The Art was neatly written, but by hand; it had little splotches and loops you wouldn’t see in an issue of the Herald, and the lines didn’t run perfectly even. It took her less than ten minutes to soak in the whole thing. She stood there, letting the words and pictures swim around in her head, and breathed out.
“You’ve read all of it?” said Tyrus. Ruyi nodded.
He frowned at her, grunted, but said nothing. He didn’t believe her; he was just like all the rest. It gave her confidence. For the first time she knew more than him. She’d show him.
“Cold Start…” muttered Ruyi. It was Winter’s Wrath’s first stage. All Arts were made by drawing in essence through the body in specific patterns, making loops between nodes. It was like that for humans and Techniques too. There were more combinations than stars in the night sky—and just as many Arts, though most of them weren’t any good.
When she’d tried to do basic forms with the elite warriors, she’d floundered about for half an hour—but she knew where all her nodes and channels were now; she blinked at the diagrams on the page until she could see the essence flowing through her body. She could do this!
They staked out a practice field, glimmering under the noonday sun. Tyrus watched her, hands clasped behind his stooped back, as she breathed out and traced a long arc with her foot. For a breath, nothing happened, and she started to panic. She tugged harder for essence—why wasn’t it coming?
“Easy,” said Tyrus. “Don’t rush it. Everyone fails their first try.”
That was the thing—she wasn’t everyone, she couldn’t be just anyone. But after she’d messed up so badly with those martial forms—just warm-ups even some children could do—a niggling worry had been worming at her. So much had changed once she’d come over… what if she’d lost whatever made her who she was? What if she was just ordinary at their way of fighting? The thought came to her again, and it felt like someone punched her in the gut.
She had to sit with the thought for one awful breath before a blast of essence rushed up her legs. Sucking in a breath, she drew it up her body, barely wrangled it into the loop, flushed it up her arms, and her whole steamed with frosty mist.
“I’m doing it,” she said, each word a vent of mist. “I’m really doing it!”
She laughed breathlessly; she laughed at how easy it’d come, at the wild cold rushing through her, at the shock on Tyrus’ face. And he thought she’d fail—who did he think she was? Didn’t he know she was Ruyi Yang?
“Careful!” said Tyrus. “Very good, child, but let us settle down—” but she was done listening to him. He didn’t know what she was capable of, and she was mildly offended he thought she’d fail in the first place. She felt a tug in her mind, like the reasonable part of her tugging at the hem of her dress, asking her to look back, to think a little. Maybe she would’ve listened before, but right now she was in no mood for thinking. She shook it off. She drew up the second stage in her mind—‘Drizzle Steps’—and started to move.
It was the same kind of thing as Jin’s Nine Steps—where each step built one after another, but rather than just Nine, Ruyi’s was like a dance, and as she led the essence around her body she felt her physical self dissolving. She wasn’t Ruyi anymore, she was something vast, a great hailstorm, and each step struck earth. She didn’t even know when she’d Demonformed; the neat thing was the nodes and channels were a little more spread out, but they stayed the same relative to each other. It didn’t halt her flow. Nothing could. She danced around, faster and faster, and there was so much essence raging through her she saw the ground trembling, and each step she made left a glowing pawprint. The winds howled bloody murder at her. Tyrus shouted, shielding his face with his arms; she couldn’t hear him, could hardly see him through the blizzard of essence. She lost count of her steps. She was riding a furious wave—at first she could guide it but now it was all she could do to not fall over, and she was falling, faster and faster, into the third stage—‘Rising Storm.’ She slashed, once, twice, thrice, four times, snaking back and forth, one claw after the next, running wild with her momentum, and each time her claws left angry white lines shivering in the air, like she’d managed to scar the world itself. She was laughing as she did it—she felt so strong! She knew if these landed nothing would live. Nothing alive could take her, she was the strongest, the best, maybe ever—
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—her feet lurched from under her, and her heart lurched too. Oh, no—she barely slashed in time. She tried going the other way but suddenly she wasn’t riding the wave anymore; she wasn’t even abreast of it, she was going under, flailing desperately, barely upright—
And she was crashing into the fourth stage, Winter’s Wrath. The very last slash—all her essence, her momentum, thrown into one ultimate blow. Screaming she tried, and she exploded.
***
She woke in pain.
She couldn’t move—she was strapped down, her arms—the world was muddy with dark colors—where was she?! She had a sudden jerk of the heart; she was underground again, held down by rough hands as red candles glared down at her, and voices chanted, and she felt like she was being torn open from the inside. It was just a little jerk, a phantom pain, but she sat up gasping anyways. She was soaked with sweat.
