Threads 275-Grudges 6

Ling Qi drew her breath into her lungs and exhaled, beginning the next stanza of her song. Moisture became falling snow, swiftly dirtied to gray by dust and mud. She sang of the girl, little more than an animal, living only to survive. The girl was but one rat, one starving street hound among the packs and swarms that roamed Tonghou’s streets.

They devoured the weakest, the strongest, the kindest and the cruelest alike. It was only those who stayed low who survived, unpunished. The living were those who heeded only the call of empty belly and cold limbs.

They were a multitude. They were alone.

A shadow with a face of bone came to the girl and took her away. She had something the others lacked, the shadow had said, a spark, a fire.

The shadow had been wrong. It was nothing so active. She was only lucky.

It was often said that luck was merely another talent, but so few who said those words understood them. Luck was most often all that separated a pauper from a prince.

At the mountain where the girl had been taken, there were many people and many trials. Forms appeared in the mist, familiar faces and figures caught in moments of action. Bai Meizhen, staring at her like she was some strange animal. Su Ling, squinting and suspicious. Suyin, painfully open and kind. Xiulan, haughty and demanding.

There, freed from privation of the body, the girl was able to contemplate the privation of her spirit. As starvation had been privation of the body, isolation, the girl realized, was privation of the soul, and from this privation was born suffering. On the mountain, she had reached out. And her friends had reached back.

What the girl wanted simply couldn’t be done alone. No power could change that. And so, the girl learned to speak, to act, to express.

And when the time came, she reached out with paper and ink to salvage her first failure in those arts. In the Mist, a woman and girl, the latter so tall now, and the former so small, embraced.

The girl was no saint. She could not love all. She did not even want to try. But she would see that people spoke to one another and that they did not shatter over miscommunication or by silence.

People would speak, and people would hear. Perhaps this communication would change nothing in the end. After all, one could hear without listening and speak without expressing.

But even though she only had two hands, others had hands as well. The threads of connection did not demand that she alone bear their burden.

And so, the lonely streets would be driven back.

Ling Qi’s music faltered, color and darkness flashing in her mist. Her phantoms distorted, her illusions bent, and her dantian cracked, its outer surface flaking away like a clay mold, revealing the denser, more potent core of whirling wind gusting around a core of black ice which shimmered with memories and dreams yet to be. Ling Qi felt her body lighten, mortal flesh becoming just a little more phantasmal, and her awareness expanded past her skin into the air and the mist and snow.

The fifth stage, the framing stage, was hers. Her domain was more real than before. The frame was there now, just waiting to be filled.

The phantoms of her friends and family and acquaintances gathered around her in a half circle, herself at the zenith as the mist cleared, and as one, they bowed to her audience. The ancient horned skeleton bound to the pillar regarded her with sockets full of glittering black petals.

“Interesting.”

***

“Ling Qi.” Cai Renxiang’s voice was deeply exhausted, her nose pinched between her fingers. The tea cup set before her on the fine tabletop was forgotten, the faint trail of steam rising from it drifting unnoticed.

“Lady Cai, I can’t possibly be blamed for this one,” Ling Qi protested. She blew softly on her own cup. The fog that drifted off of the impossibly cold cider parted, leaving her free to drink. Rimefruit extract was very expensive, but frankly, Ling Qi was sure that she had earned a treat at this point.

“I don’t know,” Bai Meizhen said in mock consideration. She cradled her own cup close. “Perhaps if you had followed my advice for that worm.”

Together, the three of them sat in Cai Renxiang’s sitting room, drinks and light snacks arranged neatly across the table. Xiao Fen had insisted on doing the settings, and even now, she lurked in the shadows, ready to dart out and replace anything missing.

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Ling Qi thought she should join the other girl, but the idea had seemed to cause Xiao Fen almost physical pain.

Ling Qi rolled her eyes. “And in doing so, I would have gotten myself kicked out of the Sect, and you, almost certainly punished as well. Come on, Meizhen. Even I knew you were overreacting to what ‘that worm’ had done at that time.”

Meizhen turned up her nose haughtily. She didn’t contradict Ling Qi though.

“No, you cannot be blamed. Not in any rational sense anyway,” Cai Renxiang’s eyes squeezed shut.

“Are you saying that you are afflicted by irrational thoughts, my lady?”

Cai Renxiang let a long breath through her nose, but did not rise to her bait.

Not quite there yet, Ling Qi supposed.