Chapter Text
Xie Lian laid down in the soil, blood soaking through his robes and into the dirt. His eyes were glossy, his hair was messy, and he wasn’t sure how he got here or where here was. All he knew as pain, the empty, the lonely, and how water clung to him even though he hadn’t been near the sea in forever. Salt clung to his lashes. The cicadas buzzed in the trees. Would someone place one on his tongue? To pray for his rebirth? He breathed, groggy and bloody, and the red drowned out his taste buds and dropped from his mouth into the soil in thick clumps.
He didn’t move again for some time.
(White flowers grew from his wounds, the earth, and past his skin.)
—
Hands held him in figments, just fractures of time, and he dreamed as much as the flowers bloomed. He wished they were real hands. He wished they were kind.
—
There was a figure in white standing in the field of his vision.
There was also a sword in the figure’s hand, as dark as black jade, as shiny as Fang Xin once was. Xie Lian could barely see it, gargling on blood, eyes half-open, but the blade was clean, unsheathed, and he could almost hear it say hello.
(Xie Lian knew what came next, the same way people knew the sun would rise the next morning.)
—
Someone was cradling his head, and the ground was as cold as him, and there was a sword in his neck and he was choking on blood, but it was the most gentle death.
It was the most awful, most gentle death.
Xie Lian’s hands clawed at the dirt, and he was choking, he was choking, and it was an all-over feeling, from his hands to his eyes to the tips of his ears to every hair on his body. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t really do much of anything, like this, and he was bleeding, and it was everywhere, and yet the hands holding him were terribly gentle. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know how. He coudont speak—a blade pressed through tender and malleable flesh, pink and red, pale and no longer smooth, and the bands that shackled him to an immortal but not invulnerable life were constricting his airways. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe.
His hands twisted again, a few times, and his fingers slammed and he was trying to get the air into his lungs. He couldn’t. He didn’t know why he couldn’t.
“Hurts,” Xie Lian choked, and it was all he could say, all he could say.
The air left his lungs.
His hands couldn’t keep clawing at the dirt.
“Shh,” Someone murmured, and they brushed his hair from his face, and Xie Lian didn’t know what or why, or how, or even when, because he couldn’t see the sky and no one would ever see him again. “There,” they murmured, low and calm, as if soothing a petulant child that had finally stopped throwing a tantrum. “It’s alright, it’ll pass.”
He wanted to say it hurts and please stop and please but the only thing that left his throat was a long and awful sound, an awfully small sound to match an awfully small death.
It was barely a noise at all.
His vision wasn’t clear, and there was a blade piercing his throat, holding him down into the mud, and someone was cradling the rest of him like he was a fragile doll.
The stranger murmured something, and branches creaked in the forest, and the wind tickled Xie Lian’s forehead. He didn’t know. But they tucked hair behind his ears. “Don’t cry,” they said, and they sounded faraway even though their warmth was right under Xie Lian’s head, as if they were holding him, not just sitting next to him in the mud.
He was laying down somewhere, and the sky was high above—not that he could see it, just that he knew, innately that this was up and below his skin and tattered robes was down—and someone was cradling him, as if nature overrode the instinct to let someone strange and insane die. Xie Lian was strange and insane, and was currently bleeding into the earth, choking on air and blood, and maybe vomit, and currently feeling many parts of him start breaking and holding steady due to an immortal curse that wrapped around his neck. The shackle on his ankle most likely led him to this death. Bad luck. It was his thing.
Xie Lian choked on another plea, but he couldn’t even make a breathless sound.
The someone cradled him, gentle, like a parent holding their child in their last moments. Like he was precious. Xie Lian hadn’t been precious in so long.
(Who was Xie Lian—)
“There,” They murmured, and they held him, and they were warm, and the ground was freezing and Xie Lian had lost enough blood enough times to know that this was the part he closed his eyes and came back, hours or days later, beareky healed but somehow without any scars. This was the part he cried and died and came back.
Something was splintering around his neck.
He felt like—
(—my shackle! My shackle! My shackle! My shackle!)
“Help,” He choked, and it was blood and vomit, and he was drowning.
The person just helped him lull his head to the side so he could heave into the mud and grass. They were blurry. Their robes were white, streamed by red blood and brown soil. “You’re all better,” they said, and they ran their fingers over his face, his cheek, his jaw, and then settled there like it would be a kindness to hold him safely. “Shh, shh, shh.”
Their hands were warm.
Xie Lian felt like he was moving between rocks and trees, as if his skin could melt off his bones, as if agony was no different from the mundane pieces of life; discolored, misrepresents, intertwined with the good and the bad, the free and the caged, the healthy and the sick.
(He could be all of it.)
But the person cradled him, and shushed him, and was so gentle.
There was a sword in his neck.
(His neck was constricted by blood, not by power, and there was a moment where he felt something break, really break, and it snapped and twisted and it was a sharp current. It was lightning, it was a god’s qi, it was a taste of salvation, it was freedom piling up and splitting him open from his dantian to his meridians, hundreds of years in suppression, and now he could feel it, feel it, feel it—)
Something had fractured his shackles, and he didn’t know, he didn’t know, but it severed and it cut and he gargled on blood, bubbles popping, and his eyes were wide and he could hear someone shushing him, over and over, gently.
“Shh, shh, shh,” The person was whispering, so soothing, so cruelly, and they pushed the sword down, down, down, down. “Shh, Xianle, shh.”
(Kingdom—)
And it caged him to the earth, and the hilt rocked against his skin, and he wanted to die, and he felt it, and he was bleeding, and there was salt on his lips and in his mouth and he wasn’t even sure when he went to the sea, when the sea came to him.
(—no kingdoms, no gods, no people, no lost loves.)
“Shh, shh, shh,” They silence his cries, his incomprehensible noises that were barely noises at all. “Don’t cry. It’s done, Xianle, it’s done.” Their hand was warm. It curved down his face to his throat, to where the sword was embedded, and it pressed down until Xie Lian made this awful, awful, awful noise—
No shackle, no shackle, but there was a splinter and Xie Lian was the trunk and he was losing pieces and time and blood and mind and suddenly, suddenly, it was just quiet.
There was so much blood.
(Don’t cry, it’s done. It’s over. It’ll pass.)
What passed?
—
His body was a pathetic thing.
—
But pain always resided. Xianle just had to be patient, and he would feel better soon.
—
Oh, but what a pathetic thing.
He ripped the flowers out of His body and set it ablaze, unknowing, unheard of. It smelled like ash and death and nectar. It took him so long to understand that He smelled like ash and death and nectar.
(Not now.)
And it was odd, to see it, to see himself outside of Him, a shell, a dead god. There was a sword buried between His neck and the mud, the hilt rammed close to bloodied skin, and he could only stare as flames began licking at His corpse. Because when you died, outside your body, a corpse was all that you could identify. An indication you used to be there. An indication that Xianle was once Him, once there, once present.
He stared at the sword.
He stared at it, glimmering and glinting, and he couldn’t recall—
Xianle reached forwards, flames licking at his body and His corpse simultaneously, and grasped the hilt of the sword. Its blade was buried in the mud-turning ash, and all Xianle could do was wrench it free with perfect apathy.
