Chương 13: Her

The darkness that took Mingxuan had weight and texture, pressing against him from all sides even as it held him suspended in its depths. He was aware, in some distant way, that this was not death. Not yet. But it was close enough to brush against death's hem, close enough to glimpse what lay beyond the veil he had spent his life approaching. He dissolved. That was the only word his mind could find for what happened to him in that darkness. The boundaries that separated Mingxuan from the world broke down.

He spread outward, diffusing until he touched every shore at once, until he was everywhere and nowhere. In that state of dissolution, he became aware of something vast and constant. A murmur that had always existed unnoticed beneath the world's noise. It was the sound of endings. Thousands upon thousands of them, occurring every moment across the breadth of creation. Each one a small conclusion, a period placed at the end of a sentence, allowing the next to begin.

His fragmenting consciousness could not hold them all. The human mind was not built to comprehend such vastness. It could only grasp at pieces, catching what it could before the rest slipped away like water through cupped hands. What followed were the deaths his failing attention managed to seize and hold, snapshots stolen from an infinite ledger, moments plucked from the endless stream. The first was a stag. It stood alone on a ridge at the forest's edge, where the trees gave way to open sky.

Winter had stripped its coat to patches, and the bones showed too clearly beneath the skin. Steam puffed from its nostrils in weak bursts, each exhale a little smaller than the last. The sky above was the grey of old iron. Mingxuan watched from every angle as the stag's legs folded beneath it. There was no drama in the collapse or a final stand against fate. The creature simply settled into the snow with a sigh that seemed to hold gratitude as much as resignation. Its flanks rose and fell once more, then stilled.

From the treeline, wolves emerged. They padded through the snow with their heads low. When they reached the stag, they simply began their work. Each bite released small puffs of warmth into the cold air, life departing in gentle increments. He felt the moment death arrived. A conclusion that had been approaching since the stag's birth, patient as seasons, certain as sunrise. The stag had known it was coming.

Mingxuan could sense that knowledge in the way it had chosen to climb one last time to the ridge, to face the grey sky and the clean wind before its legs gave out. The scene shifted without transition, dream-logic carrying him to a different ending. A great cedar stood in a towering forest. The tree's needles had begun to yellow. Mingxuan could both see and feel the crack running through its heartwood, a fissure that had opened during the previous winter's ice storm and slowly widened with each passing season.

Sap bled from the wound in slow tears. The tree had been bleeding for months, its strength draining away drop by drop. Now the wound gaped wider, and Mingxuan heard the groan of wood stressed beyond endurance. The cedar tilted, almost gracefully, bowing toward the earth that had sustained it for so many decades. When it fell, the sound rolled through the forest like thunder. The impact sent up a cloud of detritus. Moss was creeping toward the fallen trunk, eager to begin the work of transformation.

Already, seedlings trembled in the new shaft of light that had opened in the canopy, their small lives quickening in response to the old tree's death. Mingxuan understood then that death here wore a patient face, the face of seasons turning, of one thing becoming another in the endless cycle. There was no tragedy in it. Only change. The next death came with violence. Carriage wheels snapped on a mountain path. Wood giving way under too much weight, too much speed.

Horses screamed, their voices high and terrified as they plunged over the edge. The carriage followed, tilting, tumbling, passengers spilling from the broken door like scattered seeds. Among them was a young bride. Mingxuan saw her crimson robes spreading around her like wings, hand reach toward the sky. Her eyes were wide with disbelief. This was not supposed to happen. This was her wedding day. The mountain should have known that, should have held its path steady beneath her wheels. It couldn't end like this.

The rocks below did not care about wedding days. They accepted her with the same indifference they showed to rain or snow, and her blood marked them in patterns that looked almost decorative, crimson petals scattered on grey stone. Mingxuan felt his awareness recoil from that death even as he witnessed it. There was no patience here, no gentle settling into rest. Only shock, pain cutting short before it could fully register, and then nothing.

He wanted to look away, but his scattered consciousness had no eyelids to close or neck to turn. The vision shifted again, and this time it carried him to a battlefield. Soldiers in lacquered armour clashed beneath banners that snapped in hurricane winds. Their blades met with sounds like bells struck wrong, producing notes that hurt to hear. Qi techniques detonated overhead, storms of colour that lit the field in unnatural hues. Men roared oaths that curdled into choking gasps as steel found throat and rib.

