Threads 433-Green 2

“Ready to move, little brother? Come with me to the edge.”

He trundled up beside her. In the liminal, he was only as high as her shoulder, his spirit not quite caught up to his body.

Ling Qi clapped her hands twice and bowed three times as the lake and circling mountains blurred away. “I offer my respects to the great Patriarch of the South.”

“Zhengui offers his respects to the great Patriarch of the South.”

The infinitely tall trees stretching beyond sight above and below loomed ahead. The endless forest had been the first sight she had seen in controlled steps into the dream, and down among the leaves and branches, the teetering ruins of a hundred settlements all built atop each other and sinking into dust sprawled in the twilight. Above, winding through clouds and distant leaves from a canopy out of sight, the kilometers-long coils of draconic scales undulated through the unending twilight.

Their words echoed. Ling Qi felt, more than saw, an eye larger than her whole body roll towards them and fall upon their bowed heads.

Towering pride earned a hundred times over was a weight upon their backs, and Ling Qi grimaced as she felt the smoldering flames within her flare, sending spasms of pain through her limbs. Then, it passed. The dragon patriarch bound to Sect Head Yuan He took no offense nor interest in their doings.

Ling Qi took a deep breath, and looked out over the ruins. Far in the distance, she saw a tower of teetering buildings begin to fall, a slow motion calamity of crumbling wood and stone and rising dust. And there, she saw a flash of brilliant, verdant green.

“That is where we are going?” Zhengui peered out beyond the edge of her isle. He sounded nervous.

It was disquieting to hear him like that.

“Yes. Do you want me to carry us there?”

“Zhengui thinks that he should. This young king has been practicing with his fires,” her little brother said hesitantly. “But Big Sister is the expert of the spooky, twisty places…”

“You should take us away, little brother. I have a feeling you might be the better navigator on this journey.”

It was only a hunch, but when it came to the liminal, one had to be willing to trust their feelings to an extent, and right now, she felt like the labyrinth of layered city would impede him less than her. With the way she had begun to think of history and the past, she felt she might not be much better at navigating it than she was that first day, despite her greater skill.

Poor Meng Dan might just get lost here forever, if she didn’t keep a tight hold on his hand.

Ling Qi turned to her little brother and appeared atop his shell without taking a step, Qiyi’s silk billowing around her in an unseen wind.

The dress’ consciousness was distant. Ling Qi worried, but it was more like the mind of someone deep in cultivation. Qiyi was probably preserving herself against the dissolving tug of the liminal atmosphere.

“Okay! Gui can do this.”

“I, Zhen, am the one who can do this,” his other half scoffed.

A chair not unlike that of his shrine harness appeared for her to take a seat in. She lowered herself into it as the xuanwu began to back away from the edge of the island. The shadowed, ghostly memory of hexagonal clay plates began to whirl around them, immaterial without Xuan Shi here to support their existence.

He reached the far side of the island and oriented himself toward the layered city. And then, her little brother charged. It was hard to call anything in a tortoise’s gait a “run,” but his trunklike legs ate up the liminal ground, rocking the island with his weight. That momentum flung them from the side of the island, carrying them briefly into the misty air of the bottomless forest.

As they began to fall, wind screaming past her ears, his legs withdrew into his shell, and she heard the snapping of sparks and then, a guttural roar like the flame in a kiln forge being flared beyond limits by the pumping of a bellows. Ruddy red and orange flame erupted from where Zhengui’s legs had withdrawn into his shell, and together with her little brother, she soared into the crumbling city of buried histories.

The titanic trees whipped past them, and the curling switchback paths which carved through the chaotic tangle of piled buildings blurred by. Countless, whispering secrets all clawed at her ears as they passed, pleading to be heard, to be known, to not sink forever into the ruin and be forgotten.

But neither of them were here for those kinds of secrets today.

“This a sad place,” Gui rumbled. “It is like if the dead place in the sect were broken, all the names wiped off.”

“Fuel that will never become flame. How unsightly,” Zhen hissed. “Are you secure, Big Sister?”

“I am,” Ling Qi said. The howling wind and roar of the jetting flame was no impediment to speaking or hearing, not for her, but she did squint into the distance. “And that is a good way to describe this place. It is a crossroads and a graveyard for things forgotten.”

“Gui does not like it much. But look, sister, we will need to go through there!”

She looked ahead toward where she had spied green in the distance. There was a vast cloud of dust hanging in the air now between them and it, and they would need to swing very far out to avoid it.

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Ling Qi narrowed her eyes, considering. “Keep steady, little brother. We can handle it.”