Livia took her to a stall serving cheeses wrapped in weird purple leaves that tasted like sugar; they were delicious. She asked how Ruyi was liking things.
“It’s good!” said Ruyi, nodding quick. “Everyone’s so nice to me.”
There were things about her life lately she didn’t like. Mostly how lonely she got, but Livia could hardly fix that, and she didn’t want to weigh Livia down with all her stupid feelings. Ruyi could hardly stand them herself.
Here Livia hesitated between wrap-bites. She swallowed. “I’ve heard,” she began slowly. “You seem quite tired at morning practice.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Ruyi. “I’m just not good in the mornings.” She prayed Livia wouldn’t ask more.
“Ah,” said Livia, and thankfully dropped the issue. They went onto talking about Livia’s scouting, and of the upcoming Essence Flare, and of the tribe’s upcoming migration, and Ruyi soon forgot that little exchange.
***
After dinner, Livia said they had one last stop.
“Where?” said Ruyi, after they’d walked a while, and again Livia said, “It’s a surprise.”
They stopped outside a tent as big as the mess hall tent. When they shoved their way in, the smell was so nasty it felt like a slap in the face. Ruyi gagged a little. “What the—”
Then she saw them.
They were dogs, but they were like none she’d ever seen—they were hills of fresh-fallen snow, big as a carriage, and so fluffy their white fur covered their eyes. She could hardly make out their skin there was so much fur. There must’ve been dozens of them splayed out in the barn-tent, some snoring, some flat on their bellies. Not a single one looked up at their entrance. Not a single one seemed interested in moving at all.
“These are sagefur hounds,” said Livia. “They sleep most hours of the day, but they’re the tribe’s most reliable pack animal when they’re awake. We keep them housed and fattened when we have no use of them, but when we move soon you’ll see them hauling all the Tribe’s weight. They’d make quite the threat if they weren’t so docile.”
Ruyi was not holding herself together okay. Then Livia turned to her and said, “They make for good pets, too. Would you like to have one?” and she might have squealed a little.
The first thing she did was ask if she could touch them, to which Livia shrugged. “They neither like nor dislike it. You’ll find they don’t care about almost anything unless they’re hungry.”
“And I can have any one?”
“Any one you like.”
Ruyi went up to the first one and petted it, and it didn’t move. She looked at Livia, startled, and Livia looked back, half-smiling. “What? You have permission.”
So Ruyi climbed up on top of it, flopped herself flat on top, and was pleased to discover it was just as huggable as it looked. She inspected it from every angle, front to back—its half-lidded eyes barely deigned to follow her. She was strangely pleased by its butt. It was such a good butt, a very fluffy butt, and patting it made her feel whole inside.
“So?” said Livia.
Ruyi whirled around at her. “Mine,” she informed Livia, and Livia laughed.
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“Aren’t you going to meet the others?”
“No,” said Ruyi. “I want him.”
She knew it from the moment she hugged him. She didn’t want anyone else, she didn’t need anyone else. He was the one.
“…Sure. I’ll call the kennelmaster.”
His name was Snowball, said the old kennelmaster. Ruyi didn’t like that at all—it didn’t suit him. She asked if she could change it, to which the kennelmaster shrugged. “They’re smart,” he said. “Call them something enough, they’ll learn.”
“From today forth, you are the Destroyer of Worlds,” Ruyi declared. “Or Dow for short.”
If Dow felt any particular way about the name, he didn’t show it.
The kennelmaster told her sagefurs needed little care, mostly because they did nothing all day. They were plant eaters; she was to feed him a particular kind of straw each day, and he loaded several bales onto Dow’s back. He also said they had memories like elephants. Apparently they weren’t very outwardly affectionate—they were like fluffy rocks most of the time—but the kennelmaster said they grew very loyal to their owners, and would even lick them on occasion, and this also pleased Ruyi greatly. She couldn’t get Dow to lick her, but that was okay. It was just the first day.
***
After Ruyi led him to her tent—he could barely fit inside—she spent a few hours braiding his hair and talking to him, telling him about her life up until this point. She wished there were flowers in the Demonlands; she thought he’d look so pretty with some flowers in his hair. Then as evening crept into night she just lay on him like he was a hill, hugging him, feeling whatever the opposite of loneliness was.
That was it hit Ruyi. Livia knew exactly what she was asking back at dinner; she just didn’t want to embarrass Ruyi. And in her own way, without even mentioning it, without Ruyi even asking, she’d helped.
In that moment if Livia asked her to do anything, anything at all, Ruyi would have done it. She sighed into Dow’s furry back. She probably should’ve realized this before, but it turned out a big chunk of her mental loneliness came from her physical loneliness. Or maybe they fed off each other. She was used to having Mother and Jin or Tingting and Sen around to show physical love to, but here she had no one, and it was killing her.
She’d made up a whole rock family just to deal with this, she now realized, though she hadn’t known why she was doing it then. Just having a big warm fluffy thing to hug was surprisingly good at softening the harsh edge of her loneliness. She was realizing her loneliness had two sides—she really wanted to get love in, that much was pretty obvious to her, but she also really wanted to give love out, which was much less obvious until she was doing it. But all her extra stoppered-up feelings from the second thing went into the first, which made it so much worse. It was weird—and a little annoying—how clear it was to her now she was over it.
***
She skipped her way to the Brewer’s den to meet with Claudia later that night. While on Dow’s back, which was now her pillow-couch, she had plenty of time to mull over how to modify her elixirs to suit demon physiology. At the den she drew out her sketches for Claudia with ink and brush on a spare scroll, and Claudia meekly listened and nodded. She wished Claudia would say something; she paused to give Claudia room, but the other girl seemed almost scared to. So Ruyi kept going.
Claudia had a little over two hundred Brewers on hand, mostly junior, in dens scattered around camp. Ruyi wrote out detailed instructions on making her brew. Most of the difficulty was in getting the right ingredients—Ruyi kept lobbing recipes at Claudia, only to hear it wouldn’t work because the tribe didn’t have this ginseng, or the demonlands didn’t have that herb. Eventually, with some creativity, they scrounged something together that’d fit—they’d sieve out an ingredient from certain wyrm stools as a substitute base. Claudia said she could have Brewers trained on it in a moon’s time.
The trickier issue was the elite warriors. Ruyi had been mulling this over for a while, even when she was on the human side. There was a ‘natural ceiling’ to the amount of essence any warrior could have. The closer you got to it, the harder it was to progress; the more essence you put in, the less got converted into your own. A beginner could drink an essence potion and convert almost all of it. But someone like Drusila could drink a dozen supreme potions and hardly get anything out of it.
It ran up against the limits of the heavens, what separated mortals from gods. The few scrolls she found on it here called it the ‘vault of heaven.’
Ruyi hadn’t the faintest idea how to crack it yet, but the thought excited her.
***
She went home and discovered Dow shitting.
He hadn’t moved at all, but he had left three great stinky cubes where her mattress had been.
“Nooooo!” she cried. “Bad boy!”
Dow looked at her with the same blank half-lidded gaze. She waggled a finger at him. “Bad!”
If he cared he didn’t show it. Just after she was done scolding him, he dropped another one. She was forced to move her tent.
To her despair, she couldn’t seem to keep Dow from shitting everywhere. She ended up stationing him outside, which he didn’t seem to mind either. He did as he pleased, and he didn’t care what anyone thought of it. It was almost inspirational.