Forge of Destiny Threads Patron preview Chapter 520-Deep Fire 1

As the sun dipped low, casting twilight hues across the sky, they returned to the Boiling Deeps Shrine. The air, still shimmering with geyser mist, felt thick with humidity. Zhengui was already there on the slope, his legs drawn in, head partially retracted into his shell. Coiled atop it, Zhen remained in deep meditation.

Zhen's forked tongue flicked out, trailing ash, as they drew closer. "Sister," he greeted.

"Zhen, are you both prepared for our journey?" Ling Qi inquired, stepping aside from Meng Duyi. He lingered in the temple's shadow, his role limited to observation.

Gui fully extended his head, his bright green eyes blinking. "Yes! Gui is ready and will carry Zhen wherever he needs to go."

"You had better be! Steady Gui must support the great Zhen as he compels this stinking fiery gas to heed his words!"

Ling Qi let out a snort. "Zhen, please maintain better manners when we descend."

"Gui believes he is merely purging himself for now."

"I, Zhen, speak only the truth, but I shall be magnanimous during negotiations," he declared, tilting his snout back with a proud flick of his tongue.

Placing a hand on Zhen's head, Ling Qi led them into the shrine's interior, towards the geyser's edge where the subterranean bubbling could be heard.

They plunged in.

Navigating the liminal space while guiding their descent felt peculiar. Roaring geysers and boiling water enveloped them, while beyond, fragments of stone and metal swirled like fiery, animated mosaics.

Spiraling ever downward, Ling Qi found herself once more atop Zhengui's shell. He retracted his legs, allowing her to guide his movements through the swirling chaos. She mused that Xuan Shi would have appreciated this; within this dreamscape, riding Zhengui felt akin to steering a vessel.

"I, Zhen, sense the veils. This way, Sister," her younger brother's serpentine form coiled protectively around her shoulders. Following the subtle movements of his tongue towards a specific tendril of blue-white flame, she gently guided them toward it, entering the winding passage that unfolded before them.

"You have meditated on this for a considerable time, little brother. Can you elaborate on this spirit? Be serious now," Ling Qi requested.

They glided past writhing metallic flames, surrounded by the effervescent bubbles within the boiling water of the earthvein's liminal imprint. Numerous illusory paths presented themselves, branches and lines leading to dead ends or diverging into other spiritual courts, from the frozen pyres of the Thunderhoof atop the cliffs to Snowblossom herself, or the distant crackle emanating from the mountain of the dragon horses.

"Gui senses that this fiery entity is quite sleepy, but that is because it is also of the earth."

"A vortex of flame, captured when the stone grew still and dormant. It would slumber eternally if not for the heavens disturbing it," Zhen elaborated, his snout angled downwards. "If I did not disturb it."

"We," Ling Qi corrected gently. "I asked you to oversee and develop the veils, little brother. We both pierced the veil here."

"I, Zhen, do not regret this. The land was cold and unforgiving. Flame brings renewal. What precedes fades, and from the ashes, new life emerges," he proclaimed with haughty conviction. "Still..."

"It is simple to declare such sentiments, but harder to implement them within a place you cherish. You desire some measure of control over what perishes and what is reborn. You are no wildfire, just as I am no blizzard," Ling Qi stated observantly.

The ambient temperature began to climb. Ling Qi could feel her Qi stirring uncomfortably, a core of coldness within her rising, instinctively straining against the control she exerted over her Qi within the dream. Beads of sweat formed on her brow – an unfamiliar sensation.

Zhengui's shell scraped against the metallic flames as they transformed, shifting from granular and liquid to a more solid state. White-hot fragments of ore and stone yielded under his weight as Gui carefully regained his footing. Beneath them, the entire 'ground' shifted and stretched like yielding sand. He began to trundle forward through the ruddy-lit passage, bubbles escaping his mouth as he spoke.

"Gui believes some things are destined to burn, while others are not. The needle-like trees will not be renewed if scorched; they will simply perish. The peculiar grasses on the hillside will scatter if they burn, and they will regrow, but they will also consume all the soil's nutrients, choking out other grasses and flowers. When life emerges, it is because that which existed before has ceased to be."

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"This spirit is a wildfire, disturbed. Heaven drives him mad, he who has slept so long. The air makes his flame burn bright and will make his flame burn out. He is not like Zhen. He will make a field of ash and a sinking pit when his throne caves in, and he will die, and that will be that," Zhen said, returning to answering her question. "He will not be sad for this result, because it is his nature."

Spirits did not always regard their endings with fear, as mortals did. It wouldn't be so simple as offering the spirit a way to burn without dying, although that might be part of taming it. That concept would almost certainly be a part of shaping him into a spirit they could coexist with, if that was what they wanted to do.

