Chapter 39-Three Moons 4

Ling Qi ascended the steps into the fiery archive, Sixiang at her side and Hanyi just behind her. The greyed-out, frozen world seemed to fade away behind them until at last they stood inside of the billowing flames. Ling Qi looked around at the flame-wrought shelves that seemed to stretch out beyond her sight in every direction but back. Reaching out, she brushed her fingers across a fiery shelf and found herself surprised when a charred scroll materialized in her hands.

“Alright,” she said determinedly. “Sixiang, Hanyi, we’re going to split up. Don’t worry about trying to look at everything. Just look for things that interest you.” She had a feeling that would be enough in a place like this. Sixiang gave her a nod, and Hanyi grumbled rebelliously but didn’t disagree.

“What about us?” Zhengui asked, his stubby legs kicking uselessly from his spot under Hanyi’s arm.

“You will be coming with me,” Ling Qi replied, reaching down to take him from Hanyi. “Big Sister is going to start teaching you to read.”

It was just good practice to do two things at once if she could. She considered trying to cultivate as well, but something told her that it wouldn’t work. She wasn’t exactly wholly herself right now given that her body was still back on the mountain.

Ling Qi gave her other spirits a nod, picked a direction, and started walking. As she searched the shelves, Ling Qi passed over paintings, tapestries, and other more visual works. She ignored play scripts and dry histories. Unsurprisingly perhaps, she found herself drawn to songs, stories, and poems.

Here and there, she would pluck a scrap of paper from a tongue of flame or a storybook from the inferno of the shelving. Sometimes, she only glanced at them before tossing them aside, but for others, she would read them to Zhengui, pausing to point out the meanings of characters as she read.

As Ling Qi worked her way further toward the dim back of the archive, the language of the works began to take on a slightly archaic edge. Slight twists on otherwise familiar spirit tales began to diverge more and more, and the songs began to take on an almost foreign cadence.

Despite that, she was still surprised the first time she plucked out a song from the flames and found it written in a wholly foreign tongue, if one that was still familiar to her. She remembered deciphering these characters at Li Suyin’s side last year as they translated the book Ling Qi had taken from that shaman. It was the language of the Hill Tribes, people who had dwelled in Emerald Seas in the long past.

However, that didn’t seem right. The more she looked, the more she found works that were a strange dialect that seemed to mix the Imperial tongue with the Hill languages. She found poems in that tongue that were marked with dates from under the current dynasty even, no more than half a millennia old, though they were few indeed.

The picture they painted was a strange one. They told of a people who wandered and settled depending on the season, who sang songs to spirits of wind and rain, and who played games of riddles and wordplay with terrestrial spirits to barter for boons and cultivation. She found herself laughing at silly scraps of legends about silver-tongued tricksters and clever hunters. She found less cheerful songs as well, written in a strange ritual cadence and whispering of clashes with the Horned Gods of the Deep Groves.

Newer stories praised the sun and moon and spoke of the Weilu more as strange neighbors than monsters in the dark, then as allies against the Cloud Tribes of the south. The songs took a turn for the dark though as they grew more modern. Songs of everyday life turned into melodies of war and then subjugation, pages filled with venom for the conquering Xi. From there, the stories began to disappear, and the songs and poems dwindled in number, growing more melancholy and full of nostalgia for the lost past.

The Hill Tribes weren’t the only lost peoples either. Hanyi brought her a book of rough charcoal illustrations in a foreign style, depicting a people that lived in the high snowy mountains who worshipped the lethal and beautiful spirits that lived there and cultivated through exposure to the fierce blizzards that raged on icy peaks. Sixiang brought her scrolls of poetry written in a dozen odd dialects, almost incomprehensible in their familiarity.

Ling Qi thought she had an inkling now as to why Emerald Seas was such a fractured place.

When she at last emerged from the archive with her spirits, Ling Qi held only one work, a scroll made from many hundreds of wooden strips bound together and rolled up. It held a long form poem, one that she had found many, many different versions of spanning a great deal of time. In varying forms, it told the tale of a hero king figure and his two companions, who played the spirits of the land and mighty beasts against each other. They defeated some and won bargains from others, assuring the prosperity of the king’s people.

The details varied depending on the version. Sometimes, the king’s companions were human; sometimes, they were spirits or something in between. The king’s name and the exact nature of the spirits he bargained with and antagonized changed as well. This version, however, was the oldest one that had seemed “complete” to her.

It had been a difficult choice to make, but…

“Mine was better,” Hanyi said childishly as they descended the steps, drawing her attention.

“Obviously not, or Big Sister would have picked it,” Zhen replied imperiously from his perch on her shoulder.

“Yeah! This story was way better,” Gui agreed.

Ling Qi had found Hanyi’s finds interesting but frankly, disturbing. The unnamed mountain peoples had been rather explicit in their depictions of the various self-mutilations that were part and parcel to their cultivation. She didn’t think herself squeamish, but she didn’t feel regret in knowing that those traditions weren’t a thing anymore among civilized people. She would remember to be much more cautious with spirits like her mentor Zeqing if she encountered them away from the Empire’s influence though.

Sixiang gave her a sidelong look and a smirk. “I don’t completely agree with your choice, but yeah, not gonna argue with you going for those folks instead.”

As they finished speaking, Ling Qi stepped down onto the gravel, coming face-to-face once more with the three moon spirits. The Hidden Moon sat atop one of the larger boulders in the garden, eyes closed in meditation. The Dreaming stood, surrounded by a cloud of dying embers, humming a faint melody that sounded familiar and foreign all at once. The Grinning Moon had taken a seat atop the shoulder of the frozen scholar, balanced impossibly despite her size. The man’s still features were marked by glowing lines of fluorescent ink, irreverently scribbled.

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“Is that still going to be there when we leave?” Ling Qi asked with some concern, looking to the veiled spirit.

“Not in a way anyone will notice,” replied the Grinning Moon. “Well, not right away. I’m sure our friend here will go get the bad fortune cleansed after a week or two.”

The Dreaming Moon inhaled, and the embers and lights around her rushed in, vanishing in an instant. “More importantly, you have made your choice?”