There was a sickening sound, and the fires crackled, and he was wasting so much spiritual energy by hoisting the sword out of the ground, but he was looking, and He was dead, and the gods would never know, and the people would never know, and He would never know, and the blade in Xianle’s hand looked so similar to the weapon that once pierced him hundreds of times in a temple, on an altar, laid down. It looked like Fang Xin. It looked like the sword that killed His only follower. It looked like the sword that killed Lang Qianqiu’s father. It looked like the sword that Xianle wanted.
—
He took the—
—
An all consuming rage, the wrath of a lifetime.
There was no time.
Or, the concept of time was lost to ghosts. Days flew by. Xie Lian hated his body and hated His once-body, everything that came from Him was a bad thing, messed and cursed by the useless shackle on His ankle. Xie Lian wouldn’t have done it. He swore, truly, that he would never have asked for something so—
His legs kept buckling under him, and he hated it, hated it all. He had drowned, once. He had fought in a war he did not want to be part of, had fed two children and died before making sure they could maintain themselves.
Where had he been?
After the coffin? After the massacre?
(There had been flashes, in his mind, when he had been buried alive. There had been moments. He had seen his parents. He had seen the banquets and the palaces and the fields of refugees and the people who screamed and cried and killed him. He had seen the faces of people he could not name, could not speak of. He had seen them walk away, asked or told, and he had dreamt of their return, their wrath. He had seen things in flashes, bright colors and dull voices and ink splashed over every identifiable and unique facial feature; beauty going stagnant, a spiral, a flattening plateau. He had seen and dreamed and recalled so many things, trapped and suffocating for so long. And then—)
How long had he spent in a coffin?
How long had his pupil left him in there?
How long had it taken before Xie Lian pried the lids off, left behind and ajar due to useless grave robbers?
How long had he dreamt of life?
How long had he haunted by flecks of color, by silences, by strewn fabrics and a mask against his skin that weighed heavy, that kept his lips open, that let him struggle for air within a confined and dark prison?
Here was his grave: a tomb in Yong’An, a place where he fell ill, a place where he stood no chance, a place where death corroded him into a shell, where he was staked and held down, where he was jostled into action after robbers came and found nothing to take. Somewhere in the outskirts. Somewhere beyond the villages and cities and prosperous farmlands, even in drought, even in the tough soil. He had been layered and buried and mounded, and someone had tried to break in and steal, anyways, and he had been—
(I didn’t mean to kill you, I didn’t mean to hurt you like this, I never meant to, I never would have done so, I never would have, I didn’t want to, oh, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t, I swear that if there had been a way to spare your father and my people I would have done it, I would have, I didn’t mean to kill you, I didn’t mean to pierce you like this.)
Xie Lian was angry.
He was so angry, so angry—
There was a sword in the mud, a sword. It wasn’t his sword. He hadn’t had any swords in a long, long time.
It had been years. Decades. He had fought in a war, tries to be a peacemaker, and had been trampled to death while covering for a small girl. Trying to hide her from onslaught, from anger, from the very hatred he had tried to dismantle within himself. But murder and death and war took its toll, and being trampled to death and thrown into a river, alongside actual dead men, would ruin anyone’s memories for a while.
No swords, though.
Xie Lian hadn’t felt like this in a long time. He couldn’t even say he felt like this in the moments his kingdom fell, even when he put a mask on and began planning the slaughter of Yong’An.
But he stood, staring at ash and mud and nature, and a sword stared back at him, and it was so heavy with loneliness and hate and grief and I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you that he couldn’t handle it, couldn’t tear himself away from what called to him.
(When the memories climbed, when he climbed, when he wore a mask that matched White No-Face’s. When he was a calamity. When he nearly wiped an entire nation, new and freshly liberated as it was, off of the world’s surface. Of the plains, the skies, the greens, the rivers that wound themselves under and between his feet. Xie Lian struggled to remember who he was. He struggled to remember what he wore—white, pale, mourning. Someone had been with him. It hadn’t been Feng Xin or Mu Qing. It had been someone else wearing a smiling mask, obeying him, serving him, and Xie Lian had failed to—)
—it could be his, maybe. Or it had been His, before, a long time ago.
Xie Lian stared.
—
He took the blade.
—
Two thoughts entered his mind, swarming him from all sides. Sharp and terrible, as the blade in his hands shook, and he stared at it, and he heard the distant cries of the village that had previously kicked him out, had taken him, had killed him, had nearly—
(There were two thoughts in his mind, and they shook and shook, and he shook and shook, and he held the hilt and thought.)
One being kill yourself.
And the second, more dangerous, more terrible thought: kill them.
—
There was blood in his mouth and he couldn’t see behind his shadows, his body, his empty hands. The Fang Xin sword lay in the dirt, beneath his feet, and it radiated with murderous intent, deep and lonely, and Xianle couldn’t bring himself to pick it up yet. There were cries. Sounds from the trees that burned, now sleek with fire, and cries from goats that had been cut loose from their pens. Cries from people, who were running,who were not dead but may die if they stayed here, where a ghost now waited, where a ghost spat and heaved and breathed and took in air that was unneeded, unwanted—habit, ritual—and he stood, and the sword that killed him was at his feet, and there was a man in front of him in rich robes, strong, and Xianle wasn’t a kingdom or a god, merely a soul, and his soul was lost.
(—in paradise.)
Xianle was dead.
That meant Xie Lian was dead, too, standing upright with white robes dyed a frazzled wine color, splotchy and wrong.
“What’s wrong?” Xie Lian murmured, and there was an angry fire boistering itself next to him. He didn’t know any better. He didn’t. Maybe it was his fire, maybe it was a god’s, maybe it was no one’s.
It could be fire.
It could be death, it could be nothing, it could be nothing at all.
There was a man in front of him. Black and yellow robes, and a strange face—the details were lost. Sharp brows, a sharp jaw. An angular but thin face, as if hunger had haunted, as if something had gauged—but he had a shovel, and there was blood on his head, too, and this place was a fire’s wet dream. The trees were burning, the grass was turning red and orange, the sun was crinkling, and Xie Lian was staring at a stranger he radiated power.
“Are you alright?” He asked, low, and his belly was empty and he could feel parts and pieces move within his gut. Twist, coming undone, the way his skin peeled apart and his hands grasped his shoulders and ribs, how he tried to hold himself together.
The man was looking at him. His eyes were terribly dark, is hair was sticking to the blood on the side of his face.
He gripped the shovel with white-knuckles, ordained robes.
Xie Lian was stuck in the earth, trapped, mud and rocks piled up to his knees, trapped indefinitely. He should be mad. He should be mad at this, Asterin some stranger—some weak, young god trapping him. (He wasn’t mad. He didn’t have any reason to be mad.) He squinted. His hair was in his face, and his shadow was dancing with the flames, and this village was long dead—and the fires were red and burning orange, turning yellow, turning a sickly bright green.
Here was his grave, his wish, his plea: Lord Earth Master, the dead god breathed out, connecting the sluggish dots of godhood and ascending figures, I beg of you, put me under the mountain, I beg of you, please, this one begs.
There was a long, long moment.
Xie Lian waited, and his body felt so cold. He was so cold, so hungry, so angry, and so lonely.
