Threads 187-Return 6

“Big Sister is worried about something,” Gui accused. They stood on the much abused hilltop where their gardening efforts had taken place. The earth was dark and rich, tilled and fertilized with the shredded remains of their previous efforts.

“It’s nothing serious, Zhengui,” Ling Qi said. “Just confusing human things.”

“Yep, just some social business,” Sixiang added. Their voice came from the tiny projection seated on Ling Qi’s shoulder. “You didn’t miss anything important, big guy.”

“Are you certain? I, Zhen, did not intend to sleep for so long. It has been weeks, yes?”

“It has been a couple weeks, but everyone is just catching their balance, and that goes for you two in catching up on your sleep,” Ling Qi chided. “But you’re awake now, and we still have plenty of time to take another try at this garden.”

“Hanyi is still up on the mountain though,” Gui protested. “Is it really okay for Big Sister to be here?”

Ling Qi thought of her other spirit. She had checked in on her a few times, but…

“Hanyi’s figuring some stuff out too,” Sixiang said cheerfully. “She doesn’t need us poking our noses in right now. Besides, don’t you wanna have something nice to show her when she finishes composing up there?”

Ling Qi let out a breath; Sixiang had told her the same thing. Paradoxically, the right thing to do here was to not keep her junior sister closer. At least right now.

“Mm, Gui will believe the Sixiang. Did Big Sis collect the boulders?”

“I did.” Ling Qi patted her storage ring. “I’ll let you decide on the first arrangement. I have some new stanzas I want to arrange. You’ll give me your opinion, right?”

Three voices rose in the affirmative. Ling Qi was looking forward to this.

As they worked over the rest of the afternoon and evening, the landscape began to change shape, and from atop Zhengui’s back, she cultivated and played her songs, observing how the flows of mist and cold interacted with Zhengui’s fire and wood qi.

The Unstoppable Glacier’s March was an art that she had received in her Cai-gifted library. An art of powerful movement and implacable advance, it was perhaps not the best suited to her. But as she wove a melody together with the rhythm of Zhengui’s stamping feet to raise the heated waters that pooled beneath the hill she pondered that.

Was implacability really unlike her? She was not like Cai Renxiang nor like Meizhen, who better embodied those words in her mind, yet all the same…

In the cold of a city street, she clung to life.

In a terrible blizzard of her mentor’s making, she sang.

A knife dug into her neck, and she grasped the wrist of its wielder.

In the caldera of a volcano, she faced a superior foe, and ever so briefly held fast

A glacier moved ever forward. It carved rivers and valleys, shaping the land under it over countless years. Yet, in the moment, it was still to human eyes. She recalled the great glacier the expedition group had passed over, stretching out to the end of her sight, serene and unbreaking.

Stubborn. She could at least call herself that. Was that not something she shared with her little brother? Although she no longer used the Thousand Rings Art, she could still weather many blows. The art she had replaced it with, the Starless Night’s Reflection, didn’t feel quite right either. She understood the value of silence—without it, any music would just be a meaningless stream of unbroken noise—but she wasn’t sure she cared to make it core to herself.

Perhaps there was something else there in the spaces between that could be made into hers.

That was a thought for the future though. Often, she had thought about how her style and that of her brother’s were in conflict, but was defense not a place where it converged? Endurance and regeneration. Resilience and draining. Any wound he suffered, he recovered swiftly, and any qi she spent, she stole back from her foes.

Green shoots rose from churned black dirt, and roots curled around carefully placed stone. Shoots became saplings and then trees, their fragrant needles flowering across the sky. In the newly made darkness, mist hung low to the ground, and from boiling waters, steam rose into the evening sky. Pale flowers bloomed in the dark, and soft grass spread.

The other art was the Winter Hearth’s Resounding. This art, too, she had only been practicing for a few months, and her thoughts lingered on it as she wove the walking path through the garden, singing softly in duet with Sixiang to transform the mist beyond the paths into veils of glittering silver where those unwelcome would wander lost and to make that mist which clung to the glassy stone cool and welcoming.

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The hearth was a song of building a home, of placing up walls to keep out the cold and keep in the warm. Its weaves defended her works and made that which she crafted with song and voice harder to tear down. It gave friends a point of warmth to return to and recover from the cold night outside.

She was not a builder, but Zhengui was. Every day, his control of wood and plants allowed him to craft more elaborate structures from root and branch, and the fire of the earth came at his call. It was not the same as her arts, but it was complementary.

And that was more important than simply trying to ape her little brother’s themes, even when they did not suit her.

“No weird storms this time!” Gui chirped. “I think this is a good start!”