Threads 284-Winter’s End 3

Hanyi began to sing, and Ling Qi listened closely. The song was light and graceful, resembling the piece Ling Qi had helped her compose some time ago for that last concert before the journey south, but this version was more strident and mature.

And as Hanyi sang, flurries of snow crystallized in the wind that whipped up around her, resulting in falling flakes and pebbles of hail. The bite of the wind grew sharper, and the hems of her gown kicked up as her bare feet left the stone, carried aloft on the wind. Ling Qi felt Hanyi’s qi thinning, diffusing out into the surrounding air. The flurries soon became a curtain of snow and sleet.

A veil of glittering frost lengthened her gown, shadowed Hanyi’s face in a veil of shadow and crystal. The song grew softer as she seemed to retreat into the snowfall, a lithe shadow in the snow.

This was a song about the coming of winter, the cold wind entering the stage, and the beauty of the first snow, falling in sparkles upon the earth.

Ling Qi reached out a hand, feeling the driving snow on her fingers, infused with a potent qi that left a faint buzzing feeling on her fingers as it tried to drain away her qi. She felt the tug at her mind too, riveting her attention on her singing little sister. The power of the technique muddled a bit on her, unable to take hold on her thoughts, but…

<False affection, and a desire to protect. It’ll be really hard for anyone to take aim and hurt Hanyi on purpose,> Sixiang whispered.

And it was preparation. Ling Qi could tell that the ice qi was filling the air with snow, potent and ready for use in further techniques, and it was also diffusing what did try to strike the singer through it. A strong opening move.

Ling Qi smiled at the shadowed maiden’s silhouette. “Hanyi, did you really make a technique just to seem taller?”

The haunting song cut off, and the shadow in the snow glared at her with glittering white eyes, planting hands on her hips. “Big Siiiiis, let me be cool!”

“You’re very cool, for sure,” Ling Qi soothed. She stepped into the falling snow, ignoring the faint tingle the flesh-shattering chill left on her skin, and wrapped her junior sister in a hug. Up close, the ice that had gathered, lengthening Hanyi’s gown and veiling her face, did look very elegant. “I’m just teasing. It looks very effective. It sets up for other techniques, right?”

Hanyi stepped back, frost glittering on the front of her gown, and she crossed her arms irritably over her chest. “Hmph, yeah, it does. It’ll let me build up my power, and protect me while I do.”

“It’s a good idea for an opening,” Ling Qi said thoughtfully.

“So, what do you have, Big Sis? Thought of how you’re going to start your song yet?” Hanyi challenged.

“I’ve had some thoughts.”

After the conversation with Jaromila in the south, her performance as the Diviner Tsu at the Sect, and even the visit in the Dream to the crone’s hut only a few days ago, she had come to a conclusion on truth. Endings, the ones she created and the ones she inflicted, should pave the way for something new. If she killed, she wished to do so knowing that there was some purpose, and that a goal was advanced or improved in the doing.

<Most people want to think that. It doesn’t stop what we saw under that mountain,> Sixiang whispered.

That was the trouble when thinking in terms of seasons and of cycles. It was easy to find only stagnation and endlessly repeat her actions in the hopes of a different result. Maybe this was the wrong way to approach the subject. Shu Yue’s words and the expectations of Cai Renxiang’s mother, too, were also relevant.

Even if one turning rhymed with the last and even if there were certain base similarities in the cycles, they were not the same. Cai Renxiang was not Cai Shenhua, and Ling Qi was not Shu Yue. Else it was worse than worthless. It was only the horror and nightmare they had trodden lightly on in the dream.

And she had found some support for that concept in the writing of Meng artists and in meditations on the turnings of years and centuries and on loss and nostalgia.

The seasons turn, but the past year is not repeated.

“Hey, Big Sis, you just gonna stand there looking mournful in the snow?” Hanyi called out, shaking her out of her thoughts. Her junior sister stood there in her normal garb again, arms crossed and an eyebrow raised.

“Sorry, I lost myself in thought,” Ling Qi said ruefully. “I was going to show you some of what I had in mind, right?”

Ling Qi began to hum to herself, turning away from Hanyi to stride across the cold stone well away from where her junior sister had made her own display. Faint outlines of frost formed around her footfalls as she did, and in her hand, a length of clear blue-tinted ice began to form. It was a flute, glittering and half-transparent, much like Zeqing had once used while instructing her. She raised the flute to her lips, allowing her eyes to drift closed as she began to play some experimental bars.

The Aria of Spring’s Ending was the first technique of Zeqing’s Frozen Soul Serenade art. It was a melody that sounded off the end of warmth and heralded the obliteration of life. Here, in the eternal cold of the mountain peak, there would never be a spring, but that’s not the type of song that Ling Qi wanted. Hanyi had chosen to focus its cold emanations upon herself, retaining its defensive properties while transforming its aesthetic, making it her gown and veil.

In contrast, Ling Qi wished to focus it outward. To that end, in her mind’s eye, she envisioned Ice. She envisioned ice like that which covered the mountain peaks or which blanketed the southern lands and the peaks of the Wall creeping across every surface and foe, stilling and silencing to put the world into slumber. She envisioned a field of ice flowers blooming from the old and the stagnant and the dead, shattering and releasing their heat.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Ling Qi’s Ending was not the stasis of a mountain peak above the clouds but the winter cold that preceded a new dawn and spring. Though the spring was not her, maybe one day, she could create a song to complement her successor art, but more likely, it would be another’s role to represent the storm of spring.