art of Aili Fallon by Rebi, @rebiesque.art (instagram)
Chapter One: Aili: The Protector
Five years apart was nothing. They could come back from five years. They had eternity to work things out.
Aili took a deep breath and smoothed the wrinkles on her button-down shirt, checked that the cufflinks were where they were supposed to be, the antique belt she’d dug out of her cabinet sitting just right on her hips. Her hair, freshly trimmed, fell in her eyes again. Sometimes she missed her long hair – at least braids and pins kept everything where it was supposed to be.
Yisue said, “You look fine, Aili.”
“Thanks,” she muttered. Getting relationship advice from her son was not what she needed today. Yisue himself was wearing a ridiculous t-shirt that said Save the Otters, from the three years he had worked at some environmental nonprofit. He’d come back home to Crane Moon very quiet, after quitting that job. If Chenguang had been here, she would have been able to get him to open up. She was always better at that than Aili was.
“Why aren’t you wearing your cultivation robes, if you want to make it a special occasion?” Yisue said.
“It’s not that kind of occasion.” She’d thought about what to wear, very carefully, and decided that the cultivation robes might remind Chenguang too much that when Chenguang had wanted to leave, Aili had insisted on staying. Wearing clothes more similar to when they’d met, that was better. It might remind Chenguang that there was more to Aili Fallon than being the Master of Crane Moon. There could be more to them. This visit would be a new start. Chenguang hadn’t come back to Crane Moon for five years, and visiting her in Easterly – well, it wasn’t the same. Aili hated Easterly, and she hated seeing her beloved people in that mess of human suffering and demonic corruption.
“Too bad she can’t fly anymore, that would make it easy, you could split your time,” Yisue said.
“Yes, too bad,” she said, distracted. The issue had never been ease of transport. “How did she look, when you saw her?”
Yisue had visited Easterly just a few weeks ago, and even though she’d asked him this dozens of times already, he patiently said, “She looks fine, the same as always. She’s working hard. The clinic is busy.”
Of course the clinic was busy; Easterly was a bustling Federation city full of sick, impoverished people who couldn’t afford Federation medical care. “And she was safe?”
“No signs of any demons checking out the place.”
“It’s not just demons,” she sighed, and let it go. She needed to let it go. Today would be her chance to show that living here again would be worthwhile. It wasn’t as though giving medical care to people was the only way to help with the way the world was going. The spiritual creatures who came to Aili to study human methods of cultivating spiritual power, they needed help, too. Life had become more and more difficult for the natural spirits of animals and plants, with the pollution and drought, and they needed her teaching more than they ever had.
Or so she argued to herself, and to Chenguang, in her own mind. It was a very good argument. It was only that Chenguang would say, but you could still teach the spiritual creatures if you came to Easterly, to be among human beings.
“She doesn’t like that you just hide here,” Yisue said baldly.
“Thanks,” she said again, meaning the opposite.
Yisue looked up at the clock on the wall of the living room. The house was extremely clean, because Aili had dusted everything, and the clock was ticking happily, since she’d just wound it up – they didn’t keep anything that required electricity in Crane Moon. Aili had carefully put Chenguang’s favorite books out on the table, and a vase with wildflowers. “If you wanted to meet her on the way – ”
“Where’s Sanmer?” Their daughter. Aili had wanted to have the whole family together, coming to welcome Chenguang back.
“She’ll catch up, that’s what I came to tell you. Two of the disciples were fighting, she had to sort it out.”
“Who?” Aili asked, incredulously. Then she stopped herself. Sanmer could handle it. She could leave some aspects of leading Crane Moon to others. She’d already decided this. So she would have more time for Chenguang. So things would be better. “Never mind.”
Yisue added, “I’ll wait for Sanmer and we’ll come together to meet you both. The disciples are all a little afraid of her, it won’t take her long to settle them down.”