Someone had stabbed him to death, and he didn’t feel grounded, and his own spiritual energy was leaking out of his throat and dripping down his cold skin, over and down between his robes. It was plastering to his sternum, to his concave belly, to his frayed inner robes, to the skirts, to the waistline of his pants. Spiritual energy dripped, dripped, dripped, and it fell between his teeth and tongue, pooled under his limbs and under his feet in the mud.
“Please,” Xie Lian rasped, and he stood perfectly still, his muscles and qi contracting into something smaller, less mean, less awful. “Please.”
This must be the new Earth Master.
(How many gods had ascended, since Xie Lian was a god? How long had it been? How long had it been since someone saw him, knew him? How had the heavens fared all these years? How long? How?)
“Don’t say it,” he begged, again, and he lowered his eyes, lowered himself. The earth started crumbling away, and he pulled himself out, because it was so easy—he had so much energy, so much power, he could escape—and the Earth Master took one step back, eyes hard, face uncontrolled, but Xie Lian stumbled, took one step forwards to match, and then he fell to his knees, plastered his hands into the dirt—fires burned next and around him—and he pleaded, tried to please a god he did not know. “Please, Lord Earth Master,” the ghost rasped. “Please.”
His head was touching the earth, and he could feel energy, and he could taste it in his mouth and taste it in the air.
The sword below him, blade in the muck, pressed against his bobbing throat at this angle.It thundered, he thundered, and there was a sharp tugging that made him plaster himself further, energy leaking out of his mouth and nose, like blood, like spit, like sickness. He could hear the heartbeat of the Earth Master, standing several feet away, holding a spiritual weapon, waiting—
“What do you need?” The Earth Master asked him, and he didn’t move, and Xie Lian was kneeling in the mud and trying to convey a necessary choice, the next act, an event that must occur.
Bury me, he wanted to say, couldn’t get the words out. Take me under the ground and put me away. Bury me. Hide me. Covert me.
He was not a god. He was not a prince. He was not a mortal. Xie Lian was dead, and he was angry, and fire and flowers licked at the ground he walked, and he was burning a village to nothing, and he was so angry he couldn’t think, and he was desperate, and there was a god standing in front of him—a master of earth, someone who could put him under, keep him under cold rock, make him less of a threat, take his energy, put him back, put him back—
(—it was necessary, all of it was necessary, and he was so lonely and so tired and he was angry and the people were terrible, and He couldn’t save any of them so why could he?)
“Bury me,” Xie Lian finally choked, into the mud and dirt, and he heard a tree crack and split. The wood burned and charred and dried out, crackling. The village was dead and ashen. “This one asks you to bury him.”
And he couldn’t see the response, the face, the expression of denial or agreement, but he felt—
—
Xie Lian didn’t leave the mountain again.
—
He was cold.
The mountain, of course, was colder.
(Terrible skin-split, his hands over his face, clawing at his eyes. The flesh felt leathery, not smooth enough, not soft enough. It was crumbling under the burden. He couldn’t see it. He was splitting it, nails hooking under scabs, blood swelling against his lips. He dug in. He dug out.)
There was soil above him and all around. Stone and dirt and the breaths he expelled, however fruitless they were. There was no light. It was almost like being buried alive, without the alive part. There was an array under him, painted into smooth marble. He could feel the energy thrum under his heels, his malleable body—translucent, weak-willed, the twisting of a spine as he floundered without his vision. Ghostly, gone, long gone. Under a mountain, in an array, thinking and splitting and spitting blood. He was waiting under a mountain, in a timely manner—patience was a virtue—and the air was crisp despite its earthy tang. Copper and coal and soil and chill, so much of it.
There was frost under him, and he was shivering despite how his arms wrapped around his body. They contorted at bad angles, tension spilling from his mouth. He wasn’t slack-jawed.
He wasn’t sure what he was.
—
“Poor god,” The voice demurred, condescendingly, “Your Highness thought being buried alive would make him feel better? Is that it?”
He didn’t reply, but—
“Will it make him feel better? Make the guilt and grief go away after you failed to do what you promised you would?” A hand brushed his hair away from his head, and he trembled, and he wanted someone to keep him safe. He didn’t know who. He didn’t know who he was, either. “Would it make the soldier feel better, do you think?” The voice was not kind, not kind. “Dying like that, truly, isn’t it something Your Highness could’ve spared him from?”
“Please,” He closed his eyes, and he was cold, and he was shaking, and he didn’t want to think about these things. Thinking about these things made him upset. Made him unreasonable and angry. “Please,” he repeated, sourly, brokenly. “Don’t, please, don’t.”
“Poor god,” The voice mocked, again, but finally fell silent.
—
One of Xie Lian’s favorite memories to relive was one where he woke up in his bedroom, scattered clothes, with Mu Qing muttering about something under his breath as he looked for the proper jewelry Xie Lian was meant to wear, and Feng Xin awkwardly sifting for whatever Mu Qing demanded he look for.
A memory like that was treasured, however foreign it felt.
A different memory, but no less warm—no less warm, he said, because it was cradled deep in his chest as the size of a peach pit—was a young boy holding his own ground and trying to keep a temple, trying to keep it, because it had been Xie Lian’s temple. A golden glow, something warm, something true. To be held, to be known, to be cradled. Even in death, it might be nice. It might be kind. The world could be cruel, fearsome, and trembling, but so could Xie Lian, and he could crack, and he could break under that weight, and so could everyone else. The child who promised not to forget, they promised—
The god forgot, sometimes, and felt guilty each time the memories flooded back.
It was like his limb had its circulation cut, twisted and held down until it buzzed and throbbed like pins and needles puncturing all over. It was like it couldn’t come back to its senses for days. It was like he wasn’t him anymore.
(He hadn’t been Him for a long, long, long time.)
There were memories. There were many, many memories. And he held them all with his hands and his dead heart and his teeth. He bit them, ate them, kept them in his unsatisfied stomach. He was not full. He was not content. He was lost and ill and in the dark, and he had begged someone to bury him, and he was buried, and he was alone, and he didn’t know when it would end or if it ever would.
Xie Lian liked looking back on memories. He liked seeing the things he once was, once understood.
If he tried hard enough, truly tried, he wasn’t as upset about losing those things as he once was. (Once.) Because he would see blurry faces, hear voices underwater, and would understand that those things had passed, and so had He, and neither items of interest would ever return as they used to be.
The irrational anger of death was still hard to shake, even underground without anything to make him so hateful.
—
The mountain was cold. Or maybe it was warm.
Xie Lian stared at his arm—his pieces—and couldn’t look away and there was blood and there was old bone, fragile bone, and he needed it gone. He couldn’t see it correctly in the dark. It didn’t make sense in the dark, in a mountain, buried by a master, but he needed it gone.
Fire might work. He didn’t remember.
(Fire, he had chanted, and he had seethed, and there had been this awful feeling in his belly that soared. The forest had been quiet. The mountain had been quiet and lonesome, and the cicadas had buzzed before staggering to a halt, and Xie Lian had toppled onto His body, and he had snapped at the ribs—His ribs, His skin, His rotting flesh, His old home—and there had been a blaze of spiritual energy, and it had flashed and flooded the area. White flowers turned to ash, and he had smelled rot and death and dew and nectar, smelled the char, smelled the way He used to be.)
But he could only burn so much.
