Interlude: Winter’s End Tour Part 1

The road wound ever on. Through hills and trees, around mountains, across rivers. The cool air rushed by, sharp with the incoming winter. When they had begun, the roads had been smooth, in superb maintenance, but as they had traveled on, away from the Argent Sect, further from the core of Wang lands, they had grown rougher. At first just little signs of wear, but then more. A fallen tree here, a loose paving stone there. Proving there was something to the rumor of the wildness and disrepair of the southwest.

His wagon rattled, a bit of shock traveling up from the axels as the furiously spinning wheels passed over a series of cracked stones, and Bao Qian caught onto his wide brimmed drivers hat before it could fly off into the rapidly whipping wind. Despite the troubles he found himself in good humor. This was the romance of the open road after all! Every journey was a little different, the conditions unpredictable, the land a beauty! To follow an untraveled road as much an adventure as…

“Are we there yet?” A young girl’s voice called from inside the covered wagon, the words drawn out and petulant.

Bao Qian’s smile remained fixed, but he didn’t think anyone would blame him for the way his eyebrow twitched.

“Not just yet,” he replied, keeping a controlled tone. “As I have said the last eight times you have asked.

“Ugh, can’t the wagon go faster,” the girl complained. She appeared in the open window slat that opened onto the drivers bench, elbows leaned on the sill.

He glanced back at the spirit, were it not for her corpse pale skin and milky white eyes, she really would look like a young girl of eleven or twelve years. “We can’t, pushing the horses any harder would just delay us later,” he explained patiently.

As he had four separate times now.

“You’ve finished going through all the materials I provided on the spiritual map of the region we’re touring in?” He asked pleasantly.

“Um, yeah definitely! That stuff is super easy,” she affirmed.

Bao Qian’s eyes narrowed. The spirit of freezing death occupying his workshop put on the most angelic expression of childhood innocence.

Blindfold him, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to tell her from a precocious and slightly spoiled young miss of any clan he cared to name. With spirits such as this, it was no wonder Miss Ling had such odd ideas.

Hanyi coughed into her hand, wilting a little under his stare. “I might take another look though! Since it’s taking so long, I should show some diligence and review. That’s what big sis would want.”

“I’m sure she would,” Bao Qian sighed, keeping half an eye on the road ahead, a tug of the reigns adjusted for the turning coming on, ahead, there was a little smoke rising, the border outpost of the Meng. Soon they would be on the final leg…

“Oh do you see that! Are we there yet!”

His eyebrow twitched, and Bao Qian felt a faint ache beginning to throb in his temples.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

***

Bao Qian was kind of a stiff guy. No wonder he had such a hard time getting Big Sis’ attention. Hanyi thought. She lay on the softly upholstered bench built into the inside of his wagon, kicking her bare feet in the air as her eyes slid across the characters written on the scroll open in her hands. It was all formal and dry and boring.