Aili sighed internally. Sanmer had always had a difficult time among the spiritual creatures. Although she’d run from the demon clans as a child, and only cultivated pure spiritual power rather than the corrupted power of suffering and hatred, still, the weaker beings instinctively recognized a demon as a predator. At least, if she let Sanmer have more responsibilities, they might see how trustworthy she was.
“It’ll be all right, Aili,” Yisue said, settling himself into an armchair. “Chenguang missed you too, you know.”
As Aili walked up the hill, still trying to keep her hair out of her eyes, she looked back only once. The little wooden house she had shared with Chenguang – it was still their house, it would be their house again – was small and insignificant, high on the steep upslope from the ocean to the mountains. Her gaze caught instead on the main building of Crane Moon, which sat close to the edge of the bluff and the shore beneath it. In late afternoon, the sun had escaped from the yellowish haze in the west, sending long, heavy bars of light across the dark gray sea to bathe Crane Moon in gold.
The main building was of local stone, set together not by modern human machines but by hand, aided by spells and spiritual power. It sprawled low, all one story: the communal kitchen, the cultivation ground, the armory for weapons practice. Meditation chambers, music rooms, the library with its curved wall and high glass windows. The dormitories for the spiritual creatures that came here to become her disciples, studying human methods of cultivation, learning to use spiritual weapons. Strengthening themselves for an uncertain future.
Once, very early on, when they were still building, Chenguang had asked her why she didn’t try to teach humans. After all, the original cultivation sects had been human endeavors. Back then, Aili had said, the whole point is so we can have a safe place for Yisue, away from humans.
Which was not false, exactly. They’d left the city of Easterly originally, some two hundred and seventy years ago, because it was becoming far too obvious that Yisue wasn’t human. As a dragon, Yisue grew so differently than human children – still looking like a nine year old when the children he’d gone to school with were young adults getting married – and he couldn’t disguise his looks, either. No matter how often he cut or dyed his hair, the next morning it would fall again to his waist, shimmering white. It drew attention, the kind of attention that was especially dangerous for Chenguang. There were always dangers for phoenixes like Chenguang, if they couldn’t hide. On this remote coast, inaccessible by boat or car, no roads or towns, no electricity, warded against human discovery, Aili could make a place that was safe for all of them.
But safety and secrecy wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t wanted to bring humans into Crane Moon. Maybe that was the most honest answer, the reason she’d turned her back on human beings, when even her dragon son and her phoenix lover longed to live among humans. She was the last human cultivator, and after Chenguang had made her – whatever she was – she wasn’t sure she was human anymore. Not in any meaningful way. It was all very well to wear a human form and pretend, for beings who had never been human to begin with. Humanity wasn’t pretense for her, but it also wasn’t the truth.
Aili turned away and continued the steep climb inland, up and over the first range of coastal mountains. Chenguang would be walking to the coast from the train station in the nearest town. For a human without the spiritual powers gathered through cultivation, it would be a difficult hike. For a cultivator, the trip was easy enough, and quick, using lightness skill.
She reminded herself not to force Chenguang to make the choice again, between Crane Moon and the wider world. Surely they could find a compromise, something that worked for both of them.
I’ll do better. I’ll make it better.
The trees on the upper slopes of the mountainside had been burned in a fire some ten years before, and since the drought was so terrible, not much had grown back. Aili walked among long dried grass and low bushes, studded with black pillars of burned trunks. The thick afternoon light was still bright and hot and dusty on the western flank of the mountains, but when she went down the other side of the hill, it was already getting dark, and a little chilly.
When Aili reached the bottom of the downslope, she gave up pretending to be patient and used lightness skill to leap over a deep gully and then up the next hillside, great jumps from rock to rock, exhilarating, eating up the distance. Chenguang’s lightness skill wasn’t as good as hers. Once Aili found her, she’d carry Chenguang on her back, like she used to do, and they’d be at Crane Moon in time for supper. She’d planned it out carefully, all of Chenguang’s favorite things: braised tofu and vegetables, that sweet syrupy dessert.
