Threads 504-Mending 1

She did have one more promise to keep, though. One more conversation to have, before she turned her mind to the task of arranging meetings with the subjugated ith.

“We got a few nights left. Doesn’t have to be tonight,” Sixiang offered.

No, she shouldn’t put this off any longer. They were both avoiding it in certain ways.

“Suppose we are.”

Beside her, at the exit of the palace gardens where she’d gone to linger, looking out over the constellation of lower branches stretching in the yawning depth of the sky below, Sixiang shimmered into existence, a hollow shell of refracted light. It was a thin projection to Ling Qi’s senses, barely there.

“Whatcha thinking then?”

“I think we need to just… talk, without getting sidetracked or deflected. How about we take a walk?”

Sixiang made a show of heaving a sigh, putting their arms up behind their head. “A walk, huh? Yeah, that sounds nice. Where to?”

They left the palace lights behind, skipping distance like a flung pebble skating over the water’s surface. Flashes of the street and the riot of colors on the other side intertwined.

It wasn’t so different from one side to the other. On one side, streets thronged, filled with celebration, laughter and streamers and performances. On the other side, spirits spun and danced, pirouetting in the air between shimmering bubbles of contentment and good feeling and the fuzzy happiness of inebriation.

“What side do we feel like walking on?” Sixiang asked as they emerged from a side street in a shimmer of rippling light, joining the small parade proceeding twigward to the city’s edge.

“Your side. Less chance of interruption, and I want to remember the good of Xiangmen’s dream before I leave,” Ling Qi decided.

“Hard to overhear us when all the music is blaring. Do you mind if I choose a spot?”

She glanced at her muse in surprise. “If you have one in mind, go ahead.”

Sixiang gave her hand a squeeze as they stopped at the edge of a thoroughfare. A small procession of musicians marched through, an impromptu orchestra bringing music to the nighttime streets.

“I got something.”

Ling Qi inclined her head in agreement. Sixiang tugged at her hand, and they stepped back through the veil. Colors and noises rushed by, and thoughts and feelings scattered before them like schools of frightened fish.

They emerged in a hall of silver and glass, overlooking the riot of spirits below. The grand revel she had witnessed on her last journey to Xiangmen was now swollen like a river in the midst of a spring flood, a riot of shapes and bodies crashing through phantasmal streets.

The cacophony was muted, a dull roar. Ling Qi pressed her hand to the seemingly glass pane beside her and her fingers sank into it like mud.

“I remembered. There was a previous part of me whose human kept a viewing platform around Xiangmen. It’s busted and falling apart, as ya can see. It’ll do, though.”

Ling Qi tilted her head as she observed around her. It was like a birdcage, or rather, the bottom of one, with thin bars of silver rising into the sky overhead and melting away into the dome of permeable dreamstuff overhead. Beneath her feet, the bars came back together, creating the floor they stood on.

She could feel an echo from the person who had made it. This was, to them, what her island moon shrine was to her. It had been an entry point, a cultivation chamber. Now, it was faded, only a whisper of poetry remaining in the wind.

“It’s still quite pretty. Do you remember anything else about that dream?” Ling Qi asked. She thrust her hands against the glass and parted it, unleashing a riot of noise and scents, the bubbling good feeling of a city mid-festival.

But it didn’t leave their words to each other any less clear.

“Not really. I don’t have much more than light impressions of past dreams. Permanence ain’t exactly what the Dreaming Moon is about.” Sixiang came up beside her to lean against the silver frame. “So. This conversation.”

“This conversation,” Ling Qi echoed.

Silence stretched between them. Out of the corner of her eye, Ling Qi saw Sixiang’s hair flick in a phantom breeze, growing shorter while their face and shoulders grew broader.

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“I still feel it, even now that I’ve been away from ya. I honestly don’t know how love, that permanent love, not just the fleeting infatuation of a tryst or a dream, works. I just know I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t want to let you go.” Their voice was deeper, and Sixiang looked over at her with a longing look.

Ling Qi felt a skip in her heartbeat, a slight heat that wanted to rise in her cheeks. It wasn’t quite what she’d felt around Meng Dan when he started laying on the charm, but she wouldn’t lie and say there was nothing there. And yet, it was stifled by the confusion around…