They fell in waves, their formations breaking apart like walls hit by water. Above it all, a hawk circled. Mingxuan could see through its eyes for a moment, could feel its indifference to the carnage below. To the hawk, this was simply an abundance of carrion, a feast laid out by the strange creatures that walked on two legs and killed each other for reasons birds did not need to understand. He was pulled onward before he could fully process what he had seen.

Cultivators dueled across obsidian cliffs, their swords writing phosphorescent arcs in the dusk. One figure hurled twin spears of lightning that crackled and spit as they flew. Another caught them on a spinning shield of jade, the impact sending shockwaves through the air. A third cultivator emerged from shadow like a knife from a sheath, blade sliding between vertebrae with surgical precision. The struck cultivator's eyes went wide. Ah, he seemed to think. So this is how it ends.

His nascent core shattered, releasing a burst of power that lit the cliff face bronze. His astral avatar, that miniature self that lived within the core, flickered and then went out. The body fell, already empty, already done. The mountain drank the stolen power, cracks in the stone glowing briefly with captured energy before fading back to black. Even that grandeur, Mingxuan understood, bowed to endings.

Power could be transferred, stolen, but it could not prevent the final breath, the last flicker of consciousness before the dark closed in. The next vision made something in Mingxuan's scattered self recoil in recognition. Demons stalked through a village frozen in terror. They were hulking nightmares with cracked masks and skin like tar left to sit too long in the sun. Their claws tore through wooden walls as though they were paper. Mingxuan could smell them—sulphur and rot and malice.

The scent of wrongness given form. They moved through the village the way fire moved through dry grass, consuming everything in their path. Villagers scattered with cries of terror and grief, but there was nowhere to run that the demons could not follow. Yet even as Mingxuan witnessed this horror, the vision shifted to show him another scene. Cultivators in white robes descended from the sky like falling stars.

Talismans flared in their hands, each one releasing a burst of golden light that made the demons shriek and recoil. Golden lances materialized in the air, pinning demonic flesh to the ground. Chants rose in harmony, voices weaving together in a pattern that unravelled dark sinews the way one might pull threads from a tapestry. The demons collapsed, their hideous forms breaking apart into dust that the wind scattered before it could settle. Even monsters, Mingxuan understood, were not exempt from death's touch.

Even things born of nightmare met the same end as men and beasts and trees. The realizations came faster now, death after death unfolding before him in rapid succession. He saw them all and could hold none of them fully. A plague-ridden village wilting in humid jungle heat. Avalanche victims beneath crystal snow. Monks sprawled at prayer in temple ruins flooded by choking vines, their final bows frozen in time. Each ending added to the vast murmur he had first heard upon entering this darkness.

Each one was a note in a song so large and complex that no single mind could hope to comprehend it whole. Mingxuan's consciousness, stretched thin across creation, could only catch fragments before they slipped away. And then, amid the endless stream of ordinary deaths, something extraordinary appeared. At first, Mingxuan thought it was simply another vision, another death to witness and release.

But as the image clarified, he felt something that might have been awe if his scattered self had been capable of such focused emotion. A woman stood at the centre of a battlefield. She was wrought from moonstone and midnight, translucent skin stretched over an architecture of ivory. Every rib and knuckle was etched with runes that shimmered like glass. Her black robe flowed behind her in slow vortices, moving as though it were woven from shadow itself, responsive to currents Mingxuan could not feel.

A hood framed a skull whose hollow eyes were dark as the night sky, save for a single star pinprick that marked each iris. Those stars were not decorative. They were actual stars, ancient beyond reckoning. The battlefield around her was silent. Hundreds of warriors lay scattered across the torn ground. Their armour was broken. Their bodies were still. The skeletal woman stood among them, holding a scythe with a blade almost longer than the haft.

She moved through the field with unholy grace, the scythe arcing in lazy circles. With each pass of the curved blade, pale motes rose from the fallen forms, trailing threads of Death Qi that gathered around her and spiralled inward, disappearing into the pale star lodged in her sternum. The air thrummed with power so dense it made Mingxuan's scattered consciousness ache. This was not harvesting as he understood it.

The woman moved like someone who had performed this task a million times and would perform it a million times more. There was no hesitation in her movements, no doubt. At the moment her blade paused, the skeletal woman lifted her gaze. Her hollow eyes with their pinprick stars fixed directly on Mingxuan's drifting consciousness, seeing him in a way that should not have been possible when he was everywhere and nowhere at once. A voice fell from lipless jaws.