His hands weren’t whole. His thumbs wouldn’t move. He dug into the dirt with his palms, nails caked, and waded through long grass that wrapped their bladed leaves across his legs, his raw-rubbed ankles. His robes were skewed, off-center, and they dipped low and frayed at the hems. The threads were breaking. He couldn’t quite fix any of it—he had never been a mender. That hadn’t been his thing.
He had never been good at it. It had always been—
(Who was that other person?)
The name slipped from his fingers. Xie Lian blinked.
The ceiling above him was dark. He wasn’t sure if he was cold or warm. His hands were translucent. There was a low, heady feeling rumbling throughout him. He felt dead. (Wasn’t he?) Something had splintered and his head stung terribly—like something had poked him with a bee stinger, or sea salt had been rubbed into the tenderness behind his ears—but he wasn’t sure if it mattered. Hurting and stinging weren’t the same. Xie Lian preferred the sting.
It was easier. A lot of things were easier.
Stinging, burning, the recoil of when he stumbled down a hill and tripped and cracked his head and felt something jostle, over and over, twist, it was an uncomfortable twist—
He had wandered like that, stumbling along. It had felt like mud and water under his feet, even when there was no salt in the air. He hadn’t been able to hear seabirds, ships, or human clamor. He had barely heard the world around him. He had barely heard anything besides his own thrumming mind, the thoughts that crashed together, over and over, beginning to bend themselves out of shape.
Over and over and over.
Xie Lian’s eyes had been wide open, and the ground had been waiting and mostly solid, and he had picked himself up and stared at all the blood left behind. It had been a dark color, and hadn’t sprayed the was mortal blood would have.
It had coated his head.
It had coated his hands and neck.
It had been swallowed up by his open mouth, teeth aching, body breaking.
(Fire, he had chanted, and had burned His body to ash. Fire, he had snarled, and he had watched Him burn and turn to nothing, old dust, old things, hundreds of years undone by a white-clothed man and a sword that lay in the dirt, through His neck, pressed into the wet soil and half-dead grass. Fire, he had yelled, breaking for it, wanting it more than anything, and watching it consume Him and the ground and the nearby trees until blackness was all that remained; a thick cloak of resentment, of scattered spiritual energy, of splitting howls.)
But there was a ceiling of rock above him, and walls all around him that curved and structured.
It was not a tomb.
It was not exactly a prison, either, much to any onlooker’s disbelief. Not that anyone would find it, as Xie Lian was buried far from any villages, and farther from any surface of light and true oxygen.
He blinked sluggishly, and paced, and rocked, and rattled about like a spiritual sword in a locked sheathe.
There was an array below him, carved into the floor of the room. It wasn’t inherently mean, Xie Lian remembered—or even cruel. It was a strategic array, if anything, and easy on the eyes. If there was light, he would be able to see what it looked like. Instead, he settled for mopping the shapes and characters out with his fingertips. He felt so numb, so odd, but he could trace the engravings and piece together what the array’s purpose was. He forgot, sometimes. When the mental fog override his ability to think, to intake air—what ghost needed air? But he could think, hear it, scream and his voice would carry, and it would tremble and the walls would shake but never fall, and he would go quiet again after a few days of this. Or perhaps it was longer—there was no way to tell.
He was exceptionally angry, restless, but he didn’t feel mean or bad, he just felt lost. There was no mud under his feet here. Only smooth stone, an array, and airflow from several small nooks and gaps—parts that led upwards, surely.
If he focused, he could put spiritual energy into his hands, he could make it better—
The light would illuminate, and there would be something good in it. There would be.
If he knelt, bowed his head, pressed his skull to the ground and allowed his hair to be a curtain of protection from the darkness’s judgement, he could pray. He could beg to be forgiven. He could beg for things, plead, offer his mind and body and blood, offer His skin, if it meant the silence would end, of there would be a chance for survival, free of crime, free of this.
Xie Lian didn’t pray.
He thought about it, several times. I’ll pray to God. But then he had to pick a god, and ah, ah, ah, ah—no gods, no saviors, no saints, no truths. There was no one listening for him. He didn’t want to be heard.
(No gods.)
There was only silence, shadows, memories, and strange sensations of his chest being empty, without pain or aches, and his stomach being a concave and impatient thing.
(No God, either.)
Xie Lian stared at the snow-fuzz of the dark. In this cavern, there was nothing. There was nothing but the array in the floor, the rock ground he sat on, curved walls, and tall dome ceiling. Small airways that never gave true wind. Small moments. Small things. He blinked, saw ghosts, saw himself in the corner. He closed his eyes, pictures things that had long since died. Xie Lian was one of them. He was one of them.
Under the mountain, he decided, was not freezing.
It was not the air itself, but his body, his chest. There was a cavity at his sternum, a flesh-wound that could not properly exist without flesh, and Xie Lian had taken His flesh and burned it all, rotted as it was, with His fragile bones, wrapped at his neck, merely a pile of ash to wave about.
(Scatter?)
The mountain was a normal temperature, he was sure. Up above, in the mortal realm where others freely walked, it would be normal as well. The sun would gleam. Xie Lian could see it, almost, when he dreamt.
When the anger ebbed away into gentle moments, things divided by his need to lie down and his need to die, to make someone else die in his place.
Anger.
A lot of anger, a lot of fear, and it came from—
(Something screamed in his head, over and over, a wailing creature, and it cried, Wu Ming, Wu Ming, Wu Ming, Wu Ming! That wasn’t much of a name. It wasn’t much of anything. But he could feel it, and he could hear it, and there was a vision with the name, a dream, a past life, and it coiled around his neck and settled there like his parents’ noose, Rouye.)
There was a twitch against his chest, beyond the cold layers of ripped skin, a form he could not mend, could not stabilize. Xie Lian hummed, low and yet so loud in the endless cavern—and Ruoye didn’t reply, merely tightening around Xie Lian’s body.
Trying to hold its master together, cover a cavity, cover a wound. It had tried to do the same in the coffin.
(Or maybe it hadn’t. He couldn’t remember.)
He hummed more, over and over, and it was a lingering kiss to the air, the small nooks of oxygen, and the endless darkness. The array on the ground flickered, a shift of energy. Something to give, something that lost ground, lost motion, began to coil and pile up.
His voice resonated, no better than wind chimes.
—
There was someone cradling his head, and it was almost—
(What was the word?)
—nice.
It was almost nice to be cradled, because inside a prison under a mountain made for ghosts of wraith rank, there were no visitors or villages or vile moments. It was only him and his thoughts. His sighs. His sobs. His screams. The noises he made, the energy that whipped about but never caused damage. The choking sensation of Ruoye or his own hands at his neck—his nails clawing at his skin, his face, his eyes, his lips, his muscles, his ribs.
But this, on the other hand, was a dream. He thought he met God, like this.
“It's a shame,” Someone murmured, into his hair, and Xie Lian stirred. He was so tired. The floor and air and world was cold, and he was cold, too, and he was tired. They were cradling him. He wasn’t quite sure who they were.
Xie Lian didn’t think it mattered much.
He mumbled, “What is?”
“Shh,” The person combed the ends of his hair and didn’t let him speak again. Xie Lian was lulled back to sleep by the motion.
—
His mother held his face and soothed him, “Oh, Lian-Er.”
