Even after waking, uncomfortable memories continued to surface. Faces of the dead peered through the fog of the dreamlands. Watching. Judging. They didn't hide their disappointment. Lin forced her eyes open. Staring up from where she lay, she saw only a dim gloom, though for the flashes of days gone by that invaded her mind, there could be no better canvas.
Lin had been four years old when the Earthen Cataclysm shook the world. It had been then that the planet Taizo gained its twin, a slightly smaller body that had been named Zetian long before swallowing the north-western horizon. Living alongside Sio in a secluded valley, Lin grew into a troublesome young lady of fourteen years. Racing against the children of the neighbouring town of Yangwa, she became fast and deceptively strong. They tore along the long walls of white clay, over black, arching rooftops, and across the tall, roofed bridge that stood proudly over the turbulent Beiyu River. In the misty haze of the early mornings when her mother was away, Lin silently stole away from the Solace Valley in search of her motley gang. Among the most dedicated were Daiyu, a dark-faced girl whose nails would never grow past her fingertips, Hong, a tall and simple-faced boy, and the ever-squabbling siblings, Jiang and Feng. Using her knowledge garnered from Sio’s lessons, Lin taught them to fish with handmade equipment, and to fight to a ruthless standard.
Those days didn’t last. In a heated disagreement, Jiang struck Hong over the head with a hefty stick until his brains leaked from his skull like a broken pot of stewed meat. After hearing the breaks in the boy’s adolescent voice as he was strung up in the street, seeing the gaping mouth and desolate eyes of his sister, nothing remained but regret in the town of Yangwa.
Life in Solace Valley was difficult. When Sio wasn’t away on her travels across the continent, she spent every waking moment teaching or training her daughter, but after so many years living as the object of her mother’s expectations, Lin had forgotten exactly who she was meant to be. Was it the painstakingly trained, all-capable and steel-hearted saviour that existed only in a dream? Or was it the hot-tempered teen that had shown an impressionable child how to murder his friend? Neither answer could satisfy her doubts. Still, she couldn't afford to spend her days feeling sorry for herself. There was no room for peace in the valley.
They visited under sun and moonlight- a nightmarish legion of fiends. The maggot-ridden monsters wore broken bodies of birds and rodents, and were a common sight when working the small fields of wheat and rice. Lin had learned at an early age to stand well away from the water’s edge when fishing the Beiyu after a sturgeon the size of a man had wolfed down one of her straw sandals. The sight of the cavernous white wounds in its body and the stench of the gases escaping its mouth had both been irreversibly burned into her memory. So many days were spent hiding in fear from those putrid horrors. Her mother was absent more often than not, and so the responsibility for her protection fell into her own hands.
Back then, Lin had never questioned the cause of the attacks. There was no need to understand why the fiends arrived, the very fact that they did was enough to satisfy her opinion on the matter- they were merely a threat that needed to be dealt with. As she grew in size however, so too did her curiosity. Just what was it about the valley that attracted them? Were they simply drawn to living things? So then why had she never seen them on her visits to the town of Yangwa?
Her mother’s explanation had been stilted at best, “The depths of a pond are most easily seen with the sun directly overhead. It’s a similar concept for the boundary between this land and the shores of Xia’an. Our worlds are most closely aligned under the peaks of the sun and moon, and it becomes far easier to cross between the two.”
Unsatisfied with the evasive answer, Lin took it upon herself to find her own, and she scoured the valley whenever her mother was away. After searching the undergrowth of the sparse forest where white-spotted deer roamed and black bears prowled, it didn’t take long before she found a site of interest.
Amidst a thicket of cypress lay a solitary shed. It was a crooked and dishevelled structure of roughly sawn logs and jagged boards, and though appearing solid enough, had very clearly been built without a practised hand. Winding vines thicker than the surrounding trees smothered the shed’s entrance and constricted its walls like a hungry python, blocking any means of entry into the building. A wander around the perimeter confirmed as much, yet the girl knew she couldn’t leave it at that. Wielding the wooden sword she wore at her side, she brought its blunt edge down in an overhead swing against one of the smaller vines. It landed with a thwack. She struck it again, then once more, but her efforts achieved little more than a bruise on the smooth and thorny surface. Undeterred, Lin reached forward in an attempt to ease the vine out of her way, only to recoil backwards with a yelp of pain. It had lashed out like a viper, pricking several fingertips with its coat of vicious thorns. This doesn’t belong to nature, she realised, but if it isn’t natural, then what is it? Some kind of conjuration? What’s the point in wrapping it around this worn down shed? The next few days were dedicated to finding those answers, though they did not come as quickly as she had thought. Cutting the vines was pointless- they regenerated in an instant, and there was no sense in burning away the blockage if it meant destroying whatever hid inside. Every failed attempt was followed by another of increasing creativity. She tried a lasso and then a makeshift pulley, although the thorns were unyielding and bit through both ropes within minutes.
