Ash. Ash filled the air and shifted beneath him like slow undulating waves, the soft susurration of its movement filling his ears. He was tired, which was strange. He was never tired here, and yet he was.

He opened his eyes to stare upwards. A familiar person gazed down at him, messy red hair framing a gently smiling face, slightly warped by a long thick scar that cut over her chin to the corner of her lips. Behind her was a sky of pure still white.

“...Are you really here?” He asked in a small voice. “Are you real?”

“Do you want me to be?” She replied.

He did not know. He did not know if wanted the apparition to be real, not when he had come without her child. Not after what had happened in the city, overwhelmed by creatures of unruly flame. Flame that was supposed to be part of him. Yet he could not stop them, or find her child.

“How long will you lay there, Xie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it can’t be that comfortable,” she said, sitting down beside him. She patted her lap expectantly. “Here.”

He moved, with some effort, to drag himself the few inches needed so he could put his head on her lap. It was warm and soft and everything he remembered, the smell of pine and frost. If she was his imagination, it had done a very good job. It was strange though to be in such a position. She was usually the one who rested against him.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?”

What could he even say?

“You don’t need to if you don’t want to,” her hands ran through his hair slowly.

“...I wish I had made you stay,” he admitted. “I wish Eona had never left, that she had remained here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t dare apologize,” he looked up at her from the corner of his eyes. Her face was shadowed by her hair. “Don’t dare ever apologize. I hate that. You did what you had to do. How could I hold that against you?” He turned his gaze back outwards. An infinite white sky, an infinite desert of ash. This was him, and it was his home. A lifeless eternal desert of dust, sand, and incense ash. The remains from the birth of existence. The all-consuming flame, leaving naught but dust in its hunger. That was what he was told about himself.

“I thought about you every day,” she said. “I thought about how I should go back. But my father was so happy to be back home and close to my mother’s barrow. How could I hurt him by leaving?”

“They said you married.”

“My father had set up a marriage so I’d be taken care of when he passed.”

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“You died.”

“I did. I am still dead,” she said. Her hair was suddenly lank and her face was a leering mummified visage, bare teeth glistening with melting frost, the scar twisting the face in a horrible grimace. She smelled like rot and iron. “I died and abandoned our daughter.”

“It was not your fault,” he said. Had he not abandoned her too? Repeatedly. “...I lost her.”

“I know,” Eona said.

“You’re not upset.”

“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” Eona’s corpselight eyes stared down at him. “My little bear, even without me she still survived. When I gave birth to her, I could not help but think how much she reminded me of you. She had this fierceness in her spirit, I think she’d bite the tail of death in spite.”

He laughed weakly. “So you believe I would do that too?”

“Yes.”

He reached up slowly, his fingers touching the shriveled flesh. “She’s a good child, I think. I think I’m just not good with children. It’s hard to figure out what she’s thinking about when it’s not food. Maybe if I had tried harder to understand her, none of this would have happened.”

“We can’t erase our steps from the path of fate.”

“I know.”

“How long will you stay here, Liu Xie? You have friends waiting for you as well as our daughter.”

He did not want to go. He wanted to stay with this apparition, decayed as it was, and sleep forever with it in his arms. He wanted to ignore the mortal world and all its problems and mysteries to bury himself and the apparition in ash where none would find him and all prayers were muffled.

But he needed to find Idony. He needed to apologize her. She needed to be reunited with her mother. He promised. He needed… he needed to see her again too.

Liu Xie sat up, sighing deeply before he forced himself back onto his feet. He looked back to the apparition, but there was nothing there. There was no one anywhere except himself. In the distance he could see a tall stele jutting out from the ash, leaning awkwardly to the side. There were structures in the desert. Some buried, some which stood half-devoured on the surface. They could be very small or titanic things that dwarfed even him.

He did not know what they were. He had asked before, and his mother would not answer. He asked Uncle Amber, and he said he could not answer. Only Uncle Jade offered an explanation; fossilized bones.

But never did he say what the bones were of, or why some looked like towers or worn bridges or statues. The stele was one of the few structures he knew the purpose of, acupuncture needles for a monstrous god, and as he got closer it resolved into an ever larger black obelisk with a smooth surface wrapped in thick waxy petaled flowers he could not immediately recognize. Their petals moved slightly as though an unfelt wind rushed over them, a sickly floral scent drifting to him.

The warehouses.

The flowers were the same. His brow furrowed as he wondered why they would be in a place with no life. How had they come to grow upon the stele so thickly, flourishing despite the emptiness around them?

He reached out to the blooms, which unwound themselves abruptly from the stele to meet him. Liu Xie yelled as they wrapped around his arm, thorny vines digging into his skin as he was yanked against the pillar. His arm was held fast as the flowers constricted around it, thorns shredding his flesh away to reveal the wood beneath. The white sands shifted, the wind picking up in his rage as he pulled to no avail. Thick red sap poured downwards, falling into grooves in the stele and pooling at his feet. Ash and sand tumbled through the wind, and as he screamed in anger a distant sound like the groan of a collapsing mountain overwhelmed the howling wind.