Hope, a lie. Joy, a trap. Satisfaction only in final death. Rage and hate and fight. Never stop, and you will find peace at the end of your path. – Buzhun Tan, Sect Leader of the Broken Fates Sect
* * *
“Are you alright?” Tenri asked as I worked to light the fire for our evening camp.
“Believe it or not, sleeping with one eye open is more tiring than it looks,” I answered with equal parts frustration and exhaustion. If I’d still been an Ascendent, I would have been able to go months without sleep. Now, as a mere Iron, my body was much more limited. For nearly ten days, I’d slept only when Tenri was on watch, being too worried to relax any other time.
Tenri put a hand on my shoulder. “We’re almost there. You’re welcome to sleep in our guest room if the company would put you at ease.”
“Can I sleep under your bed?” I countered. “No one would ever expect me to sleep under the bed of a married couple with no children.” Tenri blinked once before he bit his lip in a poor attempt to stifle the laughter that threatened to escape him. It spilled out the dam of his mouth like an overfilled bucket, and his shoulders began to shake as he dissolved into a pleasant chuckle. I smiled sheepishly, glad, at least, that one of us was enjoying the situation.
Kansi walked over, adding several larger branches to my pile of wood. “He’s doing strange things, again,” she said, nodding towards our unwanted guest.
Lian Liu was going around the clearing, tacking talismans to every tree “to form a protective array,” or so he claimed. Kansi, Tenri, and I had all investigated the talismans in question, but they lacked all the usual characters that would invoke protective qi. When Tenri had asked, as the least hostile of the three of us, Lian had claimed that the talismans were woven using the secrets of his sect. Though this answer would have been perfectly believable under normal circumstances, and even protected by the common understanding of all cultivators not to pry into another sect’s secrets, I didn’t buy it.
I wanted to kick myself for choosing to trust him. I knew it would only cause me strife, and sure enough, it had. If it weren’t for the fact that Flash Back wouldn’t shatter reality any further than an hour back, I would have gone back and made extra sure that he couldn’t follow us.
Dinner was tense, made even more so by the simplicity of the trail rations. Lian sat with us, and I edged closer to Tenri. Kansi glared daggers at the summoner, while he ate with cheerful gusto, pulling off his scarf to shovel down his rice with a smile on his face. No one shared his enthusiasm.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Lian said, setting his chopsticks aside and standing. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Kansi grudgingly unpacked her bedroll and laid down next to the fire. Tenri and I did the same, pulling my hair under my hat and laying the whole thing over my head in an effort to block out the light.
“Tsuyuki,” Lian called.
“What?”
“I was wondering, why do you wear a hat at night?” he asked, a playful grin across his face. “Seems to me like such a thing would be more useful during the daytime, don’t you think?”
My eyebrow twitched uncomfortably, and I settled down without another word. From his tone, he already knew the answer. I was also quite sure that he already knew that I knew that he knew the answer. He was toying with me, and I was not a fan of it.
I settled down and pretended to sleep. If prior nights were anything to go by, then Lian would take the first watch, I’d take the second, and Tenri would take the third. That meant I had a few hours to gather my thoughts before I’d be blissfully alone again.
Lian was up and around for much of his watch, which wasn’t a problem. He shuffled around the camp, checking on his talisman barrier before returning to his seat. Only once his time was over did he approach me and shake my shoulder.
“Time to switch,” he said. I nodded and roused myself the rest of the way, careful to keep my hair tied up under my hat.
The camp was well lit by several fires and the light of the moon above. I nodded my greeting to the mercenaries who also took second watch. They nodded back, and I walked briefly around the camp to wake myself up fully.
Everything seemed normal. The night was quiet. The insects chirped in the forest beyond our firelight. Even an owl screeched in the distance.
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“I’m going to do a quick patrol,” I told the other watchmen. They nodded, but didn’t say anything, which wasn’t surprising. As mortals, there was an inherent social and spiritual gap between them and myself. The mercenaries kept to themselves, and the four of us cultivators left them to their jobs. It was a nice system, albeit one that left me with few friends besides Tenri himself.
As part of my usual procedure, I first walked the edge of the camp, looking for signs of disturbance that might show an attack or ambush. Starting by the cultivator campfire, I found nothing during my circuit before ending back where I started. From there, I stretched, then went to check the forest beyond.
The talismans flared with bright green qi, and I smacked right into a wall of pure qi. I stumbled back, but the attack was already in progress. Green qi washed over me, visible only to the sight of a cultivator. It dug into my body, trying to crawl across my skin like too many snakes. I tried to resist, but it seeped past the qi of my defenses and infiltrated my body.
