Threads 66-Foreshock 3

Ling Qi flew, clouds streaking by overhead and the earth blurring away beneath. The wind did not touch her, did not tug at her hair or snap the hems of her gown, and the fur-lined cloak that hung about her shoulders did not so much as ripple in the breeze. She flew in utter silence, a streak of grey and black across the sky, no more than a passing shadow.

Where her passage was silent and tranquil though, her thoughts churned. Despite her sureness that this was the right decision, doubt gnawed at her. Faced with potential barbarian raids to the north and spirit attacks from the south, she had judged the potential barbarian raids a greater threat. She had checked the wards on the village herself and had left her command and Zhengui behind, alerted to the danger and instructed to cooperate with Xiulan, while she abused her greater mobility to assist the other two villages in the river valley.

Yet how could she do anything but trust them? She could not be everywhere, could not clutch everything close and never let go. That was the lesson she had learned from Zeqing. She could not let fear command her responses. That was the lesson she had learned from the dream. So Ling Qi flew on and fixed Zhengui’s determination and Xiulan’s confidence in her thoughts.

Sixiang chuckled, the muse’s voice a tickling whisper in her ear. “It’s not like you left them behind to face an army.”

“You know as well as I do that something is wrong here,” Ling Qi murmured back. She faced ahead, silver light flickering in the whites of her eyes as she scanned the rushing landscape and the churning clouds. The sky was beginning to darken, a harbinger of rain, but whether it was natural or barbarian sorcery, Ling Qi could not say. “The timing of barbarians being spotted at just the right time…”

“You’re not wrong,” Sixiang murmured, but Ling Qi appreciated the attempt at comfort all the same.

<We’ll just have to kill them and go back quick. It’ll be easy for Sis,> Hanyi said arrogantly from within her dantian.

Ling Qi smiled wanly at the young spirit’s vote of confidence but spoke no more. She could see the lines of the second village on the horizon, as well as the smoke rising in tiny plumes and the dots swooping through the sky. She could not yet pick out the details, but violence was in the air. She could sense the qi of her peers and the barbarians. As she had guessed, it was no mere rabble of second realms; there were three – no, four – third realms or higher presences, the last lurking up in the clouds, muted and almost hidden from her senses.

As she flew toward the battle, Ling Qi’s gaze flashed over the burning thatch, set alight by lightning strikes, the paddies churned by panicked flight and conflict, and the first and second realm soldiers running to and fro, battling the rain of arrows that fell from the sky, giving mortals time to flee. In the distance, she sensed one of her peers, clashing with a barbarian of equal stature, and on the road, her senses brushed over a familiar presence.

Shen Hu stood in the middle of the road that wound through the fields, an open tunnel yawning from the earth behind him. People fled inside, men and women, young and old, some carrying children or precious belongings. In a circle stretching around him for hundreds of meters around, stones and pebbles rose in their thousands, reshaped into shielding hands, open palms that darted through the air, batting away the arrows that fell upon fleeing civilians. Above him, the rude slab of stone that was his domain weapon shook and smoked as a screaming missile, a vortex of churning cutting air that howled like a damned soul, slammed down upon it. The sight was not unique; the air was filled with screaming missiles, arrows that formed the air into spinning funnels of death that howled as they fell.

Ling Qi saw where they had fallen unblocked. She saw the ruins of a house, its roof gone and walls blown outward by a blast, and the body of the woman lying face down in the mud, wooden shrapnel in her back. She saw the blood pooled in muddy craters slowly filling with water where the defenders had been too slow. Ling Qi saw and remembered a nightmare of fur and teeth, of screams and bloody bones, gnawed and cast aside.

She turned her gaze toward the swooping gliders and galloping horses with their ruddy fur and blood damp manes, and her eyes and heart were cold.

“Ling Qi…” Sixiang’s sad whisper was a distant thing, something she had no time to acknowledge.

She raised her flute to her lips, and even as the melancholy melody poured forth and the world was consumed in dark and hungry mist, she released her ironclad grip on her qi. There was satisfaction in seeing heads turn in her direction and the alarm in their eyes as the churning mist spread, a vast and terrible wave pouring from the sky. The edges of her form wavered; she felt her feet trail off into black mist and the hem of her cloak dissolve into shadow as dark qi flooded her meridians, her techniques activating one after another. Silvery eyes nestled in the folds of her robe, and for a moment, she saw herself, a wraith with eyes of flickering silver and glacier blue shrouded in mist and night. Lines and veins of emerald power pulsed and throbbed in the folds of her gown like shadows in negative, and where she passed, rain became snow and sleet.

Tribesmen wheeled in the air and fled before her mist toward the cloudline where their leaders waited. Her mist rolled over mortals and soldiers alike, but no horrors waited in the mist for them to claw and bite, and no cutting cold chilled their flesh. For those below her, there was only the melancholy melody of the vale and the cold and distant song of the frozen peak.

As Ling Qi at last crossed over the road, she was finally able to take her enemies into account. She could sense them scattered throughout the farmland, harassing and harrying soldiers and civilians. There were over a hundred tribesmen, grouped in little packs; most were first realms, but she could feel at least a score of second realms, most of which were gathering about the two third realms who had pulled up near the belly of the clouds, concern visible in the fluctuations of their auras.

It was difficult to pick out the exact stage of the third realms as she could not tell where the barbarian ended and the beast began, but there was also something strange in the air, a subtle static that made the hair on the back of Ling Qi’s neck rise. Her gaze rose to darkening rainclouds where she sensed the hidden, fourth presence, a smudge on her senses that set her on edge.

Further out, she could sense one of her fellow scout officers she had come out with still clashing with, or rather, being harried by, a third barbarian presence and a half dozen second realms. This was the strength of the cloud tribesmen, the supremacy of the skies over the lower realms. Had Ling Qi not herself used that much to her advantage in the past?

It was unfortunate for them that the Lady Duchess and her apprentices had begun to neutralize that strength. One way or another, she would make them regret having come here. She glanced down and met Shen Hu’s gaze on the ground far below. With her mist keeping the tribesmen’s archers at bay, his evacuation was going much more smoothly. Already, she could sense most of the villagers traveling beneath the earth back toward the stone walls of the village center and the earthen shelters that she knew lay below it.

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