Threads 478-Grudge 2

Ling Qi, even bodiless, a thing entirely of spirit, felt a wrenching, sick feeling down in her core. She had experienced awful things. She had done awful things. She had scrabbled on the razor’s edge of survival for years and years. The nameless roil of emotion that seared its way up the remaining connections between her and the shadow of this woman, Ming Xia, felt like they could drown her.

She took hold of the flow and wove her fingers through the threads of this weave, as she had observed Sixiang doing in the back of her head and as she had done in interacting with the minds of others with her own technique. Pluck the strings, and bend them just so.

Pause.

The weight remained on her surface. She lay at the bottom of a vessel filled with choking tar and merely held her breath. As she paused though, she shut out the boiling sensation, and caught her breath.

“Well, that’s prolly a bit of the technique in itself,” Sixiang whispered. They hovered over her, not quite touching. There was fear in them still, but she could hear the soft whisper of shimmering rainbow waves and the shoreline of silk and cushions.

Her heart ached. She missed laying on that shore. Why did she take the time for it so rarely before?

“I doubt I can pause a real person,” she replied. There were no words, and she had no lips to move, but it helped her aching head to visualize it that way and to translate concepts into human sounds meant for human ears. It grounded her and stilled the throbbing in her head.

“Maybe not. Bet you mess with your perception of time though. Thought moves much faster than flesh, if you can keep it up. Might make future heists go faster.”

“How are you so unbothered? Didn’t you once think of leaving me and dissolving just to avoid feeling death?” Ling Qi wondered.

“I did. I was nothing but spun sugar at the start, a muse of happy thoughts, born for a moonlit party and dance and meant to fade away with the dawn. That’s what I was. But I decided to stay. We both know you can’t persist as giggles alone. People don’t get to only be one thing.”

“I made you like this.”

“I made myself like this. I just chose to be more real, so I could stay with you. You don’t get to take credit.”

There was the ghost of humor there. They’d spoken of this before, but it hadn’t truly sunk in what it meant, together with Sixiang’s acceptance of the nightmare aspects within them.

“So there’s nothing in this…”

“It hurts you. So, it’s hurting me.”

That wasn’t the same, she thought.

“Then explain, please,” Sixiang pleaded.

What was a muse for, if not to bounce thoughts from? Sixiang’s presence was an encouragement to her, even as her hold on the flow of the grudge deteriorated.

“In an instant, Ming Xia was reduced from a person to an object. Even her own body wasn’t hers anymore.” Ling Qi shuddered. “And she walked into those chains and was happy in them until the end.”

She’d forced herself to step beyond that conception of love, but at least in these memories, love was a chain. Without it, that man’s betrayal wouldn’t have hurt so. And without it, Ming Xia would probably have dealt with the issue herself with one of the many medicines that could be taken before there was more than one missed moon. And in doing so, her life would have remained her own, or rather, within the cage she had made her life in any way.

That was probably unfair. She had glimpsed the before in the context of Ming Xia’s memories. She was not Ling Qingge. She had chosen that life, and found success and pride in it.

Ling Qi had found that love didn’t have to be a chain, but the Nightmare King’s words did cling on. In the end, she hadn’t fully refuted him. Power wove a chain out of mere threads.

“Yeah, I get it. It’s like what we could have done to each other. Taken something or changed something with the other having no say.”

“I see why this hurts you. I’m sorry, Qi. I hope you really do know. I’d have never done that.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She knew that, in her head. That didn’t mean the same part of her that had recoiled in horror from this grudge could fully dismiss the fear.

The oily, sludgy qi of the grudge was beginning to work free from her grip, and she knew she couldn’t hold it any longer.

It roiled up and swallowed her anew.

Gray.