew it. He knew it was the right thing.

Except right then he finally saw what his mother had meant. Because he didn’t know it. He thought it. He felt it. He was sure of it. He’d convinced himself of it. But there was no way he’d ever know it. There was no right on a battlefield, only the different levels of wrong available to him. And he’d chosen his.

He looked down at the blackened skull of one who had attempted to escape, every piece of flesh already incinerated in the blue flames. He looked at it closely: the line of the jaw bone, the round of the cheeks, the dimples where remnants of eyes were still bubbling away, sizzling against the superheated bone. This was what humans were, himself included: bodies to be nourished into muscle, fat, brains and eyeballs. Thirty, forty, a hundred years of battling against hunger, brutality, weather and fate, all seared away in ten seconds through the action of one other human being.

And then he thought, but what of the soul? Those too had needed ministering, nourishment of their own kind. Do they not continue? But he knew what awaited when he looked at the great Tiendu: a black shape of nothing.

All his life he’d been taught that when a creature died, it returned to the great Tiendu to be reincarnated. The universe could never gain or lose energy, just cycle it over and over again until the end of this universe. That was why, when a Tiendu Shu peered into the Tiendu itself, they would never notice or be able to locate a single soul: it would be like picking out a single grain of sand from a mountain made of them. But when Quan looked out into the multicolored and neverending folds of the Tiendu that day, there was a hole that he’d made. And it didn’t matter how wide he cast his vision of the Tiendu, that hole was there, etched into a place and time that didn’t know reincarnation or hope.

He was faced with the reality that his teachers had been wrong. The Keepers had been wrong. Perhaps everything he’d been taught was wrong. But his mother was right. His mother knew something that all the gurus and monks had not: she knew what her actions meant – in the cold, hard daylight of the world in which that skull and the man inside it had lived, she knew the many wrongs that existed and the single right that she hoped would be enough: to do good for the good people, and to do wrong to the bad. Once she’d called it the law, now when he asked her about it, she called it good enough.

He stared at the remains for a long, long time. He led his horse on a slow walk around the ashes and dead bodies, heading back south.