Aili let her heart be eager now, knowing she’d see her again soon. Admitting how much she needed her, how desperately lonely she’d been. Her body was much more awake and aware as she drew on her cultivation, and she told her body to stop imagining other things she and Chenguang could do when they got home. Too soon for that. She wouldn’t assume Chenguang was ready. It had been a long time, she wouldn’t rush her –
She stumbled to a frozen stop.
Aili wasn’t particularly sensitive to demonic energy – she’d become a little dulled to it over the centuries – but a seething pit of it clawed at her senses, from just behind the next hill.
Someone screamed, cut off short. In a thousand years, she would not forget that sound.
Chenguang.
Her body was in motion before her heart started beating again. As she leapt down from the rocks into the shadowed side of the hill, she saw a shining dome of golden spiritual power, sparking in resistance as swords and spears of demonic energy struck it. The dome was small, covering an area perhaps the size of a bed.
Liu Chenguang sat beneath it, her back straight, her hands held at chest height with her fingers bent into the warding seal, her eyes downcast in concentration. Another person was huddled small against Chenguang’s side.
Seeing Chenguang after so long – just the same, her pale skin and her black hair cut to her shoulders, her sharp-featured face and her familiar hands – seeing her under attack –
Aili had one fraction of a moment to be grateful that Yisue was still far behind, that Sanmer had been delayed. She had worked so hard, for so many years, so her children would not know what she was capable of when she was angry.
She was angry now.
Her right hand called her spiritual sword, joyously shining golden-white with its awareness of Chenguang near, and her left hand called the phoenix-fire whip, glowering red, and eager for destruction.
Several demons, looking like beautiful human beings, as demons always did in their mortal forms, smashed down at the ward with swords and spears and maces. Others in their crow forms flew at Chenguang’s head, trying to distract her, or threw talismans at her spiritual ward to attempt to dissolve it. Corrupted spiritual power flowed everywhere in burning, turbulent waves.
More than one demon. Demons working together was shocking in itself, or would have been if Aili had been in the mood to think about it. Instead, she was just glad there were more to kill.
And then Aili Fallon leapt forward, to do the one thing she always knew how to do.
Chapter Two: Aili: Homecoming
One of the demons, a man with pale skin and short black hair, let his two swords dissolve, transformed into a crow, and flew high above Chenguang’s head. The others backed away, as he dove down and slammed the golden ward with his whole body. With a hiss and a stink of burning feathers, Chenguang’s protective dome of pure spiritual power disappeared.
The person hiding against Chenguang’s shoulder screamed, and Chenguang threw herself forward, blocking with her body. A shining dagger sank into Chenguang’s back, with that terrible, familiar sound of metal cleaving flesh, a meaty thump. She jerked, but made no noise.
She’ll heal. Aili knew a phoenix would heal, as she knew gravity would pull down, but reminding herself of it enraged her even more. Chenguang was doing what she always did, trying to protect someone other than herself, and what did it matter that any wound she took would close within minutes as though it had never been? The pain was real, even if Chenguang always made light of it. Her pain and suffering were as agonizing as any other creature’s, and now the knife was tearing at her again, slicing through muscles, grating on bone –
The old forest fire hadn’t come here, and the trees were different, huge conifers with trunks that five people holding hands could barely circle. Aili lost sight of Chenguang as she veered between them, but as a result, the demons hadn’t seen her coming yet.
Too bad for them.
“Phoenix,” came a woman’s voice, laughing in excitement. “We’ve got it!”
“We don’t need the shackle, this one can’t transform – ”
“What, we just have to walk carrying her?” A man’s voice, tight and a little anxious. “What about – ”
Then his head came off.
The demon holding Chenguang’s wrist didn’t survive for more than one gaping second before a golden blaze cut her nearly in half, the phoenix-fire whip sending blood in a miniature whirlwind all over the clearing, hissing in the air. The woman didn’t die immediately, but she certainly would, and as she turned away from the carnage Aili caught yet another demon with her sword and whip together. His body tore into three uneven pieces.