“Oh, good. You’re awake.” It was pretty face shaman boy with his red-stained brush.
“What happened?” she croaked.
“You overheated,” said the boy. “You couldn’t control your essence, and it shot out of you all at once, knocked your brain around your skull, and you went out. It’s common. Among children, that is.”
She was woozy, but she wasn’t that woozy. She still registered the insult.
“Excuse me?!”
“You heard me. Learn to be responsible, or don’t play with fire. You’ll only burn yourself—or worse.”
Ruyi had a long-running theory that pretty people were better people than ugly people, supported by little more than gut feeling. This theory had taken quite the beating with Chen Qin, and this pretty boy shaman was doing away with the rest of it. She was starting to think it ran the other way. She glared at him, and he glared back.
“Truly,” he sighed. “Do you hate yourself? Is that it? Never mind, don’t answer that. You have a beautiful body, fool. Seeing you waste it as you do angers me, but it is not my body, of course, of course. So who am I to chastise you?”
She spluttered at him. She settled on, “Why are you always such an ass?”
He considered her coolly. Then he put a hand to his leather tunic and bared his chest. It looked like the roots of an old gnarled tree, rotted away and buried deep in him—all purple and throbbing. Her eyes went wide at the sight of it—it went so deep she could see his heart pulsing gently through the skin.
“Basilisk venom,” he said. “It corrupts the channels. It can’t be healed. Yes—it is the same wound on my sister’s face, and that is no coincidence. I was a warrior, young and stupid and proud, like you. That was years ago.” He shrugged and let the leather drop. “And now, I am a healer. Livia was a warrior too—it was her most fervent dream to lead the praetorianus, to be the new Sabina. Well, she decided to try to save me, in her foolishness, a little Demon Core against the Nascent King of Serpents. And now she is a scout. Do you see? When you act this way, you harm twice. You waste yourself, true. But when you cut yourself, sometimes a loved one bleeds for you.”
It felt like he’d punched her in the face.
“Foolishness?” Livia’s voice drifted in from outside. Then she drifted in in person with her usual light-footed grace. She was even smiling. “Saving you was no fool choice, brother dearest… what is foolish is your petty little jealousies. Let it rest. You have suffered, as have I, as has Ruyi—alas that does not give you the right to be an ass.” She winked at Ruyi. “Are you alright?”
Ruyi ran over and hugged her.
“Oh!” said Livia.
“I screwed up,” mumbled Ruyi.
It was such an annoying screw-up, too. She thought she’d gotten over this kind of impulsiveness, that she’d learned to wrestle down her worse feelings, but that was before… lately it felt like all her feelings were inflamed. She was better than this, she knew she was.
“So you were mortal,” said Livia, patting her. “You’ll learn. Pay no mind to my brother—he may seem a small-minded bitter creature, and he is, but he cares, deep-down.”
At that pretty boy snorted and left, but Livia paid him no mind. “Would you like to come with me for dinner? I’ll show you my favorite eatery in Outer Camp. It’ll be a wonderful time.”
“Okay,” said Ruyi, sniffling a bit. She was looking up at Livia’s face now, her lopsided, broken face, the drooping lips, the slanted nose, the waste of skin crossing out her face, and she felt ashamed.
“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?”
Ruyi flinched. “Sorry! I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” said Livia, smiling; it didn’t improve her. “I like myself much better now. You wouldn’t have liked me back then—I was painfully vain. I was like Darius, only worse, so proud, and crueler than I like to admit…these things happen for reasons known only to Fate. Sometimes they make for blessings.”
For a moment Ruyi was silent. Then she said, “I want to be you when I grow up.”
Livia blinked; she seemed astounded. She laughed. “Ah! You can do much better. It isn’t so hard to be me. I try to be pleasant when I can, that is all—anyone can do that. Shall we?”
They made for the outer circles of the camp, Livia humming gently at her side. The dusk sun splashed the camp in warm orange. They saw a hordes of warriors dragging along the bodies of giant boars and birds—they were ten times bigger than what you’d find in the human realm; Ruyi took a few breaths to stare. They saw blacksmiths’ shops hammering out their last chunks of steel, and craftsmen rolling down the flaps to their stalls. Feral children with little snouts and horns and tails ambled their way home. It was surprisingly peaceful. It almost felt like she was walking through a giant Lower City market…