He could see her mouth move, could see the careful forming of syllables, but distance or divinity rendered the words mute to his mortal perception. The meaning slid past him. Terror flared so bright that Mingxuan feared it might shred the last threads holding his consciousness together. He was seen. He was known. And in being known by this terrible figure, he felt measured, catalogued in ways he did not understand but which made him feel suddenly, achingly small.

He wrenched his vision away, severing the connection with force that left echoes reverberating through the darkness. Somewhere far away, his heart stammered in the void her attention left behind. The darkness trembled. Another vision rose to replace the one he had fled. This time, Mingxuan saw himself. He was framed by the ruined stalls of Seventh Stone, his body weary and battered, blood seeping through torn clothing.

His own face looked strange seen from outside himself, paler than he remembered, the white streaks through his hair catching the fading crimson light. He watched his own hands drive a final palm into the demon's cracked breastplate, watched ribbons of inky essence pour from fissures in the creature's ruined carapace and spiral into his waiting channels. The scene froze at the instant of transfer. Black threads wove into pale skin, light and dark twining together.

His frozen face was luminous with exhaustion and a fierce, solemn grace that made him look older than his years, as though some ancient determination had taken up residence behind his eyes. But that victorious tableau barely held his attention. Because the air behind his frozen self was brightening, shifting from the muted rose of dying afternoon to the silver of starlight. Out of that brilliance, she stepped. She appeared unhurried, as though timelessness itself knelt to ease her passage.

Here, now, she wore the semblance of a woman fashioned from starlit snow. Her hair was the colour of winter made liquid, drifting in weightless waves around shoulders encased in robes so deep a shade of night it mesmerised him. Her bare feet touched the cobbles without sound. Every step left a brief bloom of radiance that faded almost immediately. She halted only an arm's length from the frozen tableau of Mingxuan and the demon. Her head tilted with what might have been curiosity, or sadness, or admiration.

The curve of her lips suggested a smile too profound for uncomplicated joy. It carried centuries of partings and reunions, of stories ended and stories begun, all distilled into one gentle arc. Her eyes were endless. Night skies specked with the faintest scatter of stars, each one a sun burning in some distant corner of creation. Those eyes rested on him, not the frozen echo of him, but him, the awareness that watched from somewhere beyond the scene.

They regarded him with a contemplation that felt like being read, like having someone turn him over and study him from every angle, reading the sum of his steps in the dust on his boots and the scars on his hands and the shape of his heart. Mingxuan wished he could speak. There was so much he wanted to say, so many words that crowded against his nonexistent throat, jamming together and getting stuck. And yet, as he struggled to find even one word he could shape into speech, Thanara nodded.

A small gesture, barely a dip of her chin, but it somehow acknowledged every word he could not utter. Every question. Every fear. Every desperate hope. A hush deeper than the one he carried unrolled between them. It was ripe with possibilities, questions of destiny, bargains of spirit, confessions of devotion he had harbored for so long they had become part of his foundation. The silence held them all, made space for them all, asked nothing and offered everything.

"Thanara." Her name fell from his lips—he suddenly had lips again, somehow, and a throat to shape sound—with reverence that made it almost a prayer. His consciousness coalesced, narrowing from everywhere to here, from scattered observation to focused presence. He stood before her as a spectre, translucent and uncertain, but present in a way he had not been since the darkness had taken him. The rest of the world fell away until there was only this place, this point, this moment.

"Hello, Mingxuan." Her voice was more melodious than the most beautiful music he had ever heard. It resonated in the hollows within him, filling spaces he had not known were empty.

"How?" The question came out rough, barely formed. He struggled to organize his thoughts, to shape them into something coherent.

"How are you here? Why?" Her smile widened by a hair, then gently smoothed back into eternal neutrality. She stepped past the frozen tableau of his victory, her hand trailing along the dissipating coils of demon essence. Where her sleeve brushed shadow, darkness dissolved into motes of silvery blue, a benediction given freely, offered even to the vilest ending.

"I have always been here," she said.

"You are the one who has had your eyes half-shut." Mingxuan nodded slowly. Death was everywhere, present in every moment even if most chose not to acknowledge it. He had always known that in an abstract way. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"It must feel like it has been some time, for you," she said.

"Every second was an eternity," Mingxuan agreed.

"And for you, it must feel like a single heartbeat has passed."