Calmness, controlling her breathing, was key to fighting with her cultivational power, but Aili’s rage was so enormous that the phoenix-fire whip was volcanic with it, nearly out of her control. The fire flicked embers against the tree trunks. In the spaces between her sword plunging into flesh, the whip searing into bodies, she saw a human girl sprawled on the ground bleeding. Chenguang bent over her, coughing.
Chenguang had blood all over her back.
Arrows of demonic power sliced through the air at Aili, at Chenguang, at the girl on the ground. Aili blocked some dozen or so as she ran for the archer, who had climbed a tree for better range, and then simply tore him down with the phoenix fire whip, burning through his arms and his weapon and his heart. Another demon leapt out from behind the tree, spear at the ready, as though he thought he could surprise her while she was busy. Aili cut through the spear, then let herself get close enough so she could see his eyes when she slashed his throat.
Then there were none left.
Breathing quickly, she stood on the little path through the trees. “Chenguang,” she said.
Chenguang’s dark eyes met Aili’s, across the clearing. For a moment everything stopped.
“Aili,” Chenguang said softly. “Behind you.”
Aili whirled and caught someone with her sword – she didn’t need to see them at such close quarters, the scream told her what she needed to know.
Then she let her sword and the phoenix-fire whip dissolve, took two steps forward, and pulled Chenguang into her arms. She could feel Chenguang’s heartbeat, fast and hard, the warmth of her skin. Chenguang smelled of blood and fire, but beneath that was the scent Aili would forever associate with her. Incense, and the slight bitterness of medicinal herbs.
Aili swallowed and closed her eyes, to avoid seeing what she’d done to the demons, the body parts strewn everywhere, half-burned. Finally she had it again, that familiar rightness, Chenguang fitting against her, and it was as though they’d never been apart.
She whispered into her hair, “I’m so sorry, Chenguang.”
Chenguang’s breath caught against her chest. Chenguang’s own wounds were already healed, but there was still blood all over her back, rents in her clothing, as Aili’s hand pressed against her skin.
The arms around Aili’s waist squeezed for one moment, then loosened as Chenguang pulled slightly away. “Let me check Lanse.”
The girl had several bleeding flesh wounds, her face terrified and tear-stained in the gloom. None of her wounds would be difficult to heal, not for a phoenix.
“Doctor Liu,” she said, and gasped. “Doctor Liu? Aili – Aili?”
Chenguang said, soothingly, “It will be all right, Lanse. I’ll do it, Aili. I’ve got plenty of blood all ready.”
Aili recognized the girl now: Chenguang’s human apprentice. Aili had no idea what Chenguang was thinking, bringing her here; Chenguang had never told Lanse about her own phoenix nature, or about Crane Moon. These were secrets too large to tell, too risky not to keep. Lanse thought Chenguang was an ordinary physician, an expert in Daxian traditional medicine, no more, and that Aili was her lover, away on business.
But it didn’t matter. Whatever reason Chenguang had, to bring a human to Crane Moon – whatever it was, Aili would accept it. She nodded at Chenguang, and caught a hint of gratitude in her glance.
Chenguang slathered her hand with the blood from her own closed wounds, and then anointed each of Lanse’s injuries, finishing with her bloody fingers between Lanse’s lips.
Lanse struggled slightly in protest and shock, and then said, “What?” in a very small voice.
Her breathing immediately eased. Beneath the torn clothing, her wounds knitted together, pink scars fading away into unblemished skin, stained with dried blood.
“Chenguang, we need to run. I’ll carry her,” Aili said. Hopefully the girl wouldn’t protest that. They needed to get to safety at Crane Moon as soon as possible, back inside the wards. This attack was inexplicable, so many demons at once. This couldn’t be a coincidence, that they had come here to attack Chenguang.
“They must have followed me,” Chenguang said, anticipating her thoughts, as usual. As though they’d never argued, as though nothing had separated them. She took Aili’s hand and said, “Aili – ”
“Aili?!” Between two darkened tree-trunks, Yisue appeared, blue-green eyes wide. Aili winced, as he took in her handiwork. Lumps of half-burned bodies were strewn all over the clearing, black feathers from demons in their crow forms scattered and hanging in the trees.
