It was so close now. It's massive walls loomed far over them, casting all beneath into an early night. The ancient structure bore countless scars from battles, beasts and esoteric powers that had blooded it before it had been sealed beyond the Silent Mountains, and more mutilation upon it from after it had been sealed. The fragrance of white flowers and ash drifted on the light breeze that rolled off of it, dragging dead leaves with it.

Ji Ying could not help but feel a little spark of apprehension in her chest as she approached the desolate face of the First Palace's walls. They were impossibly big for something made by mere human hands. These walls had been built with the help of gods after all, and even after so long they still carried enough gravitas that she slowed her step as the shadows fell over her.

Zhu'er had gone quiet and limp, the only reason Ji Ying did not suspect she had died was because she was still breathing. Slowly, unsteadily, but still breathing. "...I want to go down," she grumbled.

"Why? So you can run?"

"Put me down! I'll bite you!" Zhu'er threatened, her words mush-mouthed and sluggish.

Ji Ying sighed and set Zhu'er on the ground. The little girl then laid down on the dirt and crossed her arms. "...What are you doing?" Ji Ying asked.

Zhu'er did not answer, she kept her gaze resolutely towards the sky above and did not even flinch when Ji Ying budged her side with a boot.

"Why are you being quiet?" Ji Ying poked the inert body again. What was this child planning to do? Lay on the ground until she fell into hell?

"I'm not going."

Ji Ying's eyes bulged at the sheer stubbornness in the girl's words. As though simply stating something would make it so. "What do you think you are? A princess? You think you can just say something and it won't happen, you brat?"

Zhu'er crossed her arms while continuing to stare up into the sky, her eyes growing wet with tears once more. Ji Ying was amazed she somehow still had enough water left in her body to cry. "You're mean, and I don't like you. I want Gege."

"Who?" Ji Ying tried to think of who the little girl would be talking about. Her vocabulary had expanded by leaps and bounds but she still stumbled or used odd words. "Who is that?"

"Li Baobao."

"He's-" she stopped as she tried to find the right words. When she had last seen him, he had fallen to his knees in the wildflower meadow at the river. He was mumbling that all he could see was ash, pale roots eating through his body. She had left him behind there in frustration and anger and... the view of his face with those curling white roots tinged with pink from congealing blood emerged from her memory and she shuddered. Did she really need to leave him behind? When they had cut through the meadow again, he was no longer there. Where had he gone in that time? "...He's in the palace still," she lied.

Zhu'er finally looked at Ji Ying, doubt all over her reddened little face. She then sat up, taking in a deep wheezing breath to cough.

"Faking being sick won't stop things either," Ji Ying grumbled impatiently.

Zhu'er kept coughing, her thin shoulders shaking as she covered her mouth to hack and wheeze. Ji Ying reached down to firmly pat the girl's back, wondering if she had somehow swallowed a bug. After a few increasingly wet rounds of coughing, Zhu'er stopped and moved her hands away from her mouth. They were covered in sticky reddish saliva and a wad of white flower petals that she wiped off on her skirt.

Ji Ying did not touch the flowers.

She looked back at the small child, whose face had quickly paled again.

She did not want to think about the flowers, about what they meant. Instead she stood back up to try lifting Zhu'er to her feet. "Come on, it's not that long anymore."

"No!" Zhu'er protested, kicking at Ji Ying and battering at her arms. "Put me down! Let me go!"

"Stop being difficult!"

Zhu'er shook her head and glared up at Ji Ying with a ferocity in her eyes. A stubborn fierce glare that did not belong on a child's face. "You said you want to make choices but you're being stupid! Stupid! You're a stupid person! I hate you! You're a dumb lady and you're mean and you just do what adults say!"

Ji Ying's chest filled with poison and vinegar at the childish rant. She raised her hand and slapped the little girl again, but rather than cry the child just grew even angrier and tried to gnaw on her arm. "You don't understand anything and you think you can lecture me!" Ji Ying laughed derisively as the tiny teeth sank into her skin. She grabbed Zhu'er by her messy red hair to yank her off her arm, the girl's mouth lined with blood.

Zhu'er angrily balled her fists up again to start swinging at Ji Ying, "just say no if someone tells you to be a GROSS LEAF JUICE LADY!" she screamed, baring her reddened teeth like a wild dog.

Why did she not just ask?

That was a question Li Chunning had given her, not too long ago.

