Forge of Destiny

Threads Chapter 551- Emerald Dreams 1

Ling Qi continued to cycle and breath, taking in the trickle of lunar qi which shimmered down from the liminal reflection of the heavens. Carefully, meticulously, she ran her qi through the usual breathing exercises. The remnants of the restraints that had kept her qi contained to the fifth stage were subsumed into the pool of cool yin qi that made up her dantian.

All around her, the forest changed slowly. The space between trees crept apart by inches, the branches growing longer, thinner, and more skeletal. The moon loomed, its scarred and pockmarked surface somehow grim in its silence. It felt as if it would fall and crush her, obliterating all that lay beneath its visage. And lastly, soft snowflakes began to fall on the dead grasses and leaf litter of the frozen forest floor where she made her seat.

She grasped Sixiang's hand, gave it a squeeze, and together with her spirit, she stood and faced the darkness closing in around them. It shrank the circle of their visibility in a curtain that swallowed up the forest until there was only a single ring of trees left around their clearing.

The creak of hanging ropes echoed in the dark, and the bleached white of bone gleamed.

Sixiang swallowed, their hair writhing in an unseen wind. Strands of white and black flickered through the many colors. They bowed their head, never letting go of her hand.

"Heya, Gramps. It's been a while."

The icy ground snapped under skittering hooves, and the Nightmare of the Emerald Seas emerged into view. A deer’s skull, larger than either of them, had eerie pale green light flickering in its eye sockets. Proud, many pointed antlers swept out, a regal crown that scraped the sky, and from its points hung withered, mummified corpses, stripped of individuality by their ruin. A soft song of regrets and rage and loss whispered from their torn lips. Skeletal legs churned beneath a liquid cloak of rot and fear that hung heavy over the nightmare’s shapeless body and dragged on the frozen ground.

He encircled their clearing almost entirely, only a single narrow gap left for egress. A single hope of an escape. The hope was a lie, of course. Dashed hope was the most potent fuel for despair.

Unlike last time, he was not alone. Seated sidesaddle between the vertebra spurs which jutted from the semi-liquid flesh of the nightmare’s body where the first set of shoulders should have been was a resplendent woman. Her dress shimmered in countless colors, changing its cut and style from eyeblink to eyeblink, and her hair was a scintillating banner of silver and ephemeral tones. Her eyes were black pits as deep as the night sky. She spun a parasol over one shoulder, painted with festive scenes. The Emerald Dancer had joined the Emerald Mourner for this meeting, both faces of the coin that was the Dream, present and united.

"Coward."

Sixiang flinched.

"Unkind, but not wholly incorrect." The dancer sighed. "It was such a show, but I wonder if escaping like that did stunt you—"

"No."

Sixiang's voice was quiet, but firm. It should have been no more than a whisper, but it echoed.

"I am a coward, but not for the reasons you're both implying. I'm a coward for lying for so long. I'm a coward for avoiding having the conversations Ling Qi and I needed to have," Sixiang continued. "I am not a coward because I figured out what I really value and untangled what romantic love even is. So, find a new knife to dig under my skin, Gramps. That one won't work anymore."

The massive deer's skull lowered, and its stone breath washed over them in a tearing gust. "Bold, but thou knowst what boldness buys in these depths."

"Victory, when paired with other virtues," Ling Qi answered. "If you were going to stamp us out with simple violence for the insult we have dealt, you would have already done so."

The dancer laughed from atop her nightmare self's back, and the hung corpses groaned in agony at the whimsical sound. "To speak without fear in the face of power… Oh yes, you have improved, haven't you, little dancer, from the days when you would crumble in the face of an insurmountable force? But that is a lie, and I think you know it. Dreams are fickle."

The dancer's voice held no malice; it was soft, kind even, and yet, it made Ling Qi feel a chill all the way down to her bones.

She took in a steadying breath. "Would you deny a disciple her dramatic lines, Mistress of the Arts?"

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"No! Moons, no, never that, but one has to be certain they don't come to believe their own script," the dancer admonished playfully.

"The more accurate answer is, if you decide we're not leaving, that's just that," Sixiang corrected wryly. "Gramps, I know bowing and scraping won't move you at all, so why not be candid?"

"He has you there, my brother self," the dancer laughed.

"Meaningless. The cowardice is deeper than that."

The circle of darkness tightened around them.

