Forge of Destiny

Threads Chapter 553-Emerald 3

"The Truth of art is Communication. There is one Way. There are countless Ways. Both are true, and the Master of Communication is the bridge who shows the parallel truth."

The words flowed off of her tongue as she felt her way around the contours of the truth she had been cultivating, mote by mote, within her dantian. The Patriarch Jia had told her that all Ways were truths, and she did not think him wrong. That did not mean that everyone was right.

In the end, the world they had was one of conflict. Many Ways were in contradiction to one other, and this was not something that could merely be ignored nor was that something that one ascension, or even a dozen ascensions, could change.

"Sovereigns are absolute in their Law, and an Ascended is even more so, but their reach is not infinite. Past that limit, they have only the ripples of their influence and the interaction with others' Laws. The world is greater than even them. There, Emerald Mourner, do I stake my understanding of Law and Sovereigns upon. That space, where Law meets Law, is the realm of Communication."

More still ran in parallel. Many truths might never be understood clearly by the ones who walked other paths, but they did not interfere with each other. Many truths could be reflections of a truth. An ideal, or something similar.

It was all a terrible tangle. Some principles were irreconcilable, but so many were not. She wanted to bridge the distance between those who were not so as to channel conflict into cooperation. She would be the means by which disparate paths could come to be built in parallel toward a greater Way.

"A bridge, a conduit, has little power over what passes over and through it nor what its existence enables. You tread close to a path you have received wise warning of," the Nightmare King criticized. He turned his head and sent the bodies hanging from it swaying to regard her with a gimlet eye.

The Prime Minister and the nauseating, crushing glimpse into her perspective she had given Ling Qi passed through her thoughts, and Ling Qi lowered her head in acknowledgment.

"I know that this view is yet incomplete, but I am no longer uncertain of my direction. To become a passive facilitator is not my end. I am too selfish for that," Ling Qi said. She looked at the swaying corpses hanging from Brother Darksong's mantle. They twitched and writhed, their torment obvious. They must have all been just as certain as she was now when they chose to seek Law and Sovereignty.

She would not be deterred by this sight. Not because she was one of a kind, and not because she was innately better than them, but because she knew there were many souls that had sought and advanced this path of multitude. Successes might be fewer than failures, but they were not unprecedented. Sometimes, one had to make the jump, even if falling meant death.

"And she can do it, too. It's crazy how far this girl has come from the feral goblin she used to be," Sixiang joked. "She's got the patience to keep slogging through, no matter how annoying and petty people get."

"Yes, thank you, Sixiang," Ling Qi said dryly, turning her head to give them an unamused look.

Sixiang grinned back at her before turning to their grandmother. "Seriously, though, I want to stay with her, grow with her, and see how this all goes. At the very least, it's going to make a good song."

"My dour self scoffs, but what am I but a seeker of songs? And what is a disciple of the Dreaming Moon but a follower in that?" Sixiang's grandmother asked rhetorically. "I confess, history is not the composition I would have guessed when you first darkened my doorstep. You were no weaver then. Tapestries were not your style at all."

"They still are not. I have some appreciation for the point where poetry and song converge," Ling Qi replied. "History is the story we tell ourselves, the song we sing to define who we are. History is the song of peoples and nations. Back then, I had neither the skill nor inclination for those kinds of songs."

Hooves clattered across dry dirt, and viscous flesh dragged wetly behind. Brother Darksong skittered into motion, and Ling Qi found herself swept up into his steps, into mist, and into darkness where even the air felt as if it were made of something thick and choking like sewer muck.

"History is an anthem by which the dead command the living. History is a dirge of failures and slights to inflame rage in the listener's breast. History is a story clever tricksters tell to present their yearned-for future as the past."

The Emerald Mourner's words were slow and deliberate, his undulating, half-liquid flesh shimmering with nauseous, oily colors. Around them, a grand promenade of tall and leafless trees stretched toward the weighty bulk of the gibbous moon, which had swollen to consume half of the sky. The barren trees framed it as if to hold it up in the sky.