"In a manner of speaking." Her solemn gaze drifted back to the demon, to his frozen hands upon its cracked carapace.

"Yet, much has happened." Mingxuan lowered his own gaze. His shoulders slumped, even though he was not certain he should feel guilty.

"I slew it," he said. The confession was followed closely by a sigh.

"The time of death should be your domain and yours alone. I can only apologize." Thanara studied him. Her head tilted the smallest degree.

"Did you end it for sport?"

"No." He thought of the villagers cowering in the square, of Xinyi's face pale with terror, of the demon's insatiable hunger growing with every drop of fear it consumed.

"It would have devoured them. The whole village. Two hundred people for one life was an easy sum to solve." He paused, then added more quietly, "Still, I cannot ignore that I chose its final moment without your leave. I overstepped my bounds." She knelt then, bringing herself to his eye level, or perhaps bringing the ground to them, because the dreamscape shifted to accommodate the gesture without seeming to move. Her fingertips brushed the cobbles, and they rippled like water.

"Endings are neither stolen nor bestowed. They arise like dawn, inevitable, though clouds may hide them. There's no such thing as an unnatural end." He frowned, trying to understand what she meant.

"You speak as if my hand were irrelevant."

"A sword, an illness, old age. What difference does it make?" She straightened, and the motion brought her back to standing without seeming to rise. The dreamscape bent to her in ways that made normal movement unnecessary.

"An ending is an ending. Rivers reach the sea whether they wind through orchards or plunge down cataracts, and the sea does not inquire which journey was more deserving of arrival." Mingxuan's brows knit together. He gestured toward the phantom battlefield where the demon had fallen, toward the frozen moment of his victory.

"You truly don't mind my trespass upon your domain?"

"Trespass." She repeated the word as though she had never heard it before, as though it were a foreign concept she was examining from all angles. A disbelieving smile touched her lips.

"Throughout eternity, do you know how many mortals have been concerned I would take offence to them slaying an enemy?"

"It can't be many," Mingxuan admitted. The furrow between his brows deepened as he considered it. In a world where might made right, where cultivators slaughtered each other over perceived slights and demons were exterminated without hesitation, how many would pause to consider death's opinion on the matter?

"Especially not in this Elemental Realm I find myself in."

"No," Thanara agreed. Her expression softened further, warmth creeping into features that had seemed carved from eternal winter.

"It heartens me that you grant my opinion such consideration—""There's nothing more important than your opinion."

"—But you do not need to worry, in this case." She continued with a fond shake of her head.

"As long as you are still you, as long as you remain the kind, patient soul who will gladly sit by the bedside of a mortal breathing their last, you need not fret." Mingxuan took a moment to digest her words.

"Is that what it's all about, then? A balance?"

"There's no cosmic scale to tip, Mingxuan. There's only you." He did not know what to say to that. That his actions mattered not because they affected some universal equilibrium but simply because they were his actions was both lighter and heavier than he had expected. Lighter, because it freed him from the burden of cosmic responsibility. Heavier, because it meant the only measure that mattered was the one he held himself to. Thanara's eyes glimmered, tiny galaxies turning in those depths.

Her smile was dazzling in a way that made his breath catch, even though he was not certain he was breathing.

"You killed only to prevent further death," she said.

"And so you have not incurred my personal disappointment. But there wouldn't have been a karmic punishment awaiting you regardless. Death is inevitable. Always." She paused, and something in her gaze sharpened.

"Had you stood by and done nothing, letting the demon devour those villagers one by one, their final moments spent in agony, the universe would not notice. If you had done the deed yourself, snuffing out their lives with your own hand, you would have violated no natural laws. Only moral ones."

"If it were to earn your disappointment," Mingxuan said slowly, feeling his way through the thought, "it might as well be a natural law." Thanara smiled.

"If you say so."

"I do." His voice firmed with conviction.

"Never will I wield your power wantonly. Death may be inevitable, but I will not hasten it without cause. I refuse." It was a vow given freely, witnessed by the only being whose witness truly mattered. Mingxuan felt the weight of that oath settle into his bones, becoming part of his foundation. Demons would have to be the exception, of course—creatures born of nightmare and sustained by suffering had no claim to the mercy he would extend to ordinary lives.