Swarming fiends bothered her ceaselessly during her efforts. Unlike most that had attacked her before, these creatures were not limited to a certain time of day, appearing at dusk and dawn alike in staggering numbers that could only be expected under the overhead light of a full moon or summer sun. By then, she was convinced that whatever hid in the dark comfort of that shed was drawing the corpse-wearing fiends into the valley.
Days turned into weeks and months as each failure plunged her deeper into indifference. Whenever she could bring herself to visit that decrepit shack, her mind searched for more and more outlandish strategies, eventually turning to the magical techniques taught to her by her mother. Despite the undeniable usefulness of water walking and crystallising liquids, she could think of no practical way to apply those abilities to removing the obstructing vines. Her third and final technique, spectral reach, allowed her to create a shadowy replica of a hand that could be manipulated from a distance. That works, she thought, but I can barely use it to lift chopsticks. How am I supposed to move something the size of a tree?
The answer to that question came with time- more than two years of it, and a great deal of both diligence and patience. So much so that in the sixteenth year of her life, Lin had already decided to leave the valley of Solace. There was nothing left for her in that place, not in her home, nor among the townspeople of Yangwa, and although she might miss her mother, there was no guarantee that they would never meet again. Being apart from her is nothing new anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. It’ll be just like always.
Beyond the confines of the valley lay a frontier of foreign lands and peoples. Beyond those confines lay Zetian’s Bridge, those impossibly vast roots that tethered together the twin planets. It was a world she had been denied, and the time had come for that to change.
“This is my last day in Solace. The last day I’ll spend training to be my mother’s heroine. It doesn’t matter if she won’t tell me what I’m supposed to do, who I’m supposed to fight, because I’ll carve out my own legend in history. I’ll stand at the foot of Zetian’s Bridge like I always dreamed. Everything is out there waiting for me!” Lin’s announcement disappeared into the drizzle beneath the overcast sky. As if in reply, a branching bolt of lightning split the clouds, illuminating the dull summer morning for but an instant. She stared at its faint afterimage with an upturned smile, “Maybe whatever’s in that shed will make a better listener than you, sky,” and with that, she disappeared into the cypress thicket.
Nothing about that day was ideal. The week’s rain had been sporadic, but still more than heavy enough to churn the earth into a thick, sludgy mire of mud and drowned grass. Lin didn’t walk through the forest so much as she waded. Her already tired body was loath to make even a single stride. Little sleep had come the night before, and whether it was due to excitement or anxiety, the result remained the same. Lin was exhausted. She was soaked with rain and her ankles caked in mud. Leaving her plans for another, drier day was the most obvious course of action, but she had not waited this long simply to bow to the weather. Nothing was more important than today; nature could spit and sputter its protests all that it liked.
The shed stood in its usual place, the congregation of vines intertwined like lace. Wasting no time under the torrential downpour, Lin balled her hand into a fist and allowed a series of sensations to pass through her mind. She took notice of her hand’s flesh and bone, the muscle and sinew, then of the space that the thicket around her occupied. Cracks formed across her fist for a moment before the surrounding meat sloughed away amid the raindrops. Beneath a dark swirling smoke, only black bones remained.
“This is my mother’s spectral reach,” she murmured to an audience of sodden trees. Her words were lost to the rain. Casting off the flesh of her other hand, she conjured two shadowy appendages from her fingertips and sent them forth into the bristly nest of vines. The smallest few of the thorny tendrils peeled apart with ease and opened a space large enough for a child to crawl through, revealing the handles of the obscured double doors.
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“And this is my strike of Solace. I’ll find her truth and leave all of this behind.” Blinking, she zeroed her vision onto the door’s centre and thrust forward with her spectral fist. Splinters of wood and metal fittings exploded as the doors swung inward. Bleak light of the early morning illuminated no further than the entrance. She flexed her fingers, allowing their forms to reconstruct themselves.
And then she made her approach.