"This, I will not deny. With my words, I take an understanding of what came before and arrange its notes into a composition of what I want to be. One must build such a composition on a foundation of truth, or there will be no underlying metre, only a chaotic discord that unravels when a competing voice arises," Ling Qi said. "History is all of the aforementioned, but it is also a song of unity. It is the hum of people working in cooperation in field and city streets. It is the sign by which one knows who their neighbor is, even if one has never once seen their face. It is the tool by which a community can extend beyond a single village."

At the end of the promenade lay a reflecting pool. It was only some three or four meters across, and yet, it was vaster than Snowblossom Lake. Both of these facts were true. Upon it bloomed a lotus of aching beauty, its petals shimmering in every color imaginable and not.

It was upon this lotus that Sister Brightsong alighted at its center, sinking into a cross-legged pose. Her parasol broke apart into drifting petals and shimmering light, tracing the lines of a vast pattern that Ling Qi could not fully perceive behind her back and glinting across the face of the moon overhead. The shape of the petrified wood she had taken from Ling Qi and carved had become sleek and smooth rather than rough and knobbled.

Brother Darksong slid into the clear black waters as smoothly as a serpent, sending out nary a ripple as he disappeared from sight.

"Uniting many dreams is a beautiful ideal. Such a grand composition, I would never oppose. To paint with the world as your canvas is an ambition, a masterwork that leaves even I breathless in anticipation," Sister Brightsong said.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

On the lotus petal bent low in front of her, she laid the polished piece she had been toying with. Hollow with smooth holes drilled in its exterior, it was the body of a flute. There was no imagining otherwise now.

"You know well that just as history and community unites, so, too, must it exclude others. Then again, violence is its own form of communication, is it not, little dreamer?"

Ling Qi and Sixiang advanced step by step to the shore that was both vast and small and knelt before the lotus throne that was every color at once. The air was thick with power. The part of Ling Qi that yearned for every possible advantage in cultivation wished desperately that she might cultivate here. However, to try would lead her to rupture her dantian and meridians with the purity and density of the lunar qi here.

This was Fantasia's Heart, the Throne of Delusions, where the Dreaming Moon was sometimes said to hold court. She knelt before Sister Brightsong and her brother, but the moon was heavy and present.

"Yeah, there's no getting around that," Sixiang acknowledged. "I hate that, although less than I did. I’ve numbed myself since. When I was newer still, every time Ling Qi had to really fight, it felt like I was dunking myself in poison."

Ling Qi grimaced, reaching out to them, but Sixiang held up their hand.

"However, never facing conflict is something I can't do if I’m going to live longer than one sweet dream or burst of inspiration, and I’ve already decided I’m going to do that."

"The ith and the empire are on a course of collision. I cannot change that, as I am. I am not certain I could change that even if I were much mightier. The grudge is not as deep and long as that with the clouds, but the wound is so much more raw and fierce for it," Ling Qi said. "Violence is communication. I accept this. I know this as sure as I know the hiss of Chainbreaker's cut."

"And what will you do with that, I wonder? How will you polish the beauty in your dreams, and how will it be accentuated by the cruelty you will see and the cruelty you will do." Sister Brightsong's voice echoed, and a terrible crown of branching antlers and hanging cords swirled smokelike around her brow. "I am ever so curious to know!"

Bright and lively laughter shook the dead leaves piled on the shore, sending them swirling on the wind, though not a ripple touched the surface of the lake.

Brother Darksong held a thread of kindness in his cruelty and relentless cynicism. Sister Brightsong, too, bore a thread of cruelty in her kindness and in her ever-laughing innocence. That, too, was the duality of dreams.

Ling Qi startled, feeling the merest brush of the breeze. In Sister Brightsong's hands was a bar of bright and gleaming silver ore, the moon-imbued silver she had received some time ago. Her fingers molded the metal, as if it were as soft as river mud.

"I know that I cannot face the path I have set for myself and cannot truly come to understand multitudes until I have witnessed the fullness of what people may inflict upon one another. I have seen much, but…" Ling Qi paused. "The malice of individuals is different from the malice of a community."