And he cried, he cried and cried and cried, and his mother wiped his tears with her gentle thumbs, a face of sincerity present, and even as the darkness consumed her the way it consumed his body, she soothed him.
—
Xie Lian faded back and forth between being here and being inside his own head.
Sometimes he was in a garden, sometimes he was on a mountainside.
He was a budding flower with small leaves and white petals, not yet unfurled, and it was quiet and sweet, and the rain dappled against his plant-skin and the mud welcomed his roots. Xie Lian dreamed to be a flower, to be safe, to be the right temperature. The white flowers, the entire field, the mountain that was covered in extensions of himself; one bud at a time.
The air was good. The skies were blue and pink and purple and black and navy and beautiful. The world was good.
In his dreams, he could be good and he could be real and he could be safe. The softness of his mother’s arms, of her robes, of her lips against his forehead. When she would trace his back, over his shoulders, down his spine. Memories that were warm and fuzzy, identifiable, from better days. His mother, his father, his friends, his kingdom, his people, his world, his place in the heavens, his armory, his blades, his powers, his many, many, many opportunities. In his dreams, there were flowers and breezes and sweet nothings. He could hear the crickets sing in his dreams. He could feel a cicada in his mouth, a small but true burden, resting on his tongue. Here was his rebirth: and the soil allowed his roots to dive and dive, and he could feel salt and sun, and he could almost taste it.
He awoke to darkness, both during his atonement in that awful coffin, and when he awoke in the generous prison under a mountain, quiet and unbothered, strewn out on his back with his robes parted and the ceiling looming high, high, high above him.
A grave, a good dream, a breath—
When the ghosts echoed. When he could hear it, feel it, almost taste somethinh that wasn’t there.
Xie Lian atoned. Tried to. He should have moved faster, killed, kneeled, done anything differently—something could have been spared. Something and someone could have made it out alive.
He had to do it for his people. He had to do it, had to, because his people still lived. His people, assimilated, having forgotten their history and rites, their studies, even some of their arts—even their god—still lived, and Xie Lian had seen them, their adjusted culture, their treatment, and had felt ill. He had seen it, seen the Crown Prince of Yong’An, and had known he needed to intervene. Change it, somehow, ensure something went right.
And then the king had—
The king had demanded that—
(Who are you to kill my people! Who are you to kill anyone’s people! Who are you to kill people!)
When faced with the choice, the moment, Fang Xin had slaughtered the King of Yong’An, and had faced the hatred of the prince, the then-turned-king, for that was how fate played, and that was how retribution was sought.
The dreams haunted him.
When life split open, and Xie Lian could think without feeling an overwhelming amount of hatred, qi dripping out of his mouth like foam, spit, old bile—when it smoothes out, and he smoothed with it—there were good things to come of the dark, of his history. Fang Xin had been necessary. The acts of the State Preceptor had been necessary. The acts of His Highness had been lost to the acts of the traitorous guoshi.
(Who are you to tell me what I am? What I can do?)
And there was a sword in his throat, and a curse in his mouth, and a man in his dreams, and the sensation of being watched made him less likely to do anything besides sit or hum or lay down and dream.
He slipped.
Time slipped, and it faded, and it lapped at his ankles and muddy sleeves, and he wasn’t hungry in a mortal, my body needs food way, he was hungry in an endless chasm way. His body had no finish line. He wasn’t even sure where His ribs had gone, where the space in His stomach had gone off to—
Dissatisfaction, a restless thing, because he had always been hungry or less full than a mortal—banished god—should be, but being dead made him shaky, made him strange, made him less stable than someone should be. How he clawed at rocks and clawed at skin was a visionary, a direct relation to his demise, to whatever horrors lived in the back of his mind. He couldn’t remember the details. He could barely remember the specifics, and that meant he was empty-handed and concave and rather useless in the stretches of silence. Ruoye was his parents’ noose. It was stretched across his sternum, his ribs, his pectoral muscles, his thin and waning frame. It didn’t speak. It used to brush its little strings across his face, back in the coffin, wipe his tears and coil around and about the silver mask he once wore as a guoshi.
Dreams.
The things that moved, over and over, took up the most time.
Xie Lian could dream of good things, like this.
There was enough air in the mountain prison to think, to breathe. He wasn’t even sure why he tried, why his chest expanded to match the artificial pull of mortal lungs, manhandled into proper shapes within his body.
Ghosts did not breathe. They did not breathe, bleed, or sleep, let alone dream, but Xie Lian pushed and he prodded and he laid down on his back. It was pitch black. He closed his eyes, hair stuck to his face and matted in a million places, dried blood long since staining his hands and lips and skin and neck and—everything—and he would wait, he would sleep, he would lose himself one dream at a time.
(Xie Lian to Lian-Er to the Flower-Crowned Martial God to Xianle to Banished God to the White-Clothed Calamity to Ghost, to dead, to Xie Lian, to Lian-Er, to Xianle, to dead god, dead thing.)
He could lose himself in the names, in the dreams.
He could lose himself in the good memories. He could lose himself in the golden-swathed details of his parents, his kingdom, his old wardrobe. He could dream of it. He could feel the weight of every sword he once owned in his hands.
When the skies turned a striking red color; when the rain turned crimson; when his skin was split into ribbons; when the common people slaughtered him to survive the Human Face Disease; when all was lost and gone; when Xie Lian adorned a white mask, half-crying and half-laughing, and nearly wiped the newly liberated people of Yong’An off the fucking map; when he tried; when he failed; when Wu Ming did the final act in order to spare Xie Lian from dying to the spirits; when he was banished again; when he grieved in the absence of everything else.
(In the abyss—)
See, the darkness blotted out his abilities to understand what his current home looked like.
He could imagine the colors; shades of grey and white. Rocks without cracks. Rocks without damage. Smoothened out, carved, as if someone charred a sphere under a mountain the same way someone would burn a space inside a half-spa here to craft a wooden bowl.
(—heart in paradise, or whatever it was that he said, hundreds of years ago.)
He faded.
He opened his eyes, lashes clumped together—undefined, not individual hairs—and stared at the darkness that lived all around him.
—
“Wu Ming,” Xie Lian mumbled, sluggish, “This one is sorry.”
—
He visited his friends in dreams.
Strange dreams, the way he moved in water, like he wasn’t himself, like none of it connected back to the thing in his skull that made him true and sentient. It wasn’t like a real visit. It wasn’t like a real thing, either.
Xie Lian stared at the golden-pink colors, watered down but still somehow bright enough to make his eyes water. He was wearing white. His robes didn’t look nearly as frazzled as they should, and there was no mud or blood or other unworldly gut-fluid staining his outer layers. The world he was in was nearly pleasant. Dreams often were, when Feng Xin and Mu Qing were involved. Xie Lian’s anger washed away when he entered these spaces, when the lines of the darkness blurred with the cheerfulness of his imagination, the combining factors of want and memory.
He poked his head around a corner. Expectedly, the wall he was following ended abruptly. Beyond it was a sea of white and pale green, dull, like the dream couldn’t keep creating useless background details.
Xie Lian hummed, considerately.
“Your Highness?” Someone asked, and they were odd, and timid, and he coudont recognize their voice—he knew their name, he knew, it was buried in his brain, his chest, a seed of love, something to dig his roots into—and the dead god blinked before turning around and looking at whoever was behind him.
