Chapter 376 - Woe, Wisdom Be Upon Ye And Your Mirror

Me, watching my Patreon wobble and feeling hella funky after my craziest trip ever; "Hmm, I should write shorter chapters and do so more consistently, to boost production and provide a backlog for when I go to my editing cave properly for once."

Also me, in front of a document in the quiet of my own space for the first time in half a month, feeling my heartbeat a little too loudly; "Hey what if I took three days to refine a 4k word monstrosity who I love so very much and which makes my head feel even funkier."

Hi! Chapter 1 of 2 for tonight!

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Mortaris is a hellhole of smog and sharp edges, Viviae is a pit of scum and mess, and Godsfall is the equivalent of a bad poetry night at the world’s coldest convent- but at least they’re not New Inquisum. 

Fuck New Inquisum. If I wanted six feet of tongue shoved up my ass and wagged around my insides, I’d pay for the privilege, and get some lube involved. Those fuckers can talk your spirit into knots and make you thank them for the privilege- and quite fucking frankly, I’m not that thankful about it. 

-Conversation overheard at a bar by the name of “The Poisoned Chalice”, in Viviae, approximately thirty-seven minutes before the murder of six Inquisitoria. 

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Raika lifts her hands in surrender, palms out. “Woah, kid. I-”

“No! That’s enough!” 

Again she’s put on the back foot, head tilting to one side. It… shit. He’s actually angry. Like, really angry. How did she miss-

No. She can compensate for this. Recalculate. She puts her hands down, keeping her face still, old instincts for social manipulation helping to shape her expression to something neutral, designed for invitation as much as calm. With a wave, she cedes the floor, and-

“Fine, Master. If that’s what it takes for you to listen, then fine.”

She doesn’t blink- corpses don’t need to. But something in that hesitation, in that lack, seems as easy to read as written words for Jin, because he rolls his eyes, his expression tight. 

“I see you do that all the time, Master. When you shape your face like that. Now that you’re in this state, it’s just more obvious.”

He sits down, crossing his legs on rapidly-cooling glass, putting his hands on his knees as he leans forward to face her from a more equal height. 

“I Honor The Dead. That’s my Truth, but it’s also the way I’m cultivating. I don’t have my own Deaths to feed off of, because they don’t belong to me. I listen to them. I see them, even when they’re gone, and when they’re truly gone I remember them. You think I can’t notice things about the most dead people I know?”

He waves a hand out to the city, and the semi-divine corpses that are within and most certainly listening even now.

“Every movement they make is decided. Has to be. No subconscious stuff anymore, because they don’t really have that anymore. If you blink, or breathe, or move in any way, it’s because you’re choosing to. No more facial tics if you don’t put them there- and I’ve noticed all of yours, and the ones missing. I can feel the dead, Master, and even though you’re still here, even though I know you’ll find a way back, you are Dead. You don’t have to pretend for my benefit- not about that, and not about you.”

Inhale. Exhale.

It’s a good rhythm. Good practice, good technique for keeping herself grounded. 

Nevermind that her lungs don’t ache if she holds her breath. Nevermind that it doesn’t clear her mind or synchronize with a heartbeat. Nevermind that they deflate unless she holds them firm.

She closes her eyes, and then opens them again, focusing eyes that she knows look alive, or close enough to be hard to discern, onto her martial son and apprentice and ward and son.

“I’m not pretending, Jin. I’m me. I’m-”

“Don’t say it. Not with that thing still there.”

She looks down at the empty shape of a knife, cutting out from inside her ribcage. It’s not visible, not really real, but if she squints at it just right to see the pitch black of it, the absolute void of color that carves through bone and tissue and something more real than either, then it starts to… feel real. In a way she very much doesn’t like.

She looks away from it, putting it to one side in her mind.

“You are pretending. I know you are. I know you are, because you think it’s the best way to protect me, protect big sis Li Shu, and protect yourself. But you’re dead in a very real way, Master- and you keep pretending like that’s fine, like you’re fine, when you’re obviously not. People who are fine don’t double down on fighting a… a walking bomb-Death that hates you, you retreat and figure things out. You don’t keep antagonizing like you have. I know that there’s not that much time, but we have some. That… that god-thing, the Heart, it said there are decades still, but you act like we have days, and you makes things more chaotic and then throw yourself into them, and you do it alone.”

“I literally just last week relied on you for the portal that had me win my trial against Bishops, kid. Do you really think I do it alone?”

“You did that because you had to. Because you think you’re weak. It doesn’t mean you trust me!”

“You’re a kid. I’m the one who protects you, not the other way around.”

A shuffle from beside her.

“Then maybe take it from someone who isn’t a kid.”

