Ruyi found herself sitting there awkwardly, with nothing to do. So she fetched one of the yearly Alchemy reviews off a nearby bookshelf and pretended to browse it, even though she’d already read it and had it memorized, and honestly far preferred reading it in her head to reading it on the page; she could flip through it so much faster. And pages got messy. And she could just annotate in her head, anytime she liked, no need to haul around pens and clips and whatever else. Things were messy, but at least when thoughts got messy they left no trace.

She entertained herself doodling on the acknowledgments page for a while. The minutes ticked by, and Lin was still pouting at the same page.

“I could help, you know,” said Ruyi.

“Go away, stinky auntie!”

Unbelievable. Ruyi was sure she’d never been this bratty when she was a child. And why did Lin keep calling Ruyi ‘stinky’? …Was she…? Discreetly, Ruyi lifted an arm and gave herself a sniff. She smelled fine! This was ridiculous. She was being wrong-footed by a pre-pubescent girl.

Finally the little girl got up off her chair—she had to do a little jump just to get her legs to the ground—and strutted over to Ruyi.

“Do you really know Alchemy?” said the little girl.

“Of course,” scoffed Ruyi.

The girl plopped the book in front of Ruyi.

“How’d you do it? Explain,” she demanded.

“Ask nicely,” said Ruyi, arms folded.

Lin puffed out her cheeks, glowering. Ruyi glowered back. They sat there, neither backing down, until Lin finally deflated.

“Auntie, can you please explain it to me?” she mumbled.

“I’d love to!” said Ruyi. She pored over the text, pretending to read it, pretending to think about it, even though she’d been waiting for the little girl to walk over for the past hour or so and had already thought up half a dozen ways to best explain it.

“Hmm,” said Ruyi. Then, “Are you stuck on proving the second order harmony?”

“How’d you know?” Lin looked startled.

“Just a hunch. So here’s how I’d approach it…”

By the time she was done explaining, Lin was silent. “Huh. Thanks, auntie.”

“Please,” said Ruyi. “Call me Ruyi.”

Then she waited, expectant. A widening of the eyes, maybe? A shocked intake of breath? But the little girl just blinked at her.

“Then thanks, Ruyi,” said Lin.

…It flew right over her head.

“Actually, your name’s the same as my favorite Alchemist,” Lin added.

“Really?” said Ruyi. “And who might that be?”

“Ruyi Yang. I think she’s the best Alchemist ever.”

“Me too,” Ruyi agreed. This interaction wasn’t going how she’d hoped, but she wasn’t complaining.

“I’m going to be just like her when I grow up,” said Lin proudly. Her nose scrunched. “No matter what that stinky uncle Pao says!”

“What’s he say?”

“That I’m dreaming too big,” said Lin. “But I’ll show him. I’ll show him and all his apprentices! I wish I was eight feet tall so they can’t look down on me. Then I would pick them up and toss them into the Clearlake.” “Well, I think it’s great to dream big,” said Ruyi. “Who knows how big you’ll grow? Even if you don’t hit eight feet, six feet is still pretty good.”

“No,” said Lin. “I’m going to be just like Ruyi. Just like her. Maybe even better. You’ll see.”

“Have you met her?”

“No,” said the little girl, looking at Ruyi like she was an idiot. “She lives in Jade Dragon City. She’s never been anywhere near!”

“Well… maybe she’s closer than you might think…” Ruyi tried on her best mysterious grin, but it was utterly lost on the little girl. Lin just blinked at her. “Wha?”

“I heard a rumor she was visiting.”

“Really?!”

“How haven’t you heard?” said Ruyi, frowning. “Everyone’s talking about it.” Or so she’d assumed. If they weren’t they really should be.

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“Oh…” said Lin. She looked away. “I don’t really talk to people. I’ve been in here all weekend.”

“Why?”

“I want to become the youngest alchemist since Ruyi. They said Ruyi studied from when she woke to when she slept every day. She even got other experts like the Princess for study sessions. If I want to be as good as her, I have to study just as much, even more. And I will.”

“Where’d you hear all that? Ruyi didn’t study wake-to-sleep. And I have it on good authority when the Princess was around they did very little studying. And besides, don’t you have other things to do?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know… don’t you have friends?”

“No,” said Lin, wrinkling her nose. “Who needs those? All they do is waste time. I’m going to be the best, just like Ruyi. I don’t have time for friends.”

“Why do you want to be Ruyi so bad?” pressed Ruyi. “Maybe if Ruyi could choose to not be Ruyi, she’d be someone else. Maybe it’s not very fun being Ruyi, not very fun at all.”

Lin was looking at her like she was dumb again.

“I don’t care about having fun,” Lin declared. “I want to be the youngest alchemist ever.”

Hearing this made Ruyi quite sad.

Lin had been packing as she spoke; slinging her pack over her shoulder, she hopped off her stool. “I’m gonna go see if I can find her,” Lin declared. “Goodbye, auntie. I’m sorry for calling you stinky.”