Ling Qi was afraid, in truth. Her beautiful dream, her home, and her family… What would she do in the name of preserving it? What was permissible? Where did a neighbor stop and an enemy begin, and where in the shading did her resolve to kindness and cooperation break down?

"Yes, indeed. It is easy to say one must be kind, one must be forgiving, and one must find another way, until it's your dream shattering under another's." The Emerald Dancer laughed. "Isolation, you name your blade, your violence. But that is not the whole of it."

Ling Qi licked her lips. "My violence, the blade I wield, is inseparable from my want. Power is not a goal in and of itself. Power does not drive my blade. Power is a consequence of action or a medium, not an instrument in and of itself, any more than vibrating air is itself music. Desire is the root of conflict. In this, I would call the Dreaming Way correct. It is because I want so much that I want security for what is mine and that I want to see a world that has become other than it is. It is because of my desire that violence is a tool I cannot discard. I am not an ascetic, or even a philosopher; my perception of the world is too base for that. I live in the mud at the lotus' roots, and dream there, too."

Silver glimmered, liquid strings stretching between Sister Brightsong's fingers. Particulates of impurity drifted from it. The potent reagent she had acquired was being refined and made even more pure by the moment at the casual manipulations of the avatar of the Dreaming Moon.

"It is a stable foundation you choose. Violence as the outcome of desire is well-trodden ground by priests, philosophers, and artists alike. What a good girl you are, refusing to spin webs of self-satisfying lies to deny and hide this from yourself. It's almost a shame. Such webs glitter with eye-catching delight," the Dancer said wistfully. "Then again, honesty does not change the outward outcomes. You will kill to attain what you wish for, if that is the only path your eyes can see."

"I will," Ling Qi agreed heavily. "It’s the outcome I want the least, but I will."

She was afraid of falling into the feral animal mindset, which she had clawed her way out of. For a time, part of her wanted to reject anything that tied back to those days. It was why she had fled in circles before the Nightmare King previously. She had rejected his blunt, cruel description of sovereignty then, but there was a seed of truth there beneath the upsetting exaggeration.

"Men and beasts alike want, and there is not enough in the world to fulfill all of their hungers. Ever shall there be friction and competition over whose dream and desire is asserted. This would be so even if the world were filled with an endless bounty, for dreams are boundless. Our Mother, dead under our feet. Our Father, dead overhead. Was it only the cradle which was broken, or the precious dolls they made as well?"

The spirit's voice reverberated with two tones, masculine and feminine, airy and deep. Dancer and Mourner both spoke.

"Was the Enemy right to abhor their creation? I do so wonder…"

"The dream of the Nameless is beautiful, even if it could be said that both were broken. I exist. I do not regret existing. I do not think most people do," Ling Qi refuted. "Who can truly imagine an existence, utterly free of desire?"

"Not you, for certain, and not I," the Dreaming Moon’s avatar said fondly. "And that is why you shall ever be one of mine, for what is a dream but the expression of desire? The one who came before you never quite understood that. She understood the mud and knew its nature and how it shaped the petals, but only ever saw it as a base understanding to be discarded and eventually, transcended. And so, her children snapped their roots away one by one, and they grew from asceticism to disdain, and from disdain to contempt for the black earth below, leaving her Dream stately and unmoored, drifting helplessly above it all. What an aching tragedy, the beauty of an age."

Ling Qi felt a nauseous churn in her stomach. She knew who she was paralleling, and the Mourner’s warnings of atrocity done in the name of her Law gnawed, but she had already accepted that there would come a time when she could no longer guide where this Way went.

Silver flowed together smoothly, mouthpiece, caps, and filigree forming in intricate tracery along the body of the flute.

"Recall this, dreamer. Your song of multitudes has been sung before. You walk your path knowing you did not start it and will never finish it. It is a dangerous path. You have witnessed fellows on this road: The Preacher of Strife, the Crucible of Screaming Steel, and the Flower Revolution. You have looked upon the Ruin Star, Tyrantsbane, and witnessed the birth of one of its many children. As Totality ends in Silence, the extreme of Multitude is Dissolution. Its end may be just as terrible."