Li Shu’s eyes are… distressingly similar to Jin’s. Clear, resolute- and staring directly into Raika. 

“Your son isn’t wrong, Raika. You discussed this plan with us, but you never asked if we had any ideas or alternatives. You push forward, and it’s our job to patch the holes and keep up, no matter what we think about where you’re running or how fast you’re going.”

“And now, you’re almost deader than Dead,” Jin says, his eyes going to the knife that Raika is trying quite successfully to ignore. “I can see that thing. How… bright it is. How empty. It’s what killed you the first time, isn’t it?”

It’s a rhetorical question, and she doesn’t bother to answer. She’s busy not thinking about it, and Jin just nods, like she’s said something obvious.

“Right. You pushed yourself more than you should, became more of who you were before for a moment, and it came for you. Past the fact that you’re already Dead, and acting… different. It’s not just the planning, or how you force yourself to use other people rather than just yourself for your ideas. Us as tools to let you fight the Bishops, the Bishops as tools to let you fight the Church, the Church as tools to let you fight the world. It’s not how you would have done things before, but it’s also… it’s the same. Pushing forward, fast as you can, hard as you can, messy as you can, so you can use that mess against people.”

“And the alternative?” she asks, her voice quiet and raspy, like her breathing has changed. “What would that be? What plan do you have that lets us get the strength we need to change what needs changing, now rather than when it’s too late? Decades until the End, but not decades before it’s irreversible- that might be a lot less. And there are people who need me, things I need to do, and-”

“Every dead person has things they still need to do. It’s part of being an Echo.”

She stops responding for a moment. She-

“You didn’t look at me when I started talking,” Li Shu says. 

Raika turns her head to look at her, cocking it at a tilt to-

“Like that. You didn’t turn last time. You just saw me anyways. Because you’re dead, right? Metaphysical interpretation of literal reality. Magic. As Above, So Below. You know I’m talking, so you know I’m talking. The paradox of Craft, sort of, or something close to it.”

“...Ok? And?” 

“And you don’t acknowledge it,” Jin interrupts. “You don’t notice. And if you don’t notice that, then it makes plenty of sense, Master, that you wouldn’t notice the other things you’re doing.”

“I’m…”

She pauses.

Inhale. Exhale. 

Don’t focus on how cold it is. How empty it is. How the breath does nothing, how the act of breathing does nothing more than she thinks it does. How the Knife in her is the only thing that feels like anything at all.

“I am trying. So hard. To include you both. To work with you. I know that I can’t do it on my own. I know. I can’t- even if I make it, even if I win, I can’t fix the world, I don’t know how. I just… I want to make a world where other people can be who they want to be, build and improve things how they want. I want a world where you both can just… grow, without needing all of this mess. Without getting dragged through warzones. Without…”

She doesn’t say it. It hurts that it’s still there. It hurts to put it in words, rather than leave it as motivation.

“Without you?” Jin asks.

That, at least, she can feel. Not as sharply as the knife of the End in her, maybe, but… more than anything else. 

She says nothing for a moment. She just feels the energy still swirling around them, the way her body has come back only partially due to the loss of some of her anchors, the way that the ground is still warm from all the Death that has burned and bled onto it. 

It’s Li Shu who breaks the silence.

“If you were strong enough to do it without us, would you?”

It’s a silly question. Or an important one. Hard to tell the difference. Either way, it’s not much of a question at all, because everyone present knows the answer already.

Jin inhales, and then exhales. It hurts, worse than the Death by explosion- unlike the abstraction of power, of death turned to ghosts turned to the rewriting of reality, it’s… personal. Real in a very different way.

He inhales, and then exhales, and she knows that’s what she sounds like when she does it. 

“I don’t think it’s just one thing,” he eventually mutters, as if speaking mostly to himself. “I think that there’s parts of it where you don’t like you, and parts of it where you can’t stand the world or yourself as it is, and parts where I think that being dead has… some kind of effect. I think it’s harder for dead things to change. Maybe easier for you, because of your Truth, but still, I think it’s easier to fall into patterns and not realize.

“It’s not that you’re not doing things differently, it’s that you’re… certain parts of you get stuck. I think it’s what the Bishops have mentioned about stillness, how some places just kind of go quiet after long enough. Bishop Seo En-Hyun died in some kind of battle, something with fire and fists, against himself I think? And now… he’s a fighter. It’s… it’s like back at the Wall. All those cultivators, the healers, the ones at Singheart, the more you cultivate something, the more you become that thing. I think… that maybe even before all this, you were cultivating yourself a certain way, and now that you’re undead like you are, the Death you suffered is a part of you. Cutting yourself apart to avoid an End you couldn’t see coming, but know is there.”