These dreams were good. These dreams were kind. These dreams made him feel less awful, less mean.
The person behind him was taller than Xie Lian. Their hair was up, and they took the body of a man. His hair was lighter, slightly, but neat. His clothes, too, were neat and formal. Not as rich or ordained as a prince or king, for example, or even how a guoshi would dress, but the colors were clean and did not clash, and the fabric looked warm. That was good. Xie Lian couldn’t recall who this person was, but he wanted the man to be warm and safe. It was a resounding thought, even if he couldn’t define or name it.
“Oh,” Xie Lian breathed, and he smiled despite not seeing the not-stranger’s face. “Hello,” and the words failed him, “Isn’t this a good dream?”
And he looked back to the abrupt dead-end fence, the blurred lines that signaled that this was the end of the dream, and then turned around again to properly look the man in the eye. He couldn’t help but smile. He couldn’t help it—truly, it had been so long, and these dreams were kind to give him a chance to see who the people had become whilst he had been banished, and or more recently, dead.
“It’s a good dream, Your Highness,” The not-stranger confirmed. His eyes flicked up and down over Xie Lian’s face. His own expression, however blurry, crumpled. “Are you—”
“Peaches,” Xie Lian hummed, and the man stopped speaking. “Or oolong tea.” He scratched his cheek. His hair wasn’t matted in this dream. He was still smiling, still light on his feet. He wasn’t so cold in this dream. It was a nice reprieve when the rest of his time was spent aching and mean. “Does this place have peach trees?” He wondered. “It’s so pretty. It must have good things.”
(I know you, I know you, I know you.)
The man reached out when Xie Lian started walking closer, likely to pass and try to find the trees he was talking about. “Your Highness,” the not-stranger choked, sounding worked up.
Xie Lian blinked. The sky was golden and pink, and the ground was soft with grass, and the man in front of him must also be a god.
His smile returned, and it came crashing fast. “Hello,” he soothed, gently. “I’m here.” He reached out, imbued by the urge, and he put his warm hand on the god’s arm, where it had stretched to try and touch him, to try and catch his white Taoist sleeve. “It’s okay,” he promised, “Let’s find the peach trees. We should have done that when we were younger.” It would have been nice, maybe, to do so. “I would love to eat something.”
“Wait,” The god—a good god, really—pleaded, eyes wide on the spot Xie Lian had patted him, but the dead god was already wandering away, pale and low in visibility.
This was normally how these dreams ended, anyway.
Just a small taste of goodness.
—
How many gods were good?
Xie Lian could count them on one hand, actually, not that he knew their names or if they were even alive anymore. But he could feel it, in his bones, under the layers of his body. People he once knew, something certain, and he could say—
—
One in the same, because if he was dead, then so was He, but He used to be great, and he certainly wasn’t, but there had been a fall and great devastation, and surely, surely that meant something?
That meant something.
Why wouldn’t it mean something?
He had to be whole, one individual, only spiraled by titles and actions. If he was the same as Him, then He was the same as him, and that meant Xianle and Xie Lian and Lian-Er and the Flower-Crowned Martial God and the beloved prince of the kingdom were all the same, and that meant it all was one, it was one, it was just one.
That meant—
—
Mu Qing was looking at him.
Or maybe Xie Lian was looking at him. It could be both. Two things at once, you know? Not that he understood. Not that anyone would understand it.
Xie Lian blinked a few times, and the rain was coming down hard. Or maybe it wasn’t. This was an odd dream. In the cave, there was no rain or snow or hail. Barely any wind, either. No sun. By extension, there were no people visiting or speaking to him. He was alone. Facing this stranger, he could see the defined ridges near Mu Qing’s eyes. The bridge of his nose, sloped gracefully. His hair was dark, but there was—silver, too, and it gleamed. A silvery night on his head.
“So,” Xie Lian mumbled. “Are you old?”
“What?” Mu Qing asked, baffled—maybe outraged, and he gestured wildly with his hands. “Why would I be old? We—you and I, we’re the same age!” Then he jabbed a hand at Xie Lian. “You’re old, too, then!”
He blinked. “I’m dead, I can’t be old.”
Mu Qing faltered. “What?”
“It’s a good thing,” Xie Lian assured him, kindly, “I can talk to you like this. It’s a good thing.” And he smiled, and it wasn’t dark in his dream—only in the mountain prison—but there was rain pattering in the dream. Hallucination. A memory, of sorts, not that he could make sense of it. He sighed, slow and content, “It’s good to see you.”
He had silver in his hair, and wore good robes. Oh, it was such a relief. Xie Lian couldn’t recall how they all parted from each other, but he knew it had been rather unexceptional. Lonely, tiresome. He couldn’t recall if he ever saw Feng Xin or Mu Qing again after they first left. He didn’t know.
It wasn’t like he cared, really.
The ghost smiled. His own robes were wrapped wrong, and he wanted to correct them, but undressing in a dream sounded tedious. It sounded mean, really, as it used to be one of Mu Qing’s jobs.
“I—” His friend looked floored, maybe gutted.
(A terrible feeling, yes.)
“There were peach trees, last time,” Xie Lian told him, kindly. “I’m certain that Feng Xin and I ate some under the sun.” Or someone who looked like Feng Xin. Someone. He stepped forwards, tried to picture Mu Qing’s face, what god he might’ve become. “You’re a god? Right? That’s good!” And he smiled, and he laughed, and his eyes didn’t burn at all. “I’m so relieved.” He reached out, let his fingers brush the side of Mu Qing’s face, and his friend revered backwards as if he had been struck by lightning.
“Your Highness,” Mu Qing said, shelled, shucked. “What are you talking about?”
Xie Lian pressed on, and he smiled, and it had been so long since he heard anyone’s voice. “Aren’t you?” He sighed, rather wistfully. “I hoped you’d be alright.” He swallowed the wetness, the pooling of his saliva. “Feng Xin is a god, too. Did you know?” He was happy, so warm even as the rain slid down his face in the blue skies.
Mu Qing was looking at him wrongly.
Xie Lian wouldn’t be able to say why. It was hard—really—to understand.
These dreams were quiet or raging, sad or good, and the food he consumed didn’t matter, and the pain he sustained when he ran far, far, far into the edges of each dreamland didn’t mean anything when he awoke buried underground. Slipping between the lines.
There was rain trickling down his face. He was wearing robes that weren’t his own—they were white, but definitely wrapped the wrong way, it showed him as a living being.
(Rest the dead. Rest your eyes. Rest—)
Xie Lian let his hand settle, and Mu Qing’s skin was rather warm. He hummed, tried to picture a flesh body, something real and breathing. He was far from it, now, unbothered in the silence or the cold. The most he could do was fake his pulse. He didn’t even use his heart, shift his skin into better things. He was like a paper-doll traversing through the remaining paint colors in the world. He smiled, and tried to come up with something good. Mu Qing was standing perfectly still. He had armor on his shoulders. He looked strong.
This dream was a good taste. It was a good thing. He wanted it to last. He wanted to remember it when he woke up.
