Forge of Destiny Threads Chapter 552 Emerald Dreams 2

A step, and the Emerald Dancer lifted off gently from the Emerald Mourner's back, suspended from her slowly strobing parasol in the ashy grey sky.

The mountain rock did not move under her feet nor did the wind blow, but Ling Qi still felt a sense of motion. The liminal world flowed around her, out of the control of her novice steps. She squeezed Sixiang's hand and pushed away the spike of anxiety that came from being utterly without control.

"The summit I championed is proof of what can be accomplished without tyranny or domination," Ling Qi stated. "My voice and Jaromila's voice explained it. Cai Renxiang and the White Sky's interests backed it. The General Xia and the Weeping Sentinel’s presence disallowed the immediate threat of violence. It was not a sovereign law that enforced a change which would ripple across the south of the Emerald Seas, of the Wall, and the frozen foothills beyond."

The sickeningly slick sound of the Nightmare King's flesh dragging across the rocks sent a shiver of disgust up her spine. The spirit circled her and Sixiang, the gap widening to grant her a view of what lay outside their clearing.

High mountain pastures were empty of their herds. Bones and blood coated the fields.

An imperial lord in long, outdated armor proudly held forth a document of treaty. He flickered, and his triumphant smile was now the grimace of a corpse; arrows punched through his armor. The hoof-trampled bodies of his children lay at his feet.

She saw a grim-faced khan, battle-scarred and weary. Both beast and man held above his head a thick torque of fine steel, engraved with the terms of an oath of friendship. The man flickered and became a headless corpse, steel stained with blood. His kin screamed.

More. More. A hundred more scenes flashed in her vision before she pulled her eyes away.

"Not the first. Never the first. Words are wind without power, and twice as fleeting. You think it was not power that forged your conquest by ink?"

In the sky over the burning vales, the shade of a golden dragon who might swallow the Patriarch of the South whole roared, and across the mountains in the south, a one-eyed crow whose wings were the whole of the night sky screeched back. All the world trembled between them.

"A borrowed boot stamps down all the same. Still, you dance with details which do not change the core truth."

"The dragon and the crow are yet beyond me. I cannot change their courses any more than I may push a mountain aside with my bare hands at this level. But Still Waters Deeping proves that a Way does not need to haul the world along by the neck to change it," Ling Qi replied with frustration. "The empire is coming to the Wall. The tribes of the cloud are rallying to strike back at it. Left alone, it would just be another round of conquest by khan or by general, with the line of the borderlands flowing one way or the next for a time. My conquest by ink is using an event that is already happening to enable a different result."

She turned her eyes back to the horrors of the valley. The failures and the fumbles of history stretched before her in all its nauseous ugliness. This time, she forced herself not to look away, to acknowledge what she saw.

"All of these thousand tragic attempts to change something within the wheel that has been turning for countless millennia in the south were isolated and small. Who knows their names, aside from you, whose antlers they hang upon?"

"Some scholars, probably. Meng Dan could probably list off some incidents, but even if you told people about it, these past, individual attempts were not really real to most people," Sixiang supported.

"What I did was make it real. In the next hundred years, who in the Emerald seas will not know of it? If it holds for only that long, who will be able to deny that it purchased a hundred years of peace, small as that may seem to the ancient and the mighty? This success, you will not shake me on, Nightmare King. Impermanence, the possibility of a future ending, never makes what is done in the present without meaning."

The Mourner’s skull loomed high in the sky above her, and the hanging corpses from his branches laughed and laughed, hideous, rasping sounds from choked and broken throats.

“Their sacrifice will be worth it,” they chorused at her.

Ling Qi flinched, but she did not fall back. She didn't dance away and retreat. "It is not possible to accomplish anything in this world without sacrifice. My path, the path of multitude… the step on that route I may take will not reach the end where that is possible, but it may bring it a single step closer."

Ling Qi declared, "Maybe I will hang on those antlers, too, but my efforts will not have been without meaning. The ones who hang there, whose names I do not know, who strove for something different, their lives were not without meaning either."

As she spoke, she felt it as a pressure in her throat, the welling force of her belief straining against the limitations of frail flesh.

Only one End was final. Impermanence did not strip away meaning.

"No one sacrifice will ever save the world forever, but it might carry it one more step forward. And I include myself in that," Ling Qi finished.

The Mourner’s laughter quieted, and so did that of the hanging corpses. It was not a silence of shock or stunned surprise. The sound of broken necks twisting and empty eyes looking at her was almost solemn.

What she saw out of the corner of her eye turned her stomach. Shenglu was burning, the serene lake reflecting the horror of the manor house crumbling in on itself before the reflection was cut by the trails of little boats fleeing out onto the water, chased by sparking bolts. She could see the empty noose hanging from an antler point.