Lin couldn’t understand what she had found in that hollow of the dark and depraved. She didn’t know she was running until her foot was swallowed by a mud-filled pit hiding within a puddle. She fell, twisting her wrist badly as she tried to break her fall. The pain had no time to register. Yanking her leg free from the muddy morass with a thunderous burst of energy, Lin slipped out of her sandal and continued her sprint with one foot bare through the misty downpour across a sodden wheat field. On and on she ran, her face battered by wind and rain; she dared not risk a glance behind. Her home appeared before her, a large cabin with a reed-thatched roof. She dove inside and hurriedly sealed the door, collapsed to the floor, and it was then that she could finally breathe. Her muscles were taut enough to imitate steel.
A hallucination, she realised through a whirring vortex of thoughts, that thing wasn’t real. I’m safe here. In our little valley of Solace, we never fear the sunset. Her mother’s words had never felt so unconvincing. How Lin needed her now, to be held in her reliable warmth. The same devils exist in daylight as under darkness. You were right, Mother, and now they’ve come for me.
It had been dim within the dusty confines of that forsaken shed, but the shadows did not hide the long-festered mounds of human remains. She couldn’t see the veiled creature until it sprung toward her, tearing through vines and wood with a single deadly swipe. It was a devil she had never laid eyes on before, its body a sick perversion of the human form that wore an elongated face full of teeth and two bulging, bloodshot eyes. She hadn’t had long to admire the thing’s twisted beauty before it had tried to gnaw through her windpipe. Quick thinking and a shadowy hand had saved her from that moment of death, but the creature’s pursuit had been unbelievably fast. Heat emanated from the gaps in the door frame at the entrance of her home. Lin’s breath was an unsteady pant, she could taste the stagnant air that was thick with the stench of desiccated dead. It had followed her home.
Lin stood from the ground. There couldn’t have been more than ten steps between her and her mother’s armoury. She began towards it, and at that moment, the ceiling gave out. The discoloured horror collapsed into a heap of gangling limbs. Lin could no longer stand against her fear. She screamed so loudly that her vocal cords felt close to tearing, then fled back out into the dismal, waterlogged landscape. This time however, the creature was far quicker to react, hounding her on all fours, bounding over sodden earth with a malevolent eagerness to rip and ravage the meat beneath her skin. Lin dug a foot into the ground and stopped dead in her tracks, using the rebounding momentum to swing an astral fist into the monster’s drooling jaws. A useless attempt. It bit through the hand like a cloud of dust, unfaltering in its stride. The creature charged and forced her shoulders against the damp ground. Her hands clamped around two of the many elongated fangs closing around her throat. Its rancid breath inflicted dizziness, so potent that her arms felt weak under its influence. Her muscles burned down to their very fibres in a desperate effort to keep the creature’s teeth from severing her head. Tighter and tighter the jaws grew, pressing so deeply against her skin that she dared not even breathe. No thoughts passed through her mind. There was no moment of reflection or mortal enlightenment in the face of death, only fear. It was that very feeling that brought her back into the realm of reason.
Lin could no longer resist the overwhelming power held within the jaws of the devilish creature. Her body felt weak and unresponsive. So why is it that I’m still alive? Am I being toyed with? When the freakish devil slowly loosened its grip around her throat, Lin’s confusion only deepened. It stood tall, raising its mottled, bug-eaten nostrils to the sky. She wasted no time, slowly crawling along the ground with one hand, pooling her energy into the other. Nobody in the empty valley could save her. No one other than herself could make that stand. The battle was hers, and hers alone. She raised her fist for her final strike. And then she lowered it again.
After tearing its way halfway across the valley and laying waste to Lin’s home, the hellish creature fled eastwards over the forest-peaked Fenzhi mountains without spilling a single drop of blood. Lin watched with blank eyes as it surmounted the first of the peaks. Neither relief nor peace came from the sight. She lifted herself once more and started after it. Only one thing lay to the east that could have drawn its attention: Yangwa, the little river town, and it was there that Lin would go. She removed her remaining sandal and didn’t stop to arm herself with a weapon. If she didn’t reach the town quickly enough, there would be nothing left there to fight for. Her fear persisted in a new form, driving forward her every step as she pushed strenuously through dense fields of damp wheat in pursuit of the monster. It ran strangely in the distance, bipedal, like a human shimmying at speed, soon disappearing over the bleak horizon. Lin continued upward over the foot of the mountain where moss-laden trees loomed over flooding mud slopes, pressing harder and further until her throat became raw and her chest burned with an agonising intensity. Still she persevered. Her linen trousers and blouse grew heavy with water as she climbed, the rain battering her face so relentlessly that the great mountains and forests of Solace were obscured into a panorama of grey, blurred shapes.
