Threads 103-Descent 5

There was a time and a place to hurry, to bluster and threaten. Ling Qi did not think that now was that time. Liao Zhu had not reported threatening movements from their enemies, and her group was not under immediate threat. And if she messed this up and started a fight, both of those things could change quickly.

Ling Qi looked up at the circling swarm of chittering, inhuman eyes, the quiet harmony of her arts echoing in her thoughts. She needed to understand this thing if she was going to talk to it, and yet, as she reached out with her spiritual senses and tried to submerge herself in the flows of the creature’s qi, she found…

Chaos. Filth. Rot. Ling Qi almost gagged as her spirit brushed against the creature’s putrid, churning essence. Without the filter of Sixiang, the creature’s voice was like a thousand screaming animals in the midst of slaughtering. She swayed on her feet, and only a quick pulse of reassurance through her bond stopped Zhengui from stepping forward with wrath in his eyes.

“Hey, now. Don’t try to steal my job,” Sixiang joked nervously, the “water” at her feet rippling.

<I needed to try,> Ling Qi thought, wincing.

And her efforts had not been for nothing. She now understood just why Zhengui was so on edge. The core of this creature was something utterly repulsive. It was not death, not consumption, but [Stagnancy]. It was a beast of the dark, a thing of hunger and want, but it did not move. It did not act. It only reacted. It fed on the things which happened to wander within. There was no drive to it other than that.

Ling Qi was feared because she was not food. She was poison, poison which it had never before encountered. The creature was strong, probably stronger than her given its enormous size and well of not-qi, but it was not a creature used to what she would think of as combat.

<Sixiang, keep translating please,> she thought. She did not want to touch this thing again. Even thinking of her physical body touching it made her skin crawl now.

“I understand that prey is scarce,” she said, choosing her words with care. “But my companions and I do not draw sustenance from such things.”

Sixiang rippled beneath her feet, and Ling Qi cocked her head, listening to the dream echoes of her own words and the way the muse subtly altered the imprecise connotations born by spoken language. It wasn’t quite the same as conveying something with music, if only because she wasn’t certain she could really understand the creature’s perspective well enough to convey her feelings to it.

But she watched and listened to Sixiang’s echoes all the same.

[Trespasser not hunger? Lies / deception / prey?]

Alien eyes narrowed and swirled, chittering as pupils split into sharpened teeth and closed in, only to squeal in pain as they brushed against the perimeter of Sixiang’s being. She could feel the creature’s confidence growing, new eyes being born in the dream maelstrom as it began to puff itself up in a blustering display.

“No!” Ling Qi shouted, and cold rippled out through the dream. The creature squealed as images of frozen mountain peaks and howling blizzards, of frozen streets and weeping voices in the dark, wormed through the storm of color.

Beside her, Zhengui let out a bellow, and green surged out, impaling eyes upon writhing roots and branches, and Hanyi puffed out her chest, joining her own voice to Ling Qi’s in a wintery howl.

“We are not prey,” she said harshly, letting her voice ring with a hint of threat. She had been too soft and conciliatory, and the creature had taken it as a sign of weakness. “We do not seek to devour you though. Our prey is elsewhere. We want to pass through, and no more.” The cold wind stopped blowing, and Ling Qi withdrew back into herself, icy mist resting about her shoulders like a cloak. “We do not need to fight each other,” she added more softly, her mind racing as she worked to immerse her thoughts in the creature’s stark mindset.

It was easier than she liked to admit.

“We would only…[expend / tire / wound] without [gain / sustenance].” Ling Qi almost startled as she heard her voice waver into the bizzarre not-words that sometimes punctuated a spirit’s speech.

The swarming eyes shied back, and the large goat-like eye glared down at her as it circled around. Some eyes nipped at memories of deathly chill, and others withdrew as frozen teeth shattered. It occurred to her that down here, in the tepid and temperate caves, neither the creature nor its prey had ever experienced such extremes of temperature.

[Not prey / food / sustenance,] the thing agreed grudgingly. [Entropy / Poison / Emptiness and Silver. Seek Elsewhere?]

Ling Qi held in a sigh of relief as she contemplated her next words. While she had wished to stay friendly, she would need to make sure not to speak in a way that implied uncertainty or weakness.

“We seek to go below where the…” She frowned and did her best to picture and convey the image of the assassin thing she had faced. “… dwell. We need you to stop obstructing the path.”

[Silver Dream would Starve US!] The thing’s chittering voice was growing clearer in her mind, though it still felt like clammy slime across the surface of her thoughts. [No fight / struggle / kill, but go. Go around. Seek Land of Bones and Worms. Leave US.]

“No,” Ling Qi disagreed, “you would only need to withdraw for a short time. We must go down.” She thought of Bao Qian and moving hills, of prideful rivers and more prideful dragons. “We are not prey, but we can… make an exchange.”

Her words rippled out through the dream realm, carried by Sixiang to propogade as whispers among the swarming eyes.

“Are you sure that was a good idea, Sis?” Hanyi asked quietly. “This thing feels greedy.”

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Zhengui rumbled his agreement, watching the swimming eyes suspiciously.

Ling Qi flexed her hand, causing tiny chimes to sound, and drew upon [The Mist], thickening the cloudy mantle around her shoulders. “There is no need to make this come to violence. We need to save our energy for actual enemies.”

[Feed US the shard of Entropy / Desire.]

As if to rebut her words, the thing’s demand and the way its gaze shifted to Hanyi nearly made her lips twist into a snarl. “No. You will not have her or any of my companions,” she said furiously.

The fungal mind let out a keening, displeased wail. Hanyi glared at it.

“There is no need for conflict. That does not mean that we can’t,” Ling Qi said. Drawing upon the lessons of the Playful Muse’s Rapport art, she stared down the large eye and put both power and sincerity into her words. “My leader is far stronger than you or I.”