Threads 437-Green 6

Life coursing through deep black earth, as burning rain falls. Trunks bending and swaying under cataclysmic wind and rain. Splinter. Break. Shatter. Die.

Persist.

Green shoots rise from a splintered stump. Three die: one devoured, one uprooted, and one starving in the shade. The fourth grows, rises, armored in bark and pumped with verdant sap. Breaks again. Dies again.

Persist.

From broken stump, the fifth rises. Then the sixth. Seventh. Eighth. Ninth. A refusal of ruin.

Persist.

Roots grow deep and far. A hundred trunks, ten thousand leaves, a million shoots. Cataclysm roars, the deafening storm at the end of a world. The earth bucks and heaves, spitting the blood of broken continents. Shattered, burned, and broken, but roots remain. Will remains. Trunks, leaves, and shoots rise again.

Persist

Come Wrath. Come Ruin. Though form and body may break a hundred times, as long as will remains, you have not reached the end.

Neither the jungle heat nor the conflagration of the earth or sky were her, but the scenes resonated all the same. She had seen the old iron evergreens clinging to life in the frozen mountains on peaks so cold, the air felt like razors in one’s lungs. They, too, sunk their roots deep, so deep into rock and gravel and ice.

Persist.

Scatter new needles, and come the sun, push new trunk from frozen earth.

A scrawny, starving child, inelegant and ugly, dragged a broken limb into the safe shadows at the alley mouth. She was not the unruffled lake, though she found some value in its depths, the supremacy of formlessness and essence over flesh. She was, in the end, nothing so elegant. She was a stubborn thing who could only…

Persist.

Ling Qi sucked in a sharp breath as her eyelids fluttered, and her senses returned to the present.

“Zhengui sees so much more clearly what Kohatu was saying now,” her little brother murmured in wonder beneath her.

Ling Qi rested a hand over her stomach. Since the end of the summit, she had felt the smoldering sparks of a sovereign’s fire, and the spiritual ash it left behind had clogged her meridians. Now, she felt as if she could breathe without trouble for the first time in months. Her qi flowed without obstruction, and only a few small twinges of pain remained from a single, ruddy spark of sovereign fire flickering angrily at the bottom of her dantian.

Ling Qi bowed low, even as she cautiously felt at the knot of sensations and memories in the back of her mind, left there by Kohatu’s utterance. What she had seen and felt was only the surface of what she had been given. An art. Or at least, that was the shape her mind made of it after peeling apart the many, many layers of meaning embedded in Kohatu’s notion of persistence.

“Thank you for bestowing your wisdom.”

Kohatu’s gaze was hard. “Needed. Sister-mother of my chIld. ToO frAgile. And he must learn, too. KnOw. CaNnot grow alone.”

“Gui will never grow alone,” he promised. “But Gui’s wishes he could…”

“I. CanNot.”

Her voice brought them pause. Ling Qi saw the blackness rising, clouding out the crescent of emerald in Kohatu’s eyes.

“AnGgerR rises. hAte rises. I canNot be free. I am sPIte. Thank you for good memory, good talk. I wiLl try not to lose it. BuT you must gO.”

Zhengui looked terribly upset. “Is there nothing I, Zhen, can do for Kohatu? You should not have to—”

The beast let out a bitter burst of laughter, but there was fondness in it, too. “PeRhaps. AtaMai might still me. FreE me. No others. Not even yoU, child of rUIn.”

“… Okay,” Gui acquiesced. “Goodbye, Kohatu. Gui will not forget. Sister will not forget. Please remember. You do not have to fight for this anymore.”

Kohatu stilled. Then, the dream shook as she whipped her head around and tore into the side of the canyon, sending them spiralling upward on the plume of dust as she resumed burrowing.

She was all but fleeing.

“She could not afford to believe you,” Ling Qi soothed. “Her rage could not allow her to stay and listen to such words.”

“I understand,” Zhengui said. The jets of flame emerging from his shell roared, and they began to soar up and away, letting Ling Qi observe the way that the canyon of Kohatu’s passage had been closing, layers of buildings crawling and shifting back together as if they had never been parted.

This truly was a place of forgetfulness. It was a place for things buried and lost. Staying here too long would wear away even the living.

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“I can bring us back across,” Ling Qi offered.

“Gui would like to fly a little while longer.”

She didn’t offer again. Her mind wandered back to the the imprisoned tortoise in the Argent Peak Sect. The sect had been her first home. It was never a perfect, shining place in her memories, but this apparent betrayal was another layer of tarnish. What could possibly bring such an act about?

Maybe she should talk to Xuan Shi, and he might be able to speak with Elder Lang’s sword more. Was there another reason the elder’s grave was like that? Such a sad, out of the way place without honors or recognition was strange for a notable elder.

She sighed. The times just didn’t line up, and it didn’t help that Kohatu’s memories were obviously warped and unclear.

“I’m glad you could learn what you did, but I wish there were more for you. Zhengui, earlier, I did not mean to…”