Threads 20

In Dream, Ling Qi was surrounded by kin. Through the currents of thought and great abyss of consciousness, she swam with countless millions of her kin, forming patterns of color and brightness of incomprehensible beauty and complexity. In and out of Dream did her kin swim, breaching briefly into the alien realm of the Real. Each time, they carried a hint of Dream’s Spark and returned, enriched by new droplets of thought to add to Dream.

In Dream, Ling Qi was born and died a thousand times. She emerged wriggling from the hide of great leviathan [Grandmother/Emerald Dancer/Sister Brightsong/Dreaming Moon Local Avatar &*^*&%^(&)] to dance and play and sing with her siblings in the churning wake of the leviathan’s passage and to breach the surface and the Real with dreams and hope and creative sparks. When she had swum and danced and played and gathered the hopes, creativity, and desires of the Real onto herself until her belly bulged and her eyes sagged with exhaustion, she returned, a shed scale resuming its place and dying so that a new dream could take its place.

It was beautiful, a system without loss. Old ideas and abandoned thoughts fell into Dream to be renewed and returned to the Real, subtly different than before. The people of the Real fed the Sea of Dream, and the Sea of Dream buoyed the Real, urging them to new heights of creation.

Here, Ling Qi knew not fear or sadness. Though she touched thoughts of those kinds in every cycle, never did they cling to her. They were often the seeds of creation, but the feelings themselves could not take root in a being without permanence. Without context, such things were meaningless.

She experienced a thousand cycles and never learned a single thing. Each momentary existence, each creative spark, each muse passed and faded like a waking dream. With each passing cycle, Ling Qi felt her own mind diverging from the experience she was following until at last she felt like an observer, rather than a participant.

It repeated until the cycle that came one night in a broken tower under the bright moonlight. It was boring, as such things usually were. The dreams of spirits were bland and lacked humans’ fundamental spark, but Grandmother had obligations, and she had been shed to entertain. What a joy it was then when a human had swept in, sending ripples through Dream with her potential! Sixiang felt it right away; this was the one they had been created from. Grandmother sure liked playing around.

That had been when the real party had begun, in Sixiang’s opinion. The human had performed wonderfully, and Sixiang had gotten swept up in the human’s inebriation, laughing and singing and dancing all the night until at last, feeble flesh failed to keep up with shining spirit, and the human, Ling Qi, fell into a stupor and ceased to be much fun at all.

Ling Qi felt a bit indignant and embarrassed, watching her escapades from the outside, but such thoughts ceased as Sixiang found herself faced with their Grandmother once again. Before, from the perspective of proto-Sixiang, she had perceived the other spirit as a great leviathan from which muses were shed like scales, but with herself separated, she saw more.

The leviathan was herself only a single scale of something greater. Stretching out far beyond her perspective, Ling Qi beheld the Dreaming Moon whole and found herself insignificant in its face. If Cai Shenhua had been a mountain of impossible vastness, the reality of a great spirit dwarfed even that. One could comprehend reaching the top of a mountain, no matter how high, but this… It was if the world had flipped upside down, and the whole of the earth loomed overhead.

And, to her growing incomprehension, she found that this was only the face which looked upon the Empire. A spike of pain shot through her mind, and she saw in the blurry distance: a green skinned man of with beard bound in a stiff coil holding a strange golden scepter in his hand; another with a gleaming silver helm and a shining ruby who soared through the stars; and beyond even that, an androgynous figure with eyes of purest flame that danced in cruel merriment; and…

Ling Qi shuddered as Sixiang tugged at her sleeve, and her attention was dragged away. She felt a sense of sheepish shame as Sixiang chided her for her distraction and looking too closely at things that she was not meant to see. They floated bodiless in the churning Sea that formed Sixiang’s metaphor for Dream, and the memory they had been in dissolved.

Sixiang laughed at her befuddlement as she mentally flailed, suddenly free to move on her own in this space which was not strictly speaking space. Yet despite her lack of body, she found herself comforted by a feeling much like a hand holding her own. Ling Qi calmed herself, and for a moment, she allowed herself to enjoy the beauty of dream, simplified as she knew it was. Yet, even now, the colors were fading away. What was happening?

She had spent longer than she had thought staring at the Dreaming Moon, she understood from Sixiang, understanding without the barrier of words. Sixiang would have to sleep soon to complete their transformation. But first, here, bolstered by argent energy filtered through Ling Qi’s own dantian, Sixiang wanted to know one more thing: which of her elements did Ling Qi feel was most important to what she wanted to be?

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Was it wind? It had fallen behind in her arts, and she had rejected the idea of absolute freedom, but did the playful joy of the wind spirit still exemplify what she wanted to be? Would she have done better in recent trials if she found again the thread of cunning and creativity that had kept her alive in earlier days?

Was it darkness? So many of her arts cultivated it, and it went so well with her own covetous nature, of never wanting to let anything go if she could at all help it. Yet perhaps it was only her growing strength, but had it not encouraged a more brute force approach to problems?

Was it water? She did not often think of it, but many of her arts incorporated the element as a secondary. The virtues of persistence in pressing forward that arose from water had been a part of her for some time, even if it was not as visible and prominent as the other elements.

Or perhaps Wood? When she had begun cultivating, boundless growth and vitality were hardly among her virtues, but had it not served her well? Many trials remained in her future. She could not remain still, but that was not all that there was to the element, now was it?

Ling Qi thought hard, floating there in the dissolving dream. It was a difficult question. She knew that elements were simplifications, shorthands to understanding of the world. They could be divided or added together in an endless number of ways, and as such, deciding which one was the best was an exercise in futility. Yet there was still value to the question because despite their differing natures, she and Sixiang were both young and small, and that shorthand was their only way of understanding at this point in their development.