Ling Qi felt an itching sensation like insects wriggling on her skin sweep over her.

"Choice. Choice. This meaningless word. You flee the question and refuse its answer, dreaming that a hard decision must be a false one. That is your cowardice, grandchild, devotee. You will not leave this place with such slippery semantics and a dead man's answer."

“I will not give you a dead man’s answer again, that I grant, but I refuse the first. You say sovereignty must trample and dominate. I call your definitions overbroad," Ling Qi rebutted.

She had avoided the question last time. She had denied rather than defied, ceding the ground for Huisheng's shade to do that for her.

"You've witnessed the reshaping of the world to a sovereign's whims. You’ve even participated in it. How many leagues of mountains have you consigned to conquest?" the dancer asked. Her parasol spun, pulsing with a soft and ephemeral light, and skeletal hooves once again began to clatter and clack. The snow whirled in the air, reality fading in and out. Only her interrogators and the light of the moon overhead felt fully real.

Ling Qi squeezed Sixiang's hand. It was warm, despite the chill. They were real, too, of course; That could not be taken away.

The viscous black cloak of the nightmare expanded, and the twirling parasol merged with the looming moon as the world around them flowed like fresh ink.

Ling Qi's eyes stung and watered.

Blood and smoke and burning flesh. Corpses filled the valley below her feet, those of men and beasts and more that were indistinguishable. A cloud tribe encampment burned, and an imperial village burned, both overlapping, fluxing in and out over each other so quickly it made her eyes feel like they might burst.

“You have chosen to expand this.”

"I am not the sole responsibility of this. Many, many people have chosen to expand this," Ling Qi denied. Her stomach churned. She did not let her eyes linger on any one vision. There were broken bodies and sundered flesh, and too many atrocities to count in war. It was a cruel tactic, but not untrue.

“Cowardice.”

"I do not deny responsibility," Ling Qi retorted. "Neither will I pretend these small shoulders can lift the world. Even if I wielded a sovereign's might at this day and hour, that would be arrogance beyond words. So, no. I reject your framing. Sovereignty can be born from more than crushing tyranny. Sovereignty can convince as well as compel."

The summit had not been the work of one voice. Ling Qi had set it in motion, but it was not solely her craft. Jaromila had fought within her own battlefield to bring her side of the negotiations to bear. Xia Ren and her opposite on the Polar Nation side had been the mightiest cultivators present, and though she could see the stamp Xia Ren had left on the summit, it would be equally absurd to call it hers. Cai Renxiang had represented her mother and penned the documents that formed the minute details that would make it all work, yet propaganda aside, it was not hers either.

Ling Qi’s conversation with Patriarch Jia Hong in Xiangmen had only deepened her budding understanding of the world. Choice was a pretty ideal, and one she believed in, but it was more than respect for the agency of others. It was the understanding that even an ascension was not absolute. Even if she could make her stamp to demand the world turn onto a path of her choosing, and even if she succeeded, where the world went after her time was not up to her.

All she could do was influence the path.

"Better, better, not merely a fluttering moth drawn by a pretty flame, rejecting the tyranny of sovereignty with nothing but a vague sense of discomfort," the Emerald Dancer praised, her lilting and whimsical voice both terribly at odds with the scenery and utterly fitting in the absurdity of war. “But that conviction is still so feeble. You have reasoned out good words, and yet…"

"Thy heart does not yet bear their engraving." The nightmare’s cold voice was a gust of corpse stink and fear, making her hair stand on end.

"The heart takes longer than the mind to change," Sixiang scoffed. "You've got this, Qi."

"I should hope so. Let us enjoy this little trip then, through dreams and nightmares of those who have tread this path before," spoke the dancer. "And you may defend yourself as best you are able. Choose your words wisely."

"If I could not even do that much, it might be better for me to disappear here," Ling Qi said wryly.

One might hesitate to make such morbid jokes before spirits, but Ling Qi was already aware of the consequences of failure. She had reached the sixth stage of the green realm. Only time and the quest to resolve the tangle of concepts and words she had cultivated into a coherent name remained between her and the fourth realm. It was far too late to balk from the threat of destruction.

She understood much more now the quiet assurance of higher realms. Who could bear the weight of Law, of Sovereignty, while still retaining something so feeble as a fear of one’s own mortality?

"Good. You understand, dear," the dancer said kindly.