The sky had cleared by the time Lin set eyes on Yangwa, leaving an air of thick humidity as the overhead sun beat down onto the sweeping plains of grass and rice paddies. Not a soul moved through those streets. There were no children wading in the silt banks of the Beiyu, nor were any marksmen manning the northern bridge. After a two years’ absence, the town Lin had known as a second home had become nothing more than an empty memorial. Her throat tightened at the sight, yet she was left unable to feel grief. Rather than a picture of destruction, the view from the mountainside was eerie, unsettling, as if the town ahead of her was a hallucination from a dreaming mind. That illusion was shattered the moment she stepped foot through its gate. Cloudy streams of blood-dyed water flowed along the drainage channels at either side of the main road, carrying litter and debris in its current. Lin felt an uneasy chill run through her body, but it was a different realisation that halted her advance. The blood was flowing uphill.
Delving deeper into the centre of Yangwa, she passed an abandoned caravan still loaded with raw metals. She passed a half-full clothesline at the front of someone’s home, and then an upturned straw basket that had rolled into a flooded pothole. So many signs of life in a town completely deserted. Lowering to one knee, she absentmindedly lifted the basket from the pothole and turned it upright, then threw herself backwards in horror. Concealed beneath was a single severed finger, its skin rubbery and pale and beginning to swell with water. The finger had been bitten off at the knuckle joint- messily, as if it had been gnawed with blunt teeth. It couldn’t have been the work of the creature from Solace, with a jaw full of fangs and serrated teeth. Looking more closely, there was something protruding from its tip like a cluster of strings, all of them thin and red. They’re capillaries, she realised, that had somehow broken the skin. She turned her head in disgust.
The flow of the blood-tainted drainage channels accelerated as she entered the town’s southmost neighbourhood, Xiaoyin. Homes were most affluent there, built sturdily with hard maple wood, white clay and glazed tiles. More than half of Yangwa’s street lights belonged to that neighbourhood, and it was as brightly lit during the night as it was in daylight. That prosperity hadn’t saved them. Several houses had been broken into by some great force and their doors split apart entirely. Thick trails of sanguine trickled slowly from within, crawling over the smooth stone roads and climbing low walls. Following their movement led her along a familiar path. Out of all the children that she had played with in the town, very few had ever come from Xiaoyin. Parents were too overprotective there, though not often of their children’s wellbeing. The best and brightest youths travelled from Yangwa to the powered cities to pursue a greater life. What once might have been a cherished privilege had become a uniform path; if one’s son or daughter couldn’t perform at the necessary level, they were deemed a failed cause. Though it certainly wasn’t restricted to the neighbourhood of Xiaoyin, the relationship between parent and child had replaced love with expectations, and after generations of the same, they could no longer draw a line between the two.
One exception to that was Daiyu Xing. Like many across Han, her small family had been conscripted and gone off to fight a war against a people they’d never so much as seen before. Daiyu was left in the care of an elder sister, and then one day she too left the small girl behind, disappearing into the night without so much as a goodbye. The child had lived alone in that empty house until she ran out of food, then left and never set foot in the building again. She stole to survive, prowling Yangwa’s markets like a wily monkey, waiting for the moment she could seize a juicy persimmon or a freshly-caught carp. Her habits led the girl to associate herself with an equally dubious crowd, and before long she found herself stealing to feed not just herself, but her reputation. That changed the day she met her grandmother.
Three years had passed since then. Peering through the window of Daiyu’s home, Lin saw only a red trail oozing along its main hallway. She opened the door, immediately stepping backwards to avoid the rush of blood that had built up within. Setting foot inside, Lin stumbled across the first ember of hope she had found since entering the town. It was Daiyu, and she was alive. Spots of dried blood spattered her face, though she didn’t seem to have suffered any wounds.
“Daiyu,” Lin called, uttering the name for the first time in two years. It felt strange upon her tongue. She repeated the name when the child gave no response, speaking firmly. Daiyu pulled her empty gaze away from the ground. Nothing suggested sadness in those relaxed eyes, merely a hint of surprise at the stranger in her home.
“Lin. You’re… Lin. Why are you here?”
Lin’s eyes widened. She didn’t know herself. Was it to fight that thing? Or did I come here to protect this town? The abandoned streets and rivers of blood made it clear she had failed on both fronts. Her mother had been wrong, she was not a saviour, nor was she worthy of the hopes of the world. Was her own weakness to blame? Or was it the fault of her mother, for her misplaced expectations? The answer to that question won’t change a damn thing. An entire populace had vanished. Whatever she did now couldn’t change that fact. Her gaze fell to the ground. The reason is meaningless. I’m here now. So while I’m here, what’s wrong with pretending?