“Do you still like green tea?” He asked, contemplative. “Maybe this dream has it, somewhere.” And he finally pulled his hand away, blue at the fingertips. Mu Qing stared at him with a strange face. Every face was strange, in dreams, but this one felt exceptionally odd. Xie Lian didn’t mind.
“This isn’t real,” Mu Qing said, and he choked on the words.
There was thunder above, in the dream sky. It rumbled. Oh, how Xie Lian would love to hear thunder in real life. It would be a treat. It would be good.
(Hearing Mu Qing was good, too.)
Xie Lian blinked. No, this wasn’t. No dreams were. But that didn’t mean it had to end. That didn’t mean anything. He looked around, at the dark sky and the near-black clouds that poured rain and sadness. What a sad atmosphere. Mu Qing should walk within Feng Xin’s dreams instead, maybe it would be less melancholic.
He took a breath anyways, one he didn’t need, and he brushed some of his hair out of his face.
Mu Qing tracked the movement, impossibly wide.
“It doesn’t have to be real.” Xie Lian explained, and his skin was cold even when he brushed his fingers over his cheeks, his brows, shoving as much of his hair away as he could. “Dreams are good,” he insisted. “How else would I ever talk to you?”
He had no believers to give him power, you see. He had no prayers. He had no energy to enter communication arrays, let alone pry his way into any personal matters. He could not whisper hello or goodbye into anyone’s minds. He was a ghost, all things considered, and even if no one knew he was dead—telling people in dreams did not count—they couldn’t understand—and he was alone, and quiet, and the Earth Master out him under a mountain like he requested, and that village had burned, and Xie Lian could not talk to anyone except himself or the useless silk ribbon under his robes.
Mu Qing was looking at him.
Maybe he had never turned away. Maybe he had left, yes, but everyone did, and Xie Lian wasn’t so angry about that anymore—
He was mostly just sad and tired and lonely. He smiled. “There must be tea around here somewhere, Mu Qing, so let’s go find it.” He laughed, next, and it was good, it was so good, and the rain drenched his face and soaked Mu Qing’s hair, and it trickled down his blue-tinted skin, and he was freezing but he could pretend to be alive here, if it made the fake Mu Qing happy. “It’s the nice thing about dreams, ah, I can see all the things that aren’t real. It’s good.”
—
“Your Highness could pray,” The ghost told him, almost conversational, “You might not be lonely if you prayed.” Another pause. “Perhaps a god would answer you.”
This ghost didn’t sound hateful, or mocking, but Xie Lian squinted in the dark and their face was white, with a deep curve in three places, and he knew what it meant. Even if he was dead, fear could pool in his stomach easily, and that fear—even if it turned to white-hot anger, well, it was useless under a mountain, without a blade, and without a way out.
(The blade wouldn’t be for the ghost in front of him, would you believe it?)
“No one would,” Xie Lian rasped, and his throat was scratchy, and he was so cold. You wouldn’t believe how cold he was.
You wouldn’t fucking believe it.
(It would be for him.)
Even in the dark, Xie Lian was a tuned to the horror’s motions. He knew. He just knew. The motion, a glint of barely there silver, a flash of snow. Calm jade. A half-crying and half-laughing mask that faced him, even when the entire prison was void of depth perception.
White No-Face looked at him, tilting his head, “Wouldn’t they?”
“No,” Xie Lian choked, and he bowed his head, and he knew he bowed it because down was below, where his body had fallen to the ground, where he didn’t exist the same, where his skin peeled and pulled uncomfortably in easily-identified layers. “No one would,” the dead god said. “There’s—“ and it hurt, it hurt, but he said it anyway, “—no one who would answer.”
The silence was buzzing. There were no insects or voices, no people, no animals.
Just two hallucinations in a glorified holding room, waiting for something to change. Both in white, both equally insane, one cradling their knees to their chest, and the other sitting properly—a few feet away.
White No-Face was gone.
Jun Wu dispersed him centuries ago.
But here he was, sitting in front of Xie Lian, a smooth voice and a glinting face that flashed through the dead God’s mind every few seconds. He didn’t need illumination to see White No-Face. He didn’t. He could see Bai Wuxiang anywhere—hear the voice, the very echoes of a past life, of the Kingdom of Xianle falling apart even with Xie Lian’s numerous attempts at stalling its downfall.
In the darkness of the cavern, Xie Lian tried to piece it together. It fell from his hands and his mouth. He couldn’t feel the shackles, couldn’t identify them—
“I would answer,” White No-Face said, but he sounded wrong.
(Didn’t he always?)
Xie Lian made a noise, guttural, and squeezed his eyes shut. His arms tightened around his legs, hitched up and brought to his chest like he was a small child. In his heart, his unbeating heart, he might as well be. White No-Face had a special talent of being awful and demeaning and cruel and barely sentimental. Too touchy. Too odd. How he would crack Xie Lian’s head open and poke at his insides and then wrap him in white sleeves and shush him as he sobbed or screamed.
“You wouldn’t,” Xie Lian choked, “You’re not here.” And it was terrible, it was terrible. “No one would, not even me.”
Another silence.
“Not even you, Your Highness?” White No-Face asked, sounding thoughtful and yet sounding nothing like how he should. How should a monster sound? Xie Lian didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
He decided on laughing, blurting a response, “No!”
“No?” The calamity echoed.
“No!” Xie Lian laughed, again and again, and it was a grating sound that fell out of his mouth and scraped his throat. “I wouldn’t answer, who would answer?” And it hurt, it hurt, and he ached, and he hated to cry, hated to laugh, and his face was crumpling and his hair was matted and it was dark and lonely, and White No-Face was dead, and that meant they were both goners, and that meant neither of them were real. “It’s not a matter of anything—it’s just me, and who am I to be saved?” His voice was shaking, and his nails scratched deeply, over and over, into his frayed robes. “Who am I to—no, no, no, I wouldn’t answer, no one would!”
He wished he was dead.
He wished he was dead.
(Quietly in self-proclaimed bliss, choking and gurgling on his own blood as someone put a sword through his neck.)
He wished Jun Wu had never granted him immortality in banishment. He wished he was dead. He wished Bai Wuxiang had killed him. He wished his Wu Ming had let him die to the sword of resentful soldiers, he sighed his people killed him on that forsaken altar, he wished Lang Qianqiu cut him into pieces!
“Your Highness did everything he could,” White No-Face said, “How could anyone expect him to save the people if he couldn’t even save himself?” And he was so calm and so simple, and he sounded closer than before, and Xie Lian shrieked—
And White No-Face didn’t move again, and the dark was all consuming, and Xie Lian didn’t know where he was or who he was or why he was in a prison under a mountain if he was dead by the Heavenly Emperor’s hands.
Dead!
Would you believe it? Dead!
“Don’t be afraid, Your Highness,” The calamity murmured, not desolate and not true. He leaned closer, even as Xie Lian struggled to move away. His sleeves brushed Xie Lian’s legs, and Xie Lian spat words—incomprehensible as the fear weaved its way into his mind—but the calamity looming over him, invisible to everything around them, didn’t stab or bite or hit or crack Xie Lian. He looked, and he was quiet, and surely his mask was cry-laughing above, but Xie Lian’s eyes were stinging and his back was to the floor, an array plastered to his spine, and White No-Face was quiet when he asked, “Who will answer you if you’re scared?”