She swung Zhu'er over her shoulder like a sack of vegetables and began carrying her to the gate, ignoring the tiny fists and kicks the child rained down on her. Her limbs were moving automatically, stiffly like a poorly made puppet. She had to get Zhu'er to Baichan and then she could leave this nightmare behind. Maybe she would wander the roads and become a bandit queen, or get into literature. She began to come up with a dozen different hypothetical lives for herself as the pale waiting figure at the gate became clearer and clearer.

Baichan stood right by the threshold of the gate. His face was still in that ever calm and soothing smile, but Ji Ying caught the excited curl at the edges of his mouth. He was not holding the near corpse-like body with him, leaving him as a strangely lonely looking figure in the emptiness beyond the gate.

Ji Ying came to a stop before the threshold and set Zhu'er down on the ground, keeping a firm bloodied hand on her arm so the girl would not try bolting away.

"You came," Baichan said. Not to Ji Ying, but to Zhu'er, who was trying to avoid his gaze.

"It was a pain to bring her here," Ji Ying spoke, bringing Baichan's attention back to her. "She fought the entire way she was conscious."

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"That sounds like her," his smile widened slightly. He crouched down and began to reach for Zhu'er, only for the air around his finger tips to glow softly, stopping his hand. Ji Ying realized he could not escape the barriers erected around the First Palace, and felt a strange sense of relief. "Why are you so scared? Your mother and I have been waiting."

"I want Liu Xie and-"

Baichan's hand pressed against that invisible barrier a little more. "He and I are the same, a dream can't be separated from its dreamer, only reclaimed." He spoke soothingly.

"Her mom isn't awake yet, is she?"

"Come here, Idony, you look so tired. You need to rest," Baichan continued before he looked back up to Ji Ying. "Correct, Eona cannot awaken until Idony is with us."

A question came to Ji Ying so fast it had gone from the void straight to her mouth, "what happens then?"

Baichan's gaze had returned to the crying child, who was struggling to release herself from the iron grip of Ji Ying. "The Celestial Gates will open up and the Red Moon will be gone. In other words, I'll be able to travel both the heavens and the mortal world freely." He frowned, very slightly, his eyebrows pulling upwards in concern. "Idony please don't cry... just take another step forward..."

"No that's not what I meant," she lied. "What happens to me? What happens to Zhu'er?"

Baichan tipped his head to the side, a faint gaze of curiosity in his void like eyes. "Well, Idony and her mother will stay with me, we'll all be together. This world has already been so cold and cruel to them, it's best if they were taken away from it, don't you agree?" He paused for a moment to look back down at the crying child as though hoping that would be enough to make her come forward. "And as for you... you can leave."

"What?"

"Yes. You're free to go live your own life," Baichan replied evenly. The smile was on his face again.

"But what do I do?" She asked, "where do I go?" She had ideas, but the words 'you're free to go' had paralyzed her. What would she do? She had so many ideas but now they were distant dull things in her mind. But freedom... it was so close. Her limbs moved again on their own, pushing the squirming desperate child towards the threshold of the gate.

Baichan chuckled and it sounded so warm and comforting. "Silly girl, you've been so desperate for direction ever since you regained your original form that you will listen to anyone. You could have done anything but you can't make your own decision even now? How pathetic, maybe my brother was wrong to restore you." His words were spoken so kindly but they struck Ji Ying as lightning, blazing through her mind.

Why had she never just asked?

"I've been... I've been free all this time?" She repeated the words. They tasted like acid on her tongue. She thought she had misheard, the wailing girl on the ground was distracting her but...

"Yes, besides the request to be Idony's friend. You took it as an order," Baichan explained with an amused sigh. "Well, none of this is your fault. You cannot help it, it must have been very bewildering to have so much choice and not know what to do with it."

"You lied to me," Ji Ying's anger sparked in her chest.

"Lie? No, I did nothing of the sort."

"You said you'd give me my freedom."

"Yes, if you finished the task I gave you, you would be free," Baichan agreed. "Is that not what I promised? You have gotten what you desired. Was it not enough?" Then he looked back down at Zhu'er, who was sitting on the ground heaving with sobs still, retching occasionally from the strain. "Idony, come here... please," he said.

The little girl shook her head but did not have the energy to get up anymore.

"She needs me, give her to me," Baichan demanded, pressing his hands against the bright barrier that now swirled with off-putting colors as he pressed against it.