Sanmer stood next to him, taller than he was. Both of them were pale, almost ghostly, in the dim shade of the trees.
“What happened?” Sanmer asked. “Demons here?”
“I don’t know – ” Aili said.
Sanmer made a sudden noise, not quite a word, and one of her golden throwing knives flashed through the air above Aili’s head.
Sanmer was fast, very fast. But she was too late.
There had been one demon left.
#
Time slowed down. Everything happened inch by inch in front of Aili, as though she was watching something that had already happened. She called her spiritual sword and it was in her hand, but the demon dove straight down in crow form from the high branches above them.
The demon transformed just long enough to have a hand, and that hand held something sharp as ice, clear as crystal.
Aili slashed viciously up, and the demon’s hand separated from her body, which Aili’s sword slashed nearly in half through the belly on the return stroke. The remnants hit heavily next to them, blood spattering over them all. Lanse’s mouth was open in a scream. Yisue cried out in protest. Sanmer’s arm was still reaching to throw another knife.
The crystal blade had already buried itself deep in Chenguang’s chest, the demon’s dead hand still clenched around it.
The crystal blade shimmered, and dissolved.
Chenguang didn’t look at her own wound, only at Aili, her mouth slightly open, a little frown between her eyebrows.
The bleeding didn’t stop. The wound didn’t close.
“Aili?” Chenguang said.
Then she collapsed, her blood trickling out over the hard dust of the forest path.
#
After Chenguang crumpled to the ground, Aili stared, waiting for her to get up.
Lanse cried out in shock and crawled towards her immediately, because she didn’t know what Chenguang was. Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang would, any minute now, take a deep breath and then smile and brush helplessly at the blood soaking her shirt, which Aili now noticed was the dark red that Chenguang always looked so beautiful in, and also didn’t show blood very much. Lanse didn’t know that any minute now, Chenguang would laugh and say Healing and not dying, that’s all I’ve got.
Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang was a phoenix. Lanse didn’t know that Chenguang couldn’t die.
But everyone else in that clearing knew, and for a long, long, frozen time they all stared, waiting.
Chenguang lay there, not moving except the small painful breaths that Aili could hear, bubbling through the open wound in her lungs. Whatever it was that had stabbed her had disappeared completely. Blood pooled around her, soaking into the drought-hardened earth beneath the old pine needles.
Lanse tried to cover the wound with her hands, pressing down. “I need a tube,” she shouted, “anyone, a pen, anything? She needs something to keep breathing, she’s going to drown in her blood – ”
But she didn’t, she didn’t need any of that, because Chenguang couldn’t die. Because this wasn’t possible. Because this couldn’t be happening.
Yisue was the first one to move. He took a step forward, and then they were all there together.
“Aili,” he said, urgently. “What’s happening?”
She didn’t know. She didn’t understand.
“Was there a talisman, some spell?” Yisue urged, kneeling next to her.
Lanse was elbows deep in Chenguang’s blood. “She needs a hospital,” she said, “surgery – it’s a miracle she’s not already dead, she’s losing so much blood – ”
“Can you heal her?” Yisue ignored Lanse and looked up at Aili. “Aili?”
Jerkily, Aili called her sword and slashed at her own wrist with it. Lanse cried out again. It didn’t hurt much. She’d been hurt much more. She lay her bleeding arm against Chenguang’s wound.
Nothing happened, except that the cut in Aili’s arm closed.
Lanse stood, and slowly backed away.
“Aili,” Sanmer said. “Bring her back. We need to get back to Crane Moon. Tainu will know what to do.”
Aili looked up from Chenguang’s blood to see her daughter looking from side to side, as anxious as she’d ever seen her, keeping watch with her golden throwing knives ready.
