Threads 303 Identity 8

It was impossible to know someone perfectly without being them. Shu Yue had asserted that. And on further thought, Ling Qi felt she understood that more clearly now. People hid or held thoughts back. They remained silent when they shouldn’t have. And that was the people she was closest to, let alone acquaintances and strangers.

But the right solution wasn’t to cut everything off from herself and accept no strings at all. She was also sure of that. She could neither blindly trust nor could she rip the truth from other minds. Neither path was acceptable.

She had to be able to seek. She had to be able to hide. Choosing whom she shared such treasures like her secrets with was necessary to the path she was beginning to see. Choice, that vital thing, was at the heart of her resolution. Her Communication. Mutuality was needed for the sharing of secrets. And when there were things that could not be shared, she needed to be able to keep them.

She felt a stirring in the cool, dark qi that ran through her meridians with that realization. The Hidden Moon was not only a seeker of secrets. It was also their keeper. Like the Dreaming and the Nightmare, it, too, was divided against itself.

And she was just as much its disciple as the Dreaming.

This was not the time for pride or for stubbornness. As the antlered shadow loomed closer in the mist that was Sixiang, Ling Qi squeezed her eyes shut and called out for help in hiding something most precious.

And she felt someone respond like a single, sleepy, languid eye cracking open in the darkness. It was familiar and unfamiliar. It was not Xin, but the being that had heard her was certainly a follower of the hidden moon.

“I know he’s obligated to loom ominously and build tension, but I hope you have a plan,” Sixiang fretted.

Ling Qi grasped his hand a little more tightly. She slowly opened her eyes, feeling the germination of an idea, just a tiny tidbit of knowledge. “Don’t I always have a plan?”

“No, you definitely don’t,” Sixiang refuted, looking even more concerned.

“I can only ask you to trust me.”

“Now, that’s just unfair. But you know what? I think this’d be a fun thing to break.”

“That’s the spirit.” With her free hand, Ling Qi grasped the cloth of her cloak and flung it out, and her shadow expanded a hundredfold to follow it, engulfing them both in lightless silence.

“To flee, to hide, to avoid. It seems for all your bluster, naught has changed. You speak of choice and knowing, but only to deny what is. You choose delusion. Disappointing.”

In shadow, as shadow, the voice of the nightmare reverberated through every particle of her being and through Sixiang’s being. Dissolved into her shadow, they were close now, as close as they had ever been outside.

And in that moment, something clicked into place in Ling Qi’s mind. The stealing games with Huisheng. Shu Yue’s meditations. The nature of the dream and her own realization.

Strings were tied at both ends.

Sixiang was terribly vulnerable. Open, defenseless, their connection was too strong. Ling Qi could do at any moment to Sixiang what she had realized Sixiang could do to her. With their qi so closely aligned, it would be an immense benefit to her cultivation, perhaps even enough to press her to the threshold of the next stage or even past it. She could feel that Sixiang saw her realization, open to each other as they were.

There was nothing that could stop her.

Save for herself.

They dispersed onto the currents of the dream, a dozen fleeing packets of self, tightly embraced.

The sound of a hundred hooves skittering like the legs of a titanic spider across stone bore down upon them.

“It is futile. There is naught—”

The voice paused, the all-consuming presence of the nightmare seeming to still.

“Interference. O seeker, trickster, and thief, where do you come to the notion that obscurement, hidden intentions, might strengthen your self who proudly demands to speak?”

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For communication to mean anything, for two minds to remain themselves, the choice of silence had to exist, Ling Qi thought, scattered fragments of thought pinging between her deliberately scattered self. She flew and skittered and flowed through the dream and the shadows under snowy boughs, the frozen forest reforming again as the Nightmare Lord reasserted himself.

If she wanted friends, family… and even closer love, there would always be some unknown left in them. There would always be some need for faith and trust in the other, lest she be surrounded by mirrors and puppets in truth. She could have kept watching. She could have peered into that last little bit Sixiang had held back from her and interrogated just what the word “love” meant to the muse, but she wouldn’t force that. It all came back to her assertion. The difference between what she feared and what she wanted was choice.