But everything else, everyone else, would be shepherded with the care and reverence they deserved. Silence settled between them then. Mingxuan allowed himself to linger in the galaxies scrolling behind Thanara's gaze. He traced the slow drift of stardust across her irises, watched stars being born and dying in cycles too vast to comprehend. There was no warmth in those depths, but neither was there coldness. Only an enchanting vastness, an invitation to wander until the last star burned out.

His thoughts turned to the quiet he had so often witnessed at the bedside of the dying. That fragile hush when pain slipped its leash and peace unfurled. Thanara embodied a similar serenity, yet hers was edged with majesty, the comforting quiet tempered by an ancient authority that promised every story a proper ending. In that balance of solace and finality, he found a beauty as compelling as the gentlest passing. It was a beauty he wanted to understand fully. To become, if he could.

No one could replace her, but he could stand beside her as an equal, a fellow shepherd of endings. Thanara lifted her hand, and the dreamscape rippled outward in response. The ruined village square dissolved into raw starlight, the frozen tableau breaking apart like ice on a river. The cobbles beneath their feet knitted themselves into a silver path wide enough for two.

"Walk with me," she said. Mingxuan stepped beside her without hesitation. The world unfolded. They drifted first above a flooded delta painted rose by the newborn sun. The water stretched as far as he could see, reflecting the dawn sky in shades of pink and gold that would have been beautiful if not for what floated in it. Boats lay splintered and shattered, their hulls cracked open like eggs. Nets rippled like torn silk beneath the swollen water.

Fisher folk bobbed face down, their clothes blooming around them in gentle halos that made them look almost peaceful. Thanara descended until she knelt upon the river's shimmering skin. The current stilled in deference to her presence, the water going smooth as glass. Mingxuan followed, and found that he too could stand upon the water's surface without breaking through. She spoke to each soul where it hovered between riverbed and sky. She called them by their names as though she had always known them.

Tao Lu of Bright Gulls. Jia the Laughing Oarsman. Old Mother Sen Who Could Read the Tides. Her words were soft, carrying neither judgment nor pity. Only an acknowledgment that these people had lived, had mattered, and their stories were worth remembering even if the only one who would remember them was Death herself. One by one, the dead lifted their gaze to her. Mingxuan could see the instant when their spirits separated fully from their bodies and turned to face what came next.

Fear fluttered in some of them, confusion in others. But when Thanara cupped their cheeks with hands made of light and murmured, "The storm is behind you. Come," the fear dissolved and they followed her without question. With a sweep of her sleeve she gathered their souls and guided them into herself, into that cosmic void that seemed to hold infinite space within its boundaries.

Each breath paused upon her palm, flickering with scenes of nets cast at dawn and children waiting on piers, before dissolving into that celestial core. She offered a farewell bow to each one. Each fisher folk spirit was a dignitary worthy of that respect. The souls followed her invitation. They arced upward, disappearing into a faint constellation that followed Thanara's every movement, a growing collection of stories held safe. As the last ripple faded, the river seemed to sigh in relief.

It was as though the water itself was grateful that its burden had been carried onward, that the dead had not been left to drift eternally in its current. Mingxuan watched until the work was done, feeling calm seep into his own spirit.

"Do you grieve, in times like these?"

"I witness them," Thanara replied simply. She straightened, surveying the emptied delta with eyes that reflected both dawn and distant galaxies.

"Their stories close, and the world turns the page. Grief belongs to chapters still being written; my task is simply to ensure the ink dries in peace." The answer should have felt cold, perhaps. But Mingxuan heard the compassion threaded through it, the acknowledgment that witnessing was its own form of caring. To be seen in one's final moment, to have that moment honoured and recorded. No soul could ask for more. They moved on. Next they hovered above citadel battlements slick with blood from a recent siege.

The stone was dark with it, pools of crimson filling every crack and crevice. Warriors bled into potholes, their bodies twisted in the final throes of death. Archers hung limp over parapets, arrows still clutched in hands that would never release them. Corpses littered the forecourt in such numbers that it was difficult to see the ground beneath them. Thanara strode the length of the wall. Each corpse shivered when her shadow passed, letting go its final fragment of self.

Their souls drifted upward in glowing motes, joining the faint constellation that followed her every step.

"All endings flow the same course," she murmured, and her voice held no judgment for the violence that had brought these deaths. The cause did not matter. Only the conclusion. They descended next into a cavern lit by magma rivers. Heat washed over them in waves, but Mingxuan felt none of it. The dreamscape protected him, or perhaps his spectral form simply could not register such physical sensations. Demons writhed on basalt ledges, pierced by talismanic nails that pulsed with scriptural light.