“I’ll take Chenguang. Carry the girl,” Aili said to Sanmer. She took a deep breath, and carefully slid her arms beneath Chenguang’s still, limp form.
Sanmer gave one brief, sharp nod and took two authoritative steps towards Lanse, who immediately turned and fled into the trees.
Sanmer looked to Aili. “We should just let her go.”
“If she wants to go back to the town, or the train station, take her there. Make sure she’s safe wherever she goes.” Chenguang’s weight was warm against her body. Chenguang had brought Lanse here. When Chenguang woke up, what would she say, to learn that Aili had let her human apprentice wander in the woods, with demons on the loose?
“Keep her safe,” Aili said again. Sanmer nodded and raced into the trees, in the direction Lanse had gone.
Yisue said, “Just go ahead, I’ll do my best to keep up.”
Aili didn’t wait any longer, settled her breathing, and began to run.
The sun had nearly set. A soft golden edge glimmered on the hillside, as she raced up it with her top speed. Yisue was left far behind; he had never cultivated enough to run this quickly, or use lightness skill up such steep slopes. Being a dragon was no advantage on land. Even Sanmer, whose cultivation far outstripped Yisue’s, wouldn’t have been able to keep up.
Aili increased her speed until she was nearly flying, just the very tips of her feet touching the earth in effortless, impossible leaps through the air. The run became a sort of nightmare blur, hints of gold and red blended with shadows, gray and black. When she topped the final hill, the conifers ended and the long dry grass and burned trees welcomed her to the last slope, straight down towards the sea.
She didn’t stop at the house she had made ready for Chenguang to come home to. It didn’t feel safe enough, maybe nothing was safe enough. She raced down and down, stopping only when she needed to balance Chenguang’s body while opening doors.
The doors of Crane Moon had no guards, no locks. Crane Moon wasn’t a castle; it had no great gate, only an ordinary wooden door. Inside, lights glowed happily, and echoing through the corridors she could hear the distant laughter of her disciples, now in the dining hall for dinner.
No one came to greet her. The few people who knew that Chenguang was arriving today were either behind her in the forest with a confused Lanse, or had offered to stay out of the way to let her and Chenguang reunite in privacy. No alarm had been raised. No one knew that anything had happened.
Despite the fact that phoenix blood healing was available at Crane Moon, and cultivators and spiritual creatures easily healed from small mishaps, there were some cultivation injuries that required quiet and long-term recuperation. For such things, Crane Moon had a small infirmary.
The room had stone walls, with no windows, and a door that opened only into a narrow, quiet corridor, easily guarded. It was the safest place Aili could think of, insofar as she was currently capable of thinking. Her mind screamed at her, memories and guilt and ancient terrors, things from lives long forgotten.
When she had laid Chenguang on the bed, she paced back and forth for a bit, waving her hands in the air – they barely had bandages here, why would they have bandages when any bleeding injury could be cured immediately by a phoenix? Now that she’d brought her here, how long would it take Sanmer and Yisue to get back and figure out where she was? She should have taken Chenguang to the dining hall – she should have taken her back to the house – beneath Crane Moon there were caverns, those might be safer –
Then she said out loud “All right,” knowing she was going to lose her mind at least temporarily if she didn’t do anything, and took off Chenguang’s shirt, what was left of it, to see the damage.
A narrow hole in Chenguang’s chest, nearly in the center, through the sternum, angling slightly left into the lung.
Oddly, of all things, that steadied her. She’d been a combat medic, once, when she was still an ordinary woman, before Chenguang had found her. This windowless room, this simple bed, this wounded body: before she had been able to heal with her own blood, before Chenguang had bound her into rebirth and made her into whatever strange hybrid thing she now was, Aili had known how to deal with wounds like this.
Blood still oozed out, slowly, more a seep than a flood now. A human being would be near death from blood loss, but Chenguang’s heartbeat was steady, if slow. Her breathing as well, though it sounded painful.