Raika is not alive. There is no movement in her adrenal glands, no pulse of hormones from months-stilled synapses. The cold in her gut, reflected back and forth and multiplying against the cold in the place the warmth of life should be, is purely in her mind. 

It does not make it less cold. 

“I…”

She can’t deny it.

It’s infuriating.

It’s terrifying.

It’s cold.

“I swore to you that I would never let you find me dead,” she says instead. “I swore it with Intent, with Truespeak, with my deepest self. I couldn’t break that if I wanted to, and I don’t.”

Li Shu lays a hand against Raika’s shoulder, and Raika realizes she forgot to turn her head away from her friend as her son was speaking. She blinks, remembering herself, pulling back from the dissociation, and tries to inhale.

Her lungs feel stiff. Cold. It’s harder than it was before. Or… maybe it just feels harder now, and it’s been the same way all along. 

Being dead isn’t just power. Even if she had chosen it for herself willingly, freely, it would not be just power. It is also loss. It is also the agony of becoming less, in so many ways. 

“Just because he won’t find you like that doesn’t mean that I won’t,” says her friend, who has traveled to the end of the world with her. 

She remembers that she has a face, and turns it away to look at the ground.

“It’s working,” she says in place of a proper answer. “I… couldn’t have won that on my own, maybe, but that just means that we can coordinate more. We have one Bishop down, and the entirety of their expeditionary force with it- Mortaris is going to be weakened. It can still work.”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t.”

Jin inhales, exhales. She feels the mist, or smoke, or fog, reaching out from him and touching her, and it feels cool and warm all at once. Like a space for rest, for quiet conversation. The young man before her, over twenty years her junior and only a few years into his cultivation, pushes forth a force of self that, in spite of its relatively low power, eclipses anything she achieved as a traditional cultivator in depth. There’s a wholeness, a profoundness, that feels like it should belong to someone far stronger than him, far older- but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s why the Bishops want him, it’s how he’s survived her, it’s how he’s progressed so fast.

Only a few years in her life and yet he’s showing the sort of stability and wisdom she can only envy.

For now.

For now.

The words echo in her, as true to her as her anchors or her Death or her Truth. 

I Can Change. Dead or not.

She inhales. Exhales. 

She takes a moment to just breathe, over and over. 

And then… she stops.

Breathing is a thing for the living. She is dead.

Stillness is for the dead. She is a thing of undeath. 

They sit together, in silence, for a few minutes more. 

She sits in two places at once, because no body or shell she has crafted is her, but they are all Hers, and she is through them, even as she drifts further out into who she isn’t.

She does not open her mouth to speak. She’s not sure she has a tongue, not a proper one, not here. She can feel her anchors, the ways that she settles, that she drifts from the surface of herself down into deeper currents, and she feels her flesh shift. Corpse-tissue, as malleable as any other piece of spellcraft and Qi, softens, losing some of its structure as she lets go of herself in a way she hasn’t in…

Mmh. A long time.

“Honored Healer. Sister. Pillar of my path.

“Martial son. Apprentice. Young sage. Ward and guide.

“Tell me what you see when you see me.”

Jin smiles, his expression soft. She can see him in spite of the closed eyelids, in spite of how deep in herself she rests, in spite of how exhausted she is and must be after a battle like that. This place, with those around her, sits loud, louder than the cold of the un-knife in her chest, louder than the cold of her body, louder than the cold of the horror of her.

Li Shu sits back from where she’s kneeling, sitting in a more comfortable pose as her Sacrifices hover down to form a little diagram around her. Death and Qi flutter inwards, moved into spell-patterns, and bits of snow-white wood and black leaves begin to bloom, slowly starting to take root around them all.

“I see a maniac who does not surrender. I see a warrior who warred with herself and the world at once, for the sake of ideals and spite and sheer determination. I see a creative, intelligent idiot, someone so ignorant of how the world is that she can decide what the world should be. I see a fool, who would rather rip herself in half and spill her guts onto hot coals than admit she could use help- and who, sometimes, does so anyways. I see someone who needs to be taken care of, to be helped, to be reminded of who I am, and who those around her are, and what it means to stand beside someone.”

Raika does not inhale, even as the urge strikes. Instead, she just… focuses on the words. Letting them sink in, drift deeper into the vague state of self she’s in. 

Outside of herself, Death roils across the world, painting with brushes of Qi an aurora of the battle that just took place. The density of the moment and of the space match and resonate with each other, pushing inward, and she just… exists. 

She does not need to breathe- but she does not need to not be, either. 

Jin clears his throat, and while she does not externally react, he sees her anyways.

