Threads 241-Fox 3

Su Ling’s eyes flew open, and her ears and tail were standing on end. “We need to go.” The only hesitation was a faint grimace as she glanced toward the beatifically smiling child.

Ling Qi met Su Ling’s eyes. For that single moment, it was as if she could see the thoughts turning in her friend’s mind.

“Like—” Ling Qi began.

“—Hells,” Su Ling growled.

“Eh?” The ghost’s expression twisted in confusion, flickering between a half dozen faces of cruelty and death as Su Ling’s arms wrapped around them. She was promptly tossed over Su Ling’s shoulders like an unruly sack of rice.

“Bitch is fat enough already. Ling Qi, what do we do?”

Sixiang shimmered and vanished. Not a mote of attention could be spared for frivolous manifestation as they both gazed out of Ling Qi’s eyes, observing the flow of the dream. Wooden walls groaned as if under the force of a gale, and the mists weeped with the grief and pain of the forsaken.

<This should remind you of another escape,> Sixiang whispered.

Ling Qi swallowed, and her hand knifed forward, splitting apart rotted wood like soft clay. She was not the same girl that had fled blind through the house of her mentor, the belly of a hungry, high realm spirit. “Take my hand, and don’t let go!”

Su Ling grasped the hand she threw out in a crushing grip, and Linq Qi leapt through the gash in the shrine and through the veil of scintillating color and unshaped dream. The rush of motion came like the wind screaming past her ears, and the ground blurred away beneath her feet. She was both one with the chaos of shifting colors and stubbornly separate from it, anchored by will and love for a friend who would not take submergence in the formless chaos of the liminal realm half as well.

But there was something wrong. A chain, a binding, terrible weight, came with them. It was grudges and pain and sadness, the terrible aching loneliness of children born and dying without the most meager scrap of love, more hollow than the belly of a street rat who’d not eaten in a week.

The realm of dream made these chains as real as any steel. And the beast they were bound to felt their tug.

Ling Qi stumbled as her feet touched grass.

<No, no, no,> Sixiang murmured frantically in her head.

Ling Qi did not need the reminder to flee as fast as her feet could carry her. She tried for her wings, but they did not answer; her dress was still.

Little children couldn’t fly. Little beggars did not have fine dresses. What fairy tale did she dream?

Ling Qi’s heart thundered in her chest. The trees seemed so tall now, and their shadows so deep. Her lungs burned, her breaths rasped, and tears filled her eyes because she was alone, save for the one who hunted behind. She was just a ragged beggar girl who had wandered too far, never to be missed, never to be found.

Except. Except. Wasn’t there a hand in hers?

At Ling Qi’s core was darkness, a want so deep that she knew, in her heart of hearts, would never be filled. It was desperation and hunger and privation, the desolation of the soul, the death of higher thought and all the things that made a person more than a thing. If a single, petty human word could be applied, it was “Isolation.”

But she had wrapped herself in so many other things. Most of all, she had clung onto the grasping, yearning wind. Hers was not the open blue sky of limitless freedom, the emptiness that accepted no chains. Hers was the blizzard howl, tugging at shutters, begging to be let in.

Her wind was the wind of Want. A greedy, grasping wind for a greedy, grasping girl.

Desire was the desire for more, the desire for the aching to stop, and the desire to be warm by the fire for just a little while. Want was the soul reaching out, the impetus of connection, the abrogation of Isolation, and the seed of Community and Home.

Ling Qi was not the little beggar girl. She held her friend’s hand in hers. She did not die alone in the snow, cherishing a warmth she could never hold. Her dream asserted itself.

A blizzard erupted, and a lightless fire burned at the core, rejecting the dream of desolation.

And still, she ran, grasping that calloused hand in hers even tighter, because though she had thrown off those chains, she knew it was only the edge of the beast’s awareness, not its true strength. But the beast was a languid animal, slow to wake, slow to rouse.

Behind her, she heard Su Ling murmuring between breaths.

“… no truth but what you carve. No justice but what you hold. No meaning but what you make. Reject oneness. Reject enlightenment. Be one of many. Accept the world’s bounty.”

A heavy and coarse and solid qi sparked in her meridians, and Ling Qi felt its conflict with the realm they were in. The qi she was trying to cycle struggled to even maintain form.

“What happened?” Su Ling rasped as they soared, leaving the rough ground to dart among the trees of the grim fairytale forest as an old, awful, and hollow beast stirred in its heart.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Ling Qi understood at that moment why those shadows frightened her when she has long been their kin. This darkness did not want to be filled. It was a hunger without end, a stomach with no bottom. It was something beyond her greed, a cruel, wasting rot in its soul. “Something dragged us back like a chain. I couldn’t jump us out of this little dream realm.”

She doesn’t need to say what it is. Su Ling’s eyes narrowed. “Can you—”

“She can’t. I belong here, silly sister, and now, you do too. You shoulda just been happy to get away,” said the child sadly. “You really are gonna be eaten.”

“You don’t belong here. You don’t belong to her, or them, or anyone else who hurt you. None of you ever did!” Su Ling shouted over the rushing wind. “Fuck, I miss my Gran.”