Despite her brave words, it terrified her that this ending was a possibility for her home. Her home had been placed right on the border with the Polar Nations. If relations dissolved into total war, it burn. But she would not, and could not, turn from her path.

"Sacrifice is the bones of the world," the Emerald Dancer spoke up from overhead.

She alighted upon the curved rooftop of a fallen imperial mansion, her poofy pastel gown settling onto broken tile and smoke-stained timbers without a sound. Her long, color-shifting hair whipped in the unseen breeze cast by the wail of countless ghosts. It was like a single blotch of bright paint spattered over a woodblock print.

"To dream is to see something other than what is. All thinking creatures do this, and so, we are born, the dreams and the regrets, the hopes and the fears. We are merry dream and wailing regret, the both of us born from the killing want that shapes the waking world, and yet, dreams alone are free, for all that we are the seed of pain. Here alone, there is no sacrifice. But cultivators cannot only dream; you are cursed to

The Emerald Dancer spun a blackened length of wood between her fingers thoughtfully, and Ling Qi startled when she realized what it was. The dream spirit held the firewood gifted to her by Grydja, the aspect of Ending she had met deep in this realm alongside Xuan Shi.

"Such an ugly, ugly material. What a poor auntie, to give out such hideous gifts." The Dancer sighed, catching it in her palm.

"It was thoughtful, in its way," Ling Qi said.

"And better than ending up in the stewpot," Sixiang quipped.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Perhaps, and yet, I feel the need to improve on it." The Dancer balanced the monstrously heavy stick on the tip of one finger. “I wonder, do you truly even disagree any longer? You have accepted that bones will crunch under your dancing feet, little ones. Why, then, did you defy Our words?"

Sixiang intertwined their fingers with Ling Qi’s. "Because even if one can't avoid exercising power, the way it's exercised matters."

"Naked force is not the same as persuasion or education, nor is it equivalent to changing the foundations on which the current world stands. All of them are exercises in power, and all of them may change the world, but they are not the same. Force may still lie at the core of each, but they are not the same. A sovereign may choose how their Law is expressed. That, too, is a privilege of power," Ling Qi said.

She thought back to her last conversation with Elder Jiao. The raw wound she had glimpsed in him had been the death of his further cultivation. The realization that all that he and the emperor he had sworn himself to had done would not be enough to achieve what they had set out to do had broken him.

"And even an emperor can only turn the wheel by himself, not break or stop it. I'm no different. That is why I reject those words. It is arrogance. I cannot break the cycles of the world and defeat the Forever King, casting him away forever. However, for this one cycle of the endless back and forth? That is within my ability. Maybe war will resume in a new form for new reasons, but it will be the same."

She realized, "I will change the world, but it will still only be one more step on a long, long road."

Ending is absolute. What is built will one day break. Forever and Always are ever but comforting lies. Yet Impermanence does not deny meaning.

That was the truth, her truth, that she had found in contemplating the cold, lightless principle she had first been exposed to at the core of her teacher Zeqing. Her understanding had wavered; she had tempered it, thinking of beginnings and how they flowed from those endings. She had widened her view to find meaning in cycles. However, the foundation had never changed.

It was wrong to cling too tightly to something and hold it in stasis far past its expiration. It was wrong for Hanyi to remain eternally a child, pure and cruel in her innocence. It was wrong to believe that if one arranged the little bricks and numbers just so, one could build a perfect shining eternal edifice out of humanity, which would never break down.

That was where her liege's thoughts at the sect had erred. A cultivator could build better organizations, and they should build better organizations, but the gears would rust in time.

It was an achingly painful insight to accept as a truth, the absolute certainty that one day all she had accomplished would be dust.

There was still meaning in the attempt. For the time—the long time!—in which it would exist, there would be meaning, and the memory of it would linger and inspire the ones who took the next step.

"In the end, I seek something more subversive than merely tyranny, forcing the world to bend to my whims," Ling Qi stated.

She knew there was little difference between speaking aloud and thinking in this place and before this audience.

“To teach, to persuade, to [Communicate] is my Way. That, too, is Sovereign Law: to change the foundational factors that shape future generations' thinking. Future people will act in the ways that advance the Way of Multitudes, not because my boot is on their neck, or my qi twisting their minds, but because they truly believe that the goals I strived for are Right."

The hooves skittered, kicking up dust. The burning villages and encampments before her eyes flowed like water. The open blue sky overhead clouded over and thickened with storms. Sister Brightsong, the Emerald Dancer, hummed a soft song, and chips of black wood fell into the dust under the strokes of the gleaming moonsilver carving knife in her hands.

Her other half, Brother Darksong, the Emerald Mourner, shook his hoary head, and the corpses hanging from his antlers wept into the dust.