They were dying slowly, their demonic cores cracking. Thanara gestured, and the cores popped like embers, releasing dark wisps that she cupped tenderly in her hands before dispersing them into the dark.

"Even they return," she said, noticing Mingxuan's shiver. It should have disturbed him, perhaps, this gentleness shown to creatures that existed only to cause suffering. But he understood what she meant. Even demons were part of the cycle. Even their endings deserved to be shepherded with care, because the alternative was to let corruption linger, to allow suffering to extend beyond its natural conclusion. They wandered for what might have been moments or millennia.

Time moved strangely in this place, stretching and compressing according to rules Mingxuan did not understand. They crossed continents in a step, witnessed endings in a dozen different lands, under skies of every conceivable colour. End after end unfolded, a never-ending tapestry woven from mortality itself. So many deaths that Mingxuan's mind stopped counting and simply observed, each one adding to the vast understanding growing within him.

Along dusty tracks and starlit tundra, Mingxuan watched the way she bowed to a beggar's ghost with the same reverence she offered a warlord. He saw her spend equal care on a child who had lived three years and an elder who had lived ninety. He witnessed her pause beside a dying flower, to acknowledge its passing with the same gravity she brought to human deaths. Something inside him settled watching her work. A deeper, sturdier admiration took root, respect founded in recognition of tireless compassion.

This was what he wanted to become. Not the reaper he had glimpsed earlier, that skeletal figure harvesting souls with industrial efficiency. This. By the time the inevitability of waking began tugging at his consciousness, their journey had carried them all around the world. Yet Mingxuan realized with something like shame that he could honestly say he had committed none of the Elemental Realm's beauty to memory. How could he, when it was so overshadowed by the divinity he walked beside?

He could not even recall the faces of those ends they had witnessed, only the cadence of Thanara's voice naming each soul and the gentleness with which she ushered them onward. He felt shame at his inability to hold all those individual stories and give them the attention they deserved. But he also felt admiration for Thanara, who he had no doubt remembered every single one and would continue remembering until she came for time itself.

Finally, she guided him to an island of prismatic stone floating in a starless void. The stone caught light that had no source, refracting it into rainbows that shifted and changed with every step.

"Why am I here?" Mingxuan asked. The question held multiple meanings. Why this place, why this moment, why this life, why this path.

"Because this realm draws those who test margins." Thanara extended a palm, and fragments of unaffiliated Qi spiraled into her grasp.

"Cultivators chasing permanence, spirits refusing the cycle." She looked at the gathered energy, then released it to scatter like fireflies.

"When balance tilts, consequences ripple across worlds. A keeper attuned to endings can prune what refuses to fall."

"You mean me," he said, pulse distantly fluttering with an amalgamation of pride and fear.

"You said there was no balance to maintain."

"No karmic balance," Thanara corrected. She gestured toward the stone, shining with countless colors. A sigh escaped her lips, sounding impossibly sad coming from her.

"It is something more... material than that. Everything is finite, Mingxuan. Even the universe itself. When mortals obsess over infinity, calamity is inevitable. Death can never be unnatural. But life..." She paused, and her expression grew troubled in a way that made Mingxuan's chest tighten with concern.

"Life can do terrible things to a world, left unchecked." Mingxuan swallowed.

"What are you asking of me?"

"To do what you believe is right," she said mildly, as though she were asking him to choose between tea blends rather than setting him on a path that might determine the fate of worlds. Uncertainty flickered through him.

"I don't understand." She turned toward him fully then.

"I will not compel you. I merely seek to inform you of what is, and let you decide what should be."

"How can I possibly decide what should be?" The protest came out sharper than he intended, edged with fear he could not quite suppress. He was twelve years old. He had barely begun his cultivation. How could she expect him to make decisions about the fate of worlds?

"Don't sound so panicked, Mingxuan." She smiled at him then, and there was amusement in it, but also affection that made his chest warm.

"You have lifetimes to figure it out." He tried to tuck those words somewhere safe inside the newly patched chambers of his heart, but his thoughts scattered suddenly. The world shuddered and blurred. A low rumble crept into the dream, distant at first but growing steadily louder. Voices bled through the hush, tugging at the hem of his attention like children demanding recognition. Thanara's outline wavered. The constellations dimmed behind her eyes, stars winking out one by one.