Ji Ying looked down at Zhu'er, who was a dirty and disheveled mess, her face drenched with tears and her clothes covered in dirt and drying blood. She was only a hand's span away from the gate's threshold. All Ji Ying could think of was how she had spent the last few hours yelling and occasionally hitting a scared little girl that she had been trusted to care for. For what? For freedom? She had left Li Chunning behind because she had been so focused on that word. She felt ill, a sickening swirl of acid in her chest that bubbled and ran up into her brain. It pulled at her thoughts, it dug into her feelings with long knives as her eyesight became blurry. Every cruel word and barb that she had given now had returned to her. "...Zhu'er..." she whispered, somewhat hoarse. "...Zhu'er, get up..." she hauled the little girl onto shaking feet and held her hand, squeezing it gently.

"Come here, Idony," Baichan cooed softly, his face brightening up again.

Ji Ying swallowed a lump in her throat, "Zhu'er, you don't want to go with him right? You want Liu Xie, right?"

Zhu'er's crying tapered off, and she wiped some of her teary snot onto her sleeve and nodded.

"What are you doing, Ji Ying?" Baichan asked, all kindness evaporating from his voice.

"She doesn't want to go with you, idiot," Ji Ying put her free hand on her hip to hide its trembling. "So I'm going to take her back."

"NO!" Baichan yelled, smashing both of his fists on the barrier. Beautiful swirling patterns of white extended from where his fists beat against it. The air around them all turned stiff and heavy, Baichan's face leered out with sharp teeth. "Give her to me! Give her to me! Don't you dare-"

"You're really pathetic." Ji Ying said, watching the growing tantrum. She glanced down to Zhu'er, "start running the direction we came in ok? As fast as you can." She then released Zhu'er's hand. For a moment she felt the small little thing continue to hold onto her fingers, then slowly unfurl its thin fingers and slip away. "If you want her so bad, just get across that barrier. Can't do that huh? Then you must not really want her."

Baichan pressed heavily against the barrier, his eyes focused on Zhu'er as she ran. "No... no, Idony, come back!" He called out in shrill desperation. "Come back! Don't go... don't... don't leave me..." As his face faded with despair, howls and groans erupted from within the First Palace. The monstrous flesh puppets began crawling forth in their myriad of twisted forms. "Why..."

"Because she doesn't like you, stupid." Ji Ying eyed the monsters. There were too many for her to shoot down with her arrows. She counted ten, thirty, one hundred perhaps. There were more. She knew there would still be more coming out from the First Palace. She could even see the flower consumed shapes of soldiers wobbling forward in the courtyard. A streak of bright white light filled her eyes and she shrieked as a searing pain tore through her chest and side, rupturing amber ribs. Her throat and mouth filled with blood as she took a step back, clutching at her chest and stomach and feeling raw meat and blood under her fingers.

She looked back at Baichan, who had returned to his placidly benevolent face, his left index finger's nail was glowing white hot and tinged with red that had splashed onto his sleeve. "You have... proven to be a disappointment. But that is fine. I've dealt with many before. I still have those other two, and even then..." he smiled, "Idony will return to me, in body and spirit, or in spirit alone. Now, what shall you do, Celestial Tea Server?"

Ji Ying opened her mouth but only blood poured out, splattering into the reddening grass and dusty stones beneath her feet.

"I suppose I can just reclaim that little flame inside of you."

A hundred twisted faces turned towards her. Ji Ying could feel their pained hungry gazes on herself. She tried to swallow the blood in her mouth, but there was always more coming. She reached into the deep wound that had cut through her body and pushed past the dense muscle that filled her chest cavity. She had no lungs, as a doll, but where a heart would be nestled was ball that she tore out as the creatures mobbed her. Their blades and teeth tore into her body mercilessly, but she could no longer feel the pain.

In her blood drenched hand was a glowing amber stone, its smooth and polished surface that held a dim glow.

The bloodied hand held the glowing amber stone tightly and Ji Ying looked at it for a moment. She could feel her grasp of her doll body slowly disintegrating. Receding back to the stone that was Her. All she ever was and could be. Her thoughts, memories, and feelings. Eight hundred years of serving tea, two hundred years worth of short lives as pigs, and finally the last four months of being a person of her own. All of it fit in the palm of a hand. She had always had a choice, and now her fingers curled tightly around the stone and squeezed. The mistakes and words she had said to others filled her mind again, but she could no longer apologize. Ji Ying thought about her friend. It began to give way, her other arm was missing, and a dagger like limb was digging into her throat.

From her Self, a dawning sun grew, the fragmented final thoughts of regret incinerated in its incandescence.