“Goodbye, Lin.”

The little girl marched away. As she crossed the platform, the lamp behind Ruyi cast her shadow large, so Lin was stepping in it all the way to the staircase, chasing her ghostly head. Then Lin descended the steps and was gone.

***

She said her goodbyes to Mother. There was a small crowd gathered to see her off, and as she stepped aboard her carriage she spotted a tiny head bobbing amid the mass, gaping at her. Ruyi waved, winked, and swung the door shut.

She spent the rest of the ride home congratulating herself on how smooth that was.

***

When the next Shower came, Ruyi took her time getting to her hideout. Where she was now, new Essence soil hardly helped. Cultivate a day and it was like she’d poured a canteen of water into a dried lakebed. It was nice for replenishing lost Essence, and for staying in; human baths and saunas did little for her nowadays, but basking in her cave of Essence felt nice.

She still snatched up a few Shards—ones the Guard hadn’t gotten to yet. They really were scant nowadays, a scattering every few mountains. Her path to her hideout now ran in zig-zag lines, leaping over tree-tops and running down cliff faces to avoid Guard patrols. There were so many now, and Jin had trained them annoyingly well. Every so often she’d see him drilling a squadron in a field outside the City Walls. Gone were the crumpled stained uniforms, the sloppy spearmanship, the stench of drink trailing every Guard troupe. These men stood in tight formation, gripped their weapons with firm confidence, and not one of them had a tunic string untied. She could’ve mistaken them for a real army.

If one of them had more of Father in them, it was definitely Jin.

***

Where demon horde passed, it seemed a dark tide washed over the land. It wasn’t just from the burning. They made sure to plant Demon Hearts wherever they went so that the land turned the color of a rotting corpse.

Look back, and Marcus saw naught but bleak mountains dipping to smoldering black valleys. Rivers ran over purple-black beds, so they seemed made of tar rather than water. Towers of smoke twisted into the churning, restless sky, flecked with dark reds and brilliant yellows.

Look ahead, and Marcus saw a stampede of dark forms. It had been a neat encircling maneuver—sneaking five thousand through the Blue Mountains to catch the humans in the flank, force them to defend the narrow mountain pass. They’d held it valiantly enough, but bravery waned; bloodlust did not. You couldn’t let a demon smell blood. Show them red and they went feral. They would forfeit their lives to see more of it, an army of berserkers. The humans may have been better trained, better disciplined, but sometimes winning or losing was a matter of sheer aggression.

Once the human line started to crumble there was no stopping it. It bowed inward, then shattered, and the darkness rushed through the gaps. The general got out, as did most of his elite troops—a few strike teams hounded them as they retreated down the valley. The rest, some four thousand humans, perished here. And not in pretty fashion. For demons, after every great battle came a great feast; it was tradition to eat of the corpse of your enemy. As the screams and wails and roars died down, a slurping and a crunching took its place. Everywhere Marcus looked he saw bloody hands and bloody lips. Most had gone to humanform; most hadn’t bothered to put tunics back on. He saw a naked man-demon trying to prise a corpse’s eyeballs out, a woman-demon headfirst in the guts of another. If not for their Demon Limbs you could’ve thought them a tribe of naked humans bent over other humans, gnawing away.

***

After the feast, Octavius called a forum. Just as Marcus expected.

First he went around praising various demons for their valor, mostly his commanders, but he made sure to pick a few common warriors out of the tribe and laud them before the masses, make them feel special. Then he moved to his real business.

“The humans are broken!” he cried. “They are as wounded stags, hobbling on a leg. My brethren, nothing stands between us and the capital, between us and ultimate glory…”

The crowd seemed to lean as one toward him, like he had them all on a string.

“…Nothing except ourselves.” His eyes found Marcus’s. Laughing eyes in mocking slits.

“Marcus calls us hasty, reckless. You have heard him give his speeches, very pretty speeches, and measured, to be sure…yet every time we’ve spurned his advice, we’ve triumphed. He advocates prudence! Yet what is prudence, but weakness by another name? He would have us stop, when victory is so near at hand you can nearly taste it!”

Octavius paused. “I say no. I say we march on the morrow, and break the humans at their own capital one last time!”

He thrust an accusing finger at Marcus. “What have you to say to that?”

“Nothing,” sighed Marcus. “I have made my opinion on the matter clear. You overextend yourself. But you have command of this war. Do as you like.”

“Then ready yourselves, my brethren!” said Octavius. His smile was wolfish. “They will sing of this march.”

Later, once they’d set camp, Caius came to his tent with parchment and quill, as he’d requested.

“Pen a letter to Drusila,” he said. “Send it the moment we march tomorrow—tell him Octavius’s strength has crossed the Blue Mountains.”

His mind was elsewhere. On an encounter he’d had in mountains much like these, just a few thousand li away, with a human girl named Sen. Her temperament was quite different but she had the same issue. He supposed youngsters were all the same. They didn’t listen. They had to be beaten to learn the lesson.

Don’t reach.