The prismatic island beneath their feet began to fracture, cracks spreading across its surface in intricate patterns.

"Already?" she murmured. Sadness smoothed the curve of her mouth, pulling it down at the corners. Mingxuan reached for her sleeve, desperate to anchor the moment, to hold onto this communion for just a little longer. Yet the silver path underfoot shuddered, tiling into shards of light. The rumble grew louder, resolved into words that made his stomach clench with dread. Witch-boy... bring him out... we want answers. A lash of dread seized him with sudden gravity, pulling him down and away from the floating island.

The dream cracked open. Mingxuan fell through brightness that hurt his eyes, fell through darkness that had weight and texture, fell through layers of consciousness until he landed in linen damp with sweat. For a moment he simply lay there, blinking up at familiar rafters. Smoke from Xinyi's iron stove hung in the hut, mingling with the bitter steam from one of her medicines on the boil.

The scents were so ordinary, so grounded in physical reality, that they felt almost shocking after the ethereal spaces he had just left. The ceiling rafters blurred with the memory of argent skies. He could still see Thanara's face if he closed his eyes, could still feel the weight of her attention like sunlight on his skin. Then reality congealed around him, alerting him to his throbbing head, bandaged ribs, poultices dabbed onto myriad wounds, the weight of exhaustion that felt centuries old despite having slept.

Darkness had fallen properly now. The sky visible through the window was merely a darker shade of the colour it had been when he ended the demon, dark crimson edging toward true black. Stars were beginning to appear, though none of them called to him the way Thanara's eyes had. Outside, the cacophony sharpened into shouts. Wood banged against wood with a rhythm that suggested someone was hammering on something, perhaps a drum, perhaps the door itself.

"He's a curse!" someone yelled, the voice high and strained with fear and anger both. Another voice, thick with the kind of terror that curdles into rage, answered.

"We saw the monster dissolve into him!"

"I felt his hand grasp my soul!"

"We all did!"

"The child must answer for this!" Footsteps trudged across packed earth. Many of them, perhaps twenty or more, all milling about at the end of Xinyi's garden. Mingxuan's pulse hammered with a sudden fury that startled him with its intensity. He had been torn from Thanara's side by the ignorant outrage of these clueless country bumpkins, dragged back to consciousness by their fear and their accusations and their complete inability to understand what he had done for them. He swung his legs off the bed.

Energy surged despite his lingering fatigue. Death Qi stirred in his channels, eager and ready, responding to his anger with enthusiasm that should perhaps have worried him but mostly just felt satisfying. Shadows quivered on the walls. The meager lamp's flame wavered as if sensing a storm gathering in the small hut. Xinyi stirred from a stool near the foot of his bed. Her eyes were wide with mingled relief and alarm at whatever she saw in his expression. She was trembling, he noticed.

Actually shaking, her hands clasped together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.

"They think you summoned that demon," she whispered. Her voice was raspy, as though she had spent the intervening hours crying or perhaps arguing with the villagers on his behalf.

"They demand answers." Mingxuan clenched his fists. A thin corona of Death Qi bled into the cramped room without his conscious direction, rattling dried ginseng bundles hanging from the rafters. The herb packets swayed as though caught in a strong wind, though the air in the hut was perfectly still. He had no desire to slaughter neighbors he had once mended. But neither would he crawl to their judgment like some cornered dog, tail between his legs, begging for mercy he had already earned by saving their lives.

"Stay inside," he told Xinyi. He crossed the hut in three strides. His palm brushed the door's latch, and Death Qi pricked at the edge of his awareness, echoing the beat of righteous anger that thrummed through his chest. He exhaled, and the hush steadied. As he lifted the bar, splinters creaked under the gentle pressure of his grip. Through the crack in the door, he saw torches flaming in the darkness, their light painting shadows that danced and writhed.

He saw clenched jaws and wide eyes that held no understanding of the path he had just walked, no comprehension of what he had witnessed, what he had learned, who he had spoken with. Mingxuan squared his shoulders. For too long, these people had seen him as some phantom. A fell omen. Despite all the stories they swapped about cultivators and sects and great heroes, they had never comprehended just what he was.

He had not bothered to correct them, seeing it as irrelevant, seeing their opinion as something he could afford to ignore. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Perhaps it was time they understood, truly understood, what walked among them.

"Misunderstand me no longer," he murmured to the night, then opened the door and stepped over the threshold.