“No one,” Xie Lian gasped, and he didn’t need air, he didn’t, but he was pressing himself into the ground, trying to be as small as possible, and gods, gods, how had he survived this long if he was so terrified of his own mind—
“I would answer, Your Highness,” White No-Face murmured, and there was no tone in the words, “Next time, when you decide you have to pray to someone, pray to me, and I’ll answer.”
Xie Lian’s eyes burned, and he chose crying next, could almost feel the way White No-Face turned his head so that the crying part of the mask faced him instead. Matching, matching, matching. “No one answers,” he choked, “Neither will you.” His hands tightened in his own robes, covering his ribs, sloping upwards and deciding it was better to protect his neck, even in the darkness. Ruoye was too-tight around his chest.
White No-Face made a noise, like clicking his tongue eerily. “So pitiful,” he dismissed. “Your Highness has known glory and generosity, and suffering and pain, and still thinks himself too far below graces?” He leaned, leaned, leaned, and Xie Lian’s dead heart thumped, once, just once. “It’s nothing like that, isn’t that what you said?” He mocked coldly. “Then pray. What does it matter if you pray and rage, Your Highness?” The calamity finally leaned away, arms vanishing, the suffocating presence splitting and walking away with a gentle rustle of sleeves. “You’re likely correct, no one is going to answer.”
Xie Lian rolled onto his side, ribs aching, and vomited onto the array below him. He hadn’t eaten in—so long—but something came up, wiggly and thick, and it was terrible. By the time he was done retching, White No-Face had vanished, and so had the rest of Xie Lian’s desperation.
(What good was loneliness? What good was a terrible hallucination of the man who ruined his kingdom?)
He curled back up on his side, away from the puddle, and tried to dream.
—
Xie Lian peeled his eyes open. The sky was bright blue above him, with minimal clouds tracing the edges of the horizon. The sun was staring down at him. He could picture it—see it, feel its light blind his eyes, burn him and all that remained of his thoughts.
He blinked.
The ghost was on his back, laying between soil and rubble—smooth marble. The cave system was quiet, completely desolate, and—
There was a hole in the ceiling.
Bright, so bright—
(The body may lay in the soil and I will lay with it. Once it’s separate from me, it’s a ghost, it’s a fractional deviation, it’s not me, it’s an extension, it’s a fragment, it’s a piece from a long time ago, it’s a historical artifact to all the things I used to have a claim to. Bury me in the soil. Kill me. It may lay here and I will lay with it, outside of myself, plastered skin to skin, but it’s not me once I’m apart from it.)
—beautiful, bright, streaming light.
Light!
Golden and pale-red rays, the evening sunset, the flow of the sun saying goodbye before the sky turned black with night, a time of sleep. Xie Lian looked up with wide eyes, his pupils shifting to pinpricks, a moment where he could not recall the last time he saw light in any manner that wasn’t a flicker of energy, of blood on the ground of his chosen prison, of a corridor made of memory.
He stared.
Xie Lian stared, and he couldn’t look away, and he couldn’t bring himself to look away, and his eyes burned at the sheer light that filled his cavern of solitude, and there was a creak in his chest, in his neck, and the—
—
How long had he been under the mountain?
—
The world was old outside, and there was a thick layer of snow on the ground, but Xie Lian could walk, and he could move, and he labored to his feet. His robes frayed. He couldn’t see. He was barely covered, barely solid, and his hands were twinges blue—so were his feet and knees—and he was shivering like a mortal. Cold, he thought, but he was always cold and had been like that for so, so, so long.
Xie Lian was walking and he was walking and walking and he was here, he was here, and there were trees and clouds and layers of snow and dirt under him and a frozen river and a bird singing and a single, small moth fluttering two feet in front of him before blending into the bark of a tree trunk.
The village was gone.
He had killed it—or it had killed him, or he had died here and all those people were innocent, but what mattered was that Xie Lian was out and out meant free and free meant he could leave and that meant he was truly dead, after all.
He didn’t choke at pressure in or around his throat, and there were no markings on either ankle, but he looked and got ill, so he stopped paying any attention to it, and that meant he stumbled away through the snow and ice and choked until the cold air bit his lips red and bloody. Or maybe he was the one biting so much. His teeth snagged on the skin, not as smooth as it used to be. Not blemished, either, though he didn’t possess a mirror to confirm such a theory, so it was—
Ruoye twisted around his body, twining itself lower around his stomach rather than sternum.
“Hello,” Xie Lian cooed at it, even though it never did anything, never helped him anymore, never, never. But he was quiet and cold and wet, and very dead, and Ruoye had killed his parents and yet never killed him, so Xie Lian had every reason to coo and cradle and cry. “Yes, hello,” he cooed again, “Sweetest thing, strangest silk, the only ribbon, yes, hm?”
His voice kept cracking. His eyes burned. He was so cold.
(Were ghosts supposed to feel cold, or only be cold? Had he already failed at being a ghost?)
There were trees. Most did not have leaves. Most had shed their coverings in time for the thick snow. He was freezing. He was tinted blue. His lips cracked and his skin was dry at the joints, raw in the center, because he could rub the thin skin away and expose his gooey insides like a prize, a treasure to hold, but there were no treasurers around and no kings to lathe in greed, only Xie Lian, and he was anything but a keeper of treasure.
So, he wandered, had to wander, and someone breathed at his neck and he sucked in air he didn’t need and he tried to recall how long it had been.
(I see you in dreams, I hear you in thoughts, I feel you in the dark, I can’t go to you, and you can’t come back to me, but I remember you.)
It had been humid when he was buried in the prison.
It was winter, now, and the prison had collapsed, and he had left through the ceiling, through energy, and shackles spasmed at his throat, and he dreamed of the Heavenly Emperor and a sword and a mudslide and a river and a nation at war and a calamity in the distance and the heavens above, places he could not speak of, places he could only ever visit in dreams.
Ruoye was limp around him again.
Xie Lian was a ghost. Said beings did not need sleep or rest, not in a traditional mortal sense, but he wandered through the leafless trees and stumbled until he found a large trunk, and he settled down, knees hitting the hardened frost and crumpling the wet powder. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to sing. He wanted to cry and laugh and make things. He wanted to—
He fell into the snow, bundled himself under a tree, and closed his eyes against the powder that clung to his translucent body.
—
When he woke, there were flowers blooming in the snow.
He nearly cried.
—
There was a god on a mountain.
No one called the god a god, because they did not know him as such, but there was a god on a mountain. He settled there, rather simply, and built a cottage with planks and mud and clay and rock, scraped it together with two hands, and made a garden of white flowers that were unnamed. They bloomed every season. Onlookers wouldn’t have guessed it, but they bloomed, and the god stayed in a cottage, and a river traveled, and they were far, far, far south, and the god was alone.
The god did not call himself a god, either, and wore a mask. He had no sword. He wore white taoist robes.
He was quiet.
He was quiet, and there was a silk band around his neck, and black markings on his pale skin that flickered strangely if someone stared too long—not that anyone did or ever could, but he did not see the and did not spit, and if someone was lost, he would guide them back down the long, long mountain steps he must have built and tell them where their village was and how to get back to it.
The god was quiet and kind. The god was dead. The unintentional visitors, of course, would not know the last part.
(Only Xie Lian did.)