Threads 279-Sea of Dreams 3

She wasn’t going to be caught again. Not like she had been with the fox.

“Xuan Shi, we’re going to move much faster now,” she warned. The pressure of the voices scratching at her thoughts was growing now, and the mineshaft rumbled and contorted, bending all around them. Ling Qi flickered, appearing on top of Zhengui’s shell, and offered a hand down. “Hop on.”

He looked at her for a moment and then clasped her forearm. His bulky ceramic gauntlets were cold from the chill of her presence. She hauled him up with her.

“Aw, c’mon, chickening out already?” Kongyou taunted. “But my cousins want to play!”

“It isn’t your cousins I’m worried about!” Sixiang shouted back over the noise in the tunnel. It sounded like a wailing wind, but it was so much heavier than that.

Ling Qi let the bickering wash over her without comment as Zhengui began to amble forward. A cold and sparkling mist flowed from her sleeves and the hem of her gown.

It was one of the earliest promises she made in her cultivation, back before she had ever even heard of domains or names or laws. In her breakthrough to the second realm, she had abandoned the dream of the infinite blue sky, unmoored wholly from the base earth. Sometimes she forgot. Sometimes, it troubled her. And sometimes, she failed.

She wasn’t going to today. Her wings were strong. She would carry as many as she wanted to.

Motion, she realized, was life and joy unobstructed by the chains of destiny. Wings beating in tandem could soar through even the most terrible storm.

Wind erupted as the thought crossed her mind, and they shot down the tunnel past shapes and images of suffering in the dark, the death of peoples and the cruelty of tribes and kingdoms and empires. Inevitability crushed down upon them like the pressure of the ocean. This inescapable fate was one that humans built for themselves.

Beside her, Xuan Shi hunkered down, one hand on his hat, but under the wide brim of his hat, she caught a glimpse of his dark, inhuman eyes. There was a resolve there to match her own.

The rings on his staff chimed over the wind, and the slots on his gauntlets glowed with heat and power as ceramic plates began to fly out, two, then four, quickly passing beyond counting. The plates assembled, mathematically perfect edges meeting in a sharp prow that parted the air before them and a hull to protect them from lashing wind and the grasping claws of inchoate nightmares.

Beneath them, Zhengui’s shell vibrated as her little brother ceased flailing in the wind. There, too, was determination: to protect, to never fall behind, and to never be a burden. Trunklike legs and blunt head withdrew into a stony shell, and even the body of the serpent pulled in, retracting until there was only a dull volcanic glow. And then came heat, a blazing heat that turned crystalizing mist into a churning vortex of wind as flames erupted behind them, fiery orange and verdant green.

Ling Qi steered their vessel through the vortex. The ceramic ship that encased them crackled as dark spirits burned away on contact, leaving only three hexagonal holes from which the cones of life-flame could erupt.

In the howling darkness, Ling Qi came to know the true name of the Nightmare on whom they tread for every cry and broken spirit bore its brand. The name of the Nightmare was the Forever King who whispered sweet despair and acceptance into the ears of the weak and mighty alike. It was the brother of the beast called Other, who bound and blinded men with self-forged chains. The past demanded repetition. It required them to walk ever in the grooves carved by feet that were long since dust.

But the vice of such a beast was always sloth. Its grasp relied upon acceptance and isolation. And freedom grew only when shared because one alone is only ever as free as the strength in their arm allowed.

They erupted from the side of the mountain in a plume of dust and mist and fire, the mountain quaking behind them. It rumbled, it shook, and it cried, a million voices and more rising in accusation that in defiance, they only gave it strength, and that in seeking change, they could only worsen suffering. To deny the inevitability of conquest was only an act of extending its reach.

“And yet, there is no path which does not lie in defiance.”

She glanced at Xuan Shi, who now floated beside her, carried up on the soaring wind that came from the tug of earth’s law. Their ship came apart, a scattering cloud of whirling plates, and all of them were momentarily suspended in the crisp, cold air.

All the world stretched out around them, a cloud-filled sky and mountains without end, stretching like a rumpled blanket of ice and dirt and stone a thousand kilometers below. There, on the far horizon, lay the sun and the rays of the dawn.

“The only thing worse than trying is acceptance,” she agreed, fixing Kongyou with a glare.

The nightmare spirit, tumbling and currently upside down in midair, merely sniffed. “If it were that easy, I wouldn’t exist.”

“If it were impossible, I wouldn’t exist,” Sixiang shot back, clinging to Ling Qi’s back like a cloak.

Behind them and far below, the mountain and the mineshaft shook violently, swelled, and burst apart. A cloud of numberless glittering wings took flight in every direction, and a massive hole, bearing a terrible resemblance to a great mouth, snapped shut and vanished into a rising cloud of dust that quickly concealed the earth behind.

“The horizon is beyond this one’s poor words,” Xuan Shi said. He, alone out of all of them, had righted himself, standing upon an assembled platform of plates, his boots locked to the ceramic surface by crackling qi.

Ling Qi considered the view herself, the great rolling line where mountains touched the great blue sky, forming the line between heaven and earth. The infinite, painted colors of dawn washed over the stone. There was a crisp chill in the air, and the wind that blew past her falling frame. She reached out and brushed her hand against Zhengui, and the world twisted, their frames fading into shadow and dissolving until she stood atop his back, her little brother now falling belly down, his heads just poking out of his shell.

“It’s a sight worth a song,” Ling Qi said, her voice easily penetrating the roaring wind. Her eyes picked out shapes in the distance, distinct from the fabric of the mountain. There were towers of iron, towers of ice, and great bonfires, shards of sunlight embedded in the ice and stone. She pointed toward a tiny, distant silhouette. “This way!”

Xuan Shi nodded, squinting into the distance to follow her point. He extended his arm, and the tumbling Kongyou landed on his arm like a hawk.

And they fell and fell, guided onward by the wind.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

***

“That wasn’t just a nightmare of the past, was it?” Ling Qi asked as she stepped down from Zhengui’s shell, her feet lightly brushing the snow on the mountaintop without making any impression.

“Of course it wasn’t,” Kongyou replied. “You don’t seriously think your buddies, those Wang guys and your Sect, are nice to the ones they conquer, do you?”

The trip down had been peaceful and beautiful, but it was impossible to truly put the nightmare of Conquest from her mind. A large part of her wanted to refute Kongyou’s words and argue that the cloud tribes had always, always inflicted horrors on the people of the Emerald Seas. It was even true.

She just wasn’t sure how much that truth weighed.

“Conflict and conquest are horrors to those who lose. That is why one resolves to see other resolutions. This one thinks that can must come before should,” Xuan Shi said. “The road of peace is long.”

The difference between can’t and won’t was a dangerous line to tread, a tightrope above the jaws of a monster. She did not yet have enough hands.

Kongyou gave a throaty, satisfied chuckle. “It doesn’t take long to come back down, eh?”

“It is fine to keep one’s eyes on the road, so long as the horizon remains in the mind,” Xuan Shi said thoughtfully. “Whence do we go now, Lady Ling?”