“I see the first person to risk something to take care of me. Someone who did not have to, but who did more than any other has done for me, who took me in, and fed me, and helped me to become more than I was. The person who showed me what a warm home could be, safe from the woods and stone-throwers. The person who stood tall ahead of me in every hell we have crossed. I see someone who has not stopped, in spite of every wall in her way, and who is teaching me to be the same. I see you, Master. I see you, mom”

She does not need to cry- but she does not need to feel nothing, either. 

And then, Jin speaks again, sitting before her with the black glass beneath him, an aurora of Death behind the mist of his higher self, his eyes holding so many colors of monochromatic shadows and light.

“What do you see when you see yourself?”

She opens her mouth to speak… and then closes it. 

She speaks, and it is truer and louder and softer than air and lungs can usually provide.

“I see someone who has not done enough. I see someone too small to protect those I have sworn myself to. I see someone who cannot stop the world from being the world, and who does not know what the world should be, but fights for it anyways. I see someone who does not deserve what she has, and who should not have survived my failure to protect myself.”

And then, she clacks her teeth together, facets of biology fading even as her teeth grow sharper, her shoulders broader, her arms longer. On her head, there is a sensation, as muted as any other but as real as any other; tingling, running through her scalp, where weight and dead matter was shorn away in an effort to preserve what was left.

“I see someone who does not have to be what she was. I see someone who cannot be who she was. I see someone who does not want to be who she was. I see someone who has not yet Ended, and who can be better.”

The words echo in her. Not more, for once- better. 

The thought feels sharp and painful and brings with it an animal fear, even to a dead mind.

It is also warm, like an ember in an abandoned cabin, cold from the wind and the broken walls that let it in. 

Through another window into the world, another anchor to what Is, she feels something against her collarbone dink softly. She feels the stamp of a six-legged champion. She feels the purring rumble of a fat reptile. 

She feels a distant beat of some far-off echo, which has traveled for too long and is only now reaching her as she opens herself to it.

The blade in her chest aches, pushing a bit further out, a bit further down, as if to carve her from shoulder to hip… 

And then it begins to retract. To fade away into her, out from her, out towards the space where something else once was and who will not be again. 

I Can Change. 

We Are What We Eat. 

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

She reaches through the quiet, down into the path the un-knife made out from within her, and finds the echo of what was.

From the place outside herself, outside the bodies that are Hers but not her, she reaches down from a garden of monochrome flowers…

And eats.

She opens her eyes.

The gelatin of them is gone. The pupils are gone. The color of them is gone.

Two flowers bloom from out of her sockets, their petals shaped like knives, their color darker than the absence of light. 

From out of the top of her head, a long chain of wispy Echo-matter drifts, like smoke, winding itself around itself like limbs that wrap and twist and writhe, and which are not limbs at all.

She has lost muscle mass, but that’s alright. Her anchors don’t need to hold that much flesh. She has what she needs.

A bit more slender, she turns the flowers of her eyes on her son, her body bereft of some of its softness, some of the color of its skin. 

She is a dead thing. An arm made of Blacksteel, sharp and volcanic and skeletal; hair of ghost-flesh, of echoing endings that wrap around themselves; eyes of cultivated Death, and the memory of it; a body, too tall, shaped ever so slightly off, no longer wrapped in the illusion of the unrotted freshly-dead. 

She is an undead thing, and she smiles, soft and quiet. Behind her teeth there is darkness of loam and rot and hollowed-out room for things to grow.

And as she “sees” out of herself again, and sees her son as his torn robes and still-healing tissue leaks a strange sort of fluid, thin, muddy and drifting out of sight like evaporating oil. He looks at her, eyes clear and bright, and she can feel the way that the mist of his form has grown thicker, harder to see through and more quieting at once, how the whispers he carries echo just a bit louder.

And she sees out of herself again, and sees her friend, smiling wide and gentle, surrounded in life-from-death, bloody fingers and the Sacrifice that used to be her nails orbiting her and holding a series of tools and scrolls and more.

“Thank you,” she says. “I… don’t think I’ve done that quite so peacefully before.”

Li Shu raises an eyebrow, looking around at the glassed landscape.

“...Fair.”

Jin just smiles- and then his eyes roll up into his head, and he passes out.

A bed of soft flowers and transformed keratin catch him, his two guardians stopping him from hitting the ground too hard- and Li Shu wrinkles her nose at the act, as if touching him with her Sacrifices feels weird.

“Oof. Do you smell that? Are those…”

Her eyes go pensive, and one of her scrolls drifts open, a Sacrifice turning to a quill tipped in a crimson fluid. 

“Not yet,” Raika says. “Let’s get him back to a proper bed first. Then… you can show me whatever you’ve been working on that I haven’t really been looking at properly.”

Her sister smiles, wider than she’s seen in a while. “I would be delighted.”