"Horrors will flow in your name. To surrender your Law to interpretation is to diffuse it among many. You wish to be a foundation, the bedrock on which others build. Behold. Bask. Glory. You stand upon such now. The Forever King beckons. Dare you seek to be its heir, as the Unity of Blades forged a spiked and bleeding crown for the Other's head?"

Brother Darksong's deep echoing voice was not angry as it had been in the tribulation before the summit. Cold and flat and blunt, it pressed down upon her ears like the tolling of mourning bells.

In the greying, dissolute mist of turning eons, Ling Qi glimpsed a different vision than the burning valleys. She saw a place of seeming peace, of quiet, neatly organized villages and checkpoints and systems. Two great behemoths had squeezed out all between them, and only cold bones told the tale of what had lain there before. It was a place where swords were sheathed because words and paper reaped lives like so much wheat, and even a voice raised in anger was a terrible taboo. It was a possibility, a dream of what could be, no matter how sad. She hated it less than the burning vales, but she did not accept that it was the only outcome.

"If I were to truly become the King's heir, then another will have to topple my throne in turn," Ling Qi argued. "The wheel of the world turns, and I am not the one to stop or break it before its time. The dreaming way is not for me. I cannot end suffering, or even imagine what an existence without it would look like. It is beyond me. I want too much."

"The world's too messy and beautiful for me to like any of that transcendence talk. Isn't that just going back the way I came, but more?" Sixiang wondered.

"It is. I can't give up my Want, no matter how much it may hurt me. It is core to too much, and it is why I treasure my family and the clan I have built. I may discard many parts of me, but never that. I will not be alone again, while I remain myself."

Maybe someday, at the very pinnacle of cultivation, she would be, but at that point, she would just have to ascend, wouldn't she? She’d write her law into the world and reach end.

Sixiang's grandmother peered down at her, not unkindly. The spirit sat down atop the eerily clean temple gate of a compound, overlooking a too neat village built on foundations of bones and blood. Her parasol blew idly in the wind, circling her like a bird. The moonsilver knife in her hands flicked and flicked, shaving away minute chips of the black wood.

"We are past the point of questioning sincerity. If you speak these words in this place, under my eyes, they are in your heart. Cultivation discards, trims, and grinds away until only the perfected core remains. The first thing every aspiring wielder of Law discards is the fear of death. Fear of failure remains, and mayhaps, fear of loss, but there is nothing more mortal than the fear of mortality. This is the shackle, the safety that so few can truly discard."

"It is the shackle that shatters the limbs of those who try to force the climb to wielding Law regardless. It is the irony and cruelty of cultivation that those who may attain all of those years can no longer treasure them for what they are."

Brother Darksong's echoing rumble completed her statement.

"And yet, I may still treasure their contents, even if the years in and of themselves do not matter," Ling Qi said slowly.

She would have to be careful with every day and every year, understanding what exactly she was trimming away in forming her Name and shaping her Law.

She understood her friends and her mother had been upset with her choices. There was a disconnect there, wasn't there? She understood it in her mind, but not in her heart. A spirit of destruction spoke in violence; that was simply how one had to negotiate with it. To do otherwise was like trying to communicate with a human with a dog's barks.

That crack in understanding would remain and widen in her mother's case, but she hoped her friends would cross it. Bai Meizhen, Cai Renxiang… They probably would, she thought. The others, she hoped. She wanted her road to be full of friends for as long as possible.

The vision of the conquered Wall was fading, replaced again by the snowy forest under the too-large moon. Ling Qi saw deeper now, though. In the Emerald Seas, it was a tradition to either be buried among the roots of a tree or to have one planted over one’s grave. It was a luxury in the city she had been born in, but there were grave groves where the priests did their best to put the dead to rest, even if their best was never quite good enough.

"We really were tap dancing all over your head before, weren't we, Gramps?" Sixiang said wryly, looking out over the graveyard forest. They hugged Ling Qi from the side, no doubt feeling her thoughts, those lingering fears, clearly. "I am sorry for the headaches. You're still an incredible asshole for what you tried to make me do."

"Better you break than twist. Your avoidance had no other outcome."

Sixiang's expression screwed up in frustration and anger, but they didn't refute the elder nightmare’s words.

Ling Qi eased herself from Sixiang’s embrace and spoke again. "Even as my heart grows strange, I will continue to understand. That is the bedrock of my communication. Even if two minds are as different as can be, understanding is still possible. Just as I can never discard the frozen heart of isolation that made me what I was at the beginning of my journey, so, too, is this voice of mine the frame that is built upon that foundation." She looked up at Brother Darksong, who looked back with empty sockets, their eerie flame barely a spark. "I say it again. I will not shy from my violence nor from the coercion inherent to power, but still, I reject your framing, Grandfather of Nightmares."

"Then speak it clearly, Disciple. You aspire to bear the Sovereignty of Communication. What is its meaning in your soul?"