At this point, she did not know enough to determine if that would be possible.

"What do you want to do here, little brother?" Ling Qi asked.

Coincidentally, they were coming up to a split in the path. Or rather, seeing as the liminal was reflecting the thoughts and nature of their discussion, it wasn’t as coincidental as it seemed.

"I, Zhen, wish to find a way for this spirit to expend himself, which paves the way for growth, rather than unmaking my kingdom," her little brother answered, boiling bubbles emerging around the flicked forks of his tongue.

Ling Qi grimaced. "I understand. I dislike the feel of it though, destroying a spirit just because our infringement on its domain has caused this reaction."

It felt wrong.

Gui tilted his head. "But he wants to explode? This is what he has whispered to Gui."

"He yearns for and exalts in the wrath of the moment of destruction. Before we came, the earth crushed him, and so, he slept in cold stone, unable to spark. He is awake now, and has fed, and so, he wishes to burn," Zhen explained. "I thought to find a way to bend him to change him and make him my courtier, but I, Zhen, do not think this is good. No. Better to let the spirit of the fires do as he wills, where it cannot harm what is mine. It is not good to chain all destruction, to prevent endings, just because."

Her usually bombastic and haughty little brother was surprisingly thoughtful and somber. The glittery chips of superheated stone and metal crunched and sank beneath their tread as they passed down the hotter of the tunnels, and in the distance, Ling Qi saw dancing light and heard, down in her bones, a pounding beat like a thousand, thousand drums.

"Refusing endings is another form of stagnation, I suppose," Ling Qi acknowledged.

Preservation had been her goal in ways large and small recently. The severing had fallen from her thoughts.

"Like the corpse-scribbler. It should have died and didn’t. will only go rotten," Gui said.

The tunnel rumbled, the stone chips churned, and a roaring tongue of flame erupted. Writhing roots sprang up, blackening into dust in moments, but eating the heat of the flame so that only a few scattered bubbles of heat reached them. The boiling waters sizzled across her skin as they advanced, but her own inner chill meant it was only a slight discomfort.

"I worry about making the decision of when something should end," Ling Qi mused. “It is obvious in the heat of battle, or when it is as obvious as a rotting corpse, still shambling about, but in other circumstances, it is not clear."

It was not a choice that sat happily with her to end another's choices forever.

"I, Zhen, see. Zhen, too, is worried he will break something with too much haste when the recording of our domain is done, but it is impossible to expand without breaking other domains. Without the fire, there would only be old, dead things crushing new shoots forever. So, Zhen must be wise. Big Sister must be wise. Who else will be wise for us?"

"Teacher Far Walker is wise for us," Gui rebutted brightly, referring to Meng Duyi.

"Zhen was making a rhetorical point, foolish Gui!"

She sighed, allowing herself a small smile. Ling Qi joked wryly, "If it's what the fire spirit wants, at least it shouldn't be hard to convince him."

"Gui appreciates Big Sister's positivity," Gui said cheerfully.

Yes, she supposed so. A spirit of raging, explosive fires would likely not take kindly to being told where to burn any more than it would take being told not to burn at all.

But Meng Duyi had given her some pointers and ideas of how to sing, how to feel, how to shape.

"You have the full breadth of the earthveins in mind, little brother?" Ling Qi asked.

"Of course. Zhengui knows them like his own scales."

The fiery tunnel turned, plunging directly downward into the boiling depths of the earth, and they descended again.

It was no longer enough to rely on the ice flowing through her channels by the time they reached a stable place to stand. The soft hymn of the spirit seekers rose in the back of her throat, shielding her from the searing sparks and roaring heat.

The lingering darkness departed, yielding to a lurid orange and red expanse. The very ground resembled thick mud, yet it was fashioned from molten stone, clinging to her boots with every laborious step she took.

Zhengui fared worse, submerged up to his neck in the fiery mire. His short, stout legs struggled, churning the magma to propel him forward. Rootlets sprouted and vanished instantly, aiding his passage. Scattered across this sea of lava were solid islands of metal and hardened rock, serving as their beacons. As a closer approach was made, the dancing flames coating every surface began to appear more sentient, with eyes crafted from flickering tongues of fire observing their movement.

Towering ahead was a colossal gate of simmering stone, encased within an intricate framework of shimmering, partially liquefied metal. A gaping fissure marred its surface, threatening to cleave one of the doors entirely in two. Their objective was within reach. A symphony of hissing flames erupted as they drew nearer to the gateway, coalescing into ephemeral specters. She perceived visages, limbs, and the faint outline of a form clinging to a skeletal structure of incandescent mica.

"Kiiiindling. Kindling, you who arrive at the court of infernal fires yet remain unconsumed. You defy the blaze! Who dares, who dares trespass in this domain?"