Without warning, I couldn’t breathe, and I could only watch in horror as my skin turned sickeningly pale and my nails turned to dark claws. My head ached with a sudden pain as horns forced themselves from my hairline. I knew enough to know the rest of the changes. My mouth filled with fangs, my eyes turned a savage, piercing blue, and my hair grew darker, seeping with the black mist of the void. Finally, to complete my cursed visage, the lunar steel chains wrapped around three of my limbs. Only once the cursed band around my left ankle was rendered visible by void mist ripping at my boots was I finally able to gasp in the cool night air once more.
“I knew I’d get there eventually.” Lian was standing, watching from the side as my transformation into Void-Touched was completed. I glared at him, ready to split his skull, should the need arise. “Ooh, such hostility,” he mused. “I guess I should expect as much, though, given who you are.”
“What exactly do you want?” I growled. “I haven’t done anything to anyone since returning.”
“Is that so? What a pity,” Lian muttered. “I actually already have what I want.” He stepped towards a tree and pulled the talisman from the bark. “I know what you are, now, and how to contain you.” He tucked the talisman into his lapel. “It took many nights, iteration after iteration. I thought you were yokai, at first, you know. Imagine my shock when you turned out to be neither yokai nor shade.”
“If you ever thought I was a shade, then you need your eyes checked. I’m quite corporeal.”
“Actually, you’re not. Not really.” He shook his head. “You’re a spirit, which means at the end of the day, you’re just a ball of qi pretending to be a man. If you’ve managed to even fool yourself, then you’re just limiting your own abilities.”
A growl grew in the back of my throat. I really wasn’t sure what to make of his analysis. He knew his entity classifications, that was certain. In addition to yokai, shades, and spirit beasts, there was a fourth category of being known as spirits, beings so closely bound to a type of qi or an aspect of nature that their entire being burst with it. Fire sprites, nymphs, storm spirits were all examples, however, most people and even most cultivators never learned about spirits. They were most often mistaken for yokai or shades, but tactics that worked on one would not necessarily work on the other.
“You know, I almost didn’t believe it when you told me your name,” Lian continued. “But, now that I’ve seen you like this, there can be no mistake.”
“Are you going to try and chain me up? Put me back in the Labyrinth?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, that would be a waste of your potential. I have much greater plans, but first I want to ask. What happened to you that you’ve been weakened to the point of a mere Iron?”
He doesn’t know about the connection between me and Tenri, I realized. Given his powers, and the very name of his sect, I was worried he’d be able to recognize the bindings that entwined my fate and Tenri’s. The wood artist was my one critical weakness. Kill him, and I’d be doomed alongside.
“Why should I tell you?” I growled.
“Because I might be able to help you return to your former glory.”
Silence reigned between us as my mind whirled. I couldn’t trust him. I didn’t know anything about him, and yet, he knew one of my greatest secrets. And yet…
I could make a difference again… Memories of my kingdom danced through my mind. Building a haven for humans and yokai alike in Half-Moon Hearth, protecting millions of people from harm at the hands of other Ascendents…never once had I considered that someone would actually want to help me instead of put me away.
But…did I deserve it? Power was something only the responsible should have. I was not worthy of leading a nation again. I couldn’t be trusted not to abuse that power to harm the innocent, no matter how good my intentions.
“How would yo-” I was interrupted by a shout.
“Ghost wisps!?” one of the mercenaries shouted. “We’re under attack! We’re under a-Aarraghaahhhh”
I whirled around to see the source of the scream. The mercenaries ran in every direction, their eyes firmly shut as they fled from a transparent woman who couldn’t have been far out of her teenage years. Her hair was left down, but the flowers woven between the strands gave her the ethereal majesty of a fairy princess…an image that was firmly ruined by the bleeding corpse at her feet.
“Oh, another legend graces us this evening,” Lian Liu mused.
The camp was suddenly in an uproar. Three blurs of silver fur raced through the underbrush, and I had no doubt they were the kitsune I’d met previously. Along with them were a dozen snow-white rabbits that I recognized as the guardians of the Flower Maiden’s shrine. They darted between the mercenaries’ feet, causing them to trip and stumble into one another.
The defenders reached for their weapons, only to find bowstrings had been chewed through and sword hilts had been covered in sticky slime. Apparently, after my patrol, the foxes had been busy causing havoc.
“Guard the caravan! We’ll take care of the shade!” Kansi’s shout rang clear through the night, and the guards were immediately rallied. They retreated to the wagons as the Sword Saint’s disciple drew her blade and swept it in a wide arc.