Aili slowly tore the remnants of Chenguang’s shirt into strips and used them to create a pad of fabric, then bound it around her chest, lifting her up to do it – she was so light, it wasn’t a problem for Aili, even without drawing on her cultivation for strength. The wound was clean, with only a hint of bruising around the edges. When she’d completed the bandaging, tight enough to keep a little even pressure on the wound, not so tight as to constrict, she thought Chenguang breathed a little easier.
A demonic spell had been on whatever that crystal blade was, that much was certain.
The blood of a phoenix was the most powerful substance in the world, never fading, and demons used it for their spells and talismans. Of course a demon would want to have a phoenix like this: unable to die and be reborn, unable to heal, endlessly bleeding as a source of power for them.
Chenguang had lost her ability to fly, because she’d given part of her power to Aili, so wasn’t it Aili’s responsibility to always keep her safe? Wasn’t that the least she owed her lover?
She had warned Chenguang. She had told her, don’t stay in Easterly, alone and unguarded. They’ll notice you. There are so many demons in a city to drink the suffering of mortals, to manipulate and betray and enjoy all the results. They’ll hear about the miraculous cures. They’ll know what you are.
And Chenguang had said, I’ve been a phoenix in this realm for eight thousand years. I know how to hide. If you’re so worried, Aili, come with me.
But it had been here, after all, that they had caught her. Here, in Crane Moon. Here, in the place Aili had built, to keep them all safe.
Here. While Aili watched. While their children watched.
Aili realized that her face was wet, and her jaw was clenched so hard that she could hear her teeth grinding against one another. On the bed next to Chenguang’s body, her own hand lay helpless, useless as the rest of her.
Aili knelt next to the bed, and put her head on it, next to Chenguang’s shoulder, and let everything go dark.
Chapter Three: Yisue: The Wounded Phoenix
“How exactly was it your fault, Yisue? Stop making this about you, it’s annoying.” Sanmer interrupted his litany of self-blame without the slightest compunction.
Yisue bit his tongue and sat down at the table of thick honey-colored wood. In front of them, a window looked out over the darkening sea, and behind them, a closed door led to the room where their mother, Chenguang, had lain unstirring for days. Aili had insisted that Chenguang remain in the larger, more defensible main building at Crane Moon, rather than their private home further up the hillside. The table and chairs were set in the corridor for the guard to sit and eat, because there was always a guard. Aili had insisted on it, even though Crane Moon had its own permanent ward that repelled both demons and humans.
Yisue didn’t count as a guard. He was just there to be guilty and ashamed. The real guard was Sanmer.
His sister leaned casually against the corridor’s stone wall, arms folded, but her fingers dug into her forearms as she kept talking, even though he had already stopped. “There were at least nine demons. Chenguang can’t fight or fly, and you can’t call a spiritual weapon. You’re here and unhurt, and Chenguang is here. If anything you should say it was a win.”
Sanmer couldn’t understand. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t been able to call a weapon. He had seen the movement at the same time Sanmer had, but Sanmer at least had done something.
He put his head straight down on the table. “Ugh.”
“Yisue, you’ve never fought demons, or really anything, you’ve never had the experience. No one is surprised.”
This didn’t make him feel better. “You haven’t fought demons either.”
“False. I fought in the ranking pits before I ran away from the demon clan.”
Even wracked with guilt he turned his face to one side to stare at her. If she was bringing up her early childhood, the attack on Chenguang must have truly upset her; she’d never talked about it, at least not to him. “You were nine. I remember when Aili found you and brought you home.”
“I obviously wasn’t nine, I was closer to two hundred I think, nine was just my human form. I had only just managed to cultivate until I could shape a mortal body, before I ran away.” Her fingers dug harder into her forearm, and then she gave up and called one of her spiritual weapons, a golden throwing knife, and began tossing it up and down. Her face was completely expressionless, but the knife showed how anxious she was. Very Sanmer.
He watched Sanmer’s green eyes follow the golden blade. Chenguang living in Easterly was risky, he agreed with Aili about that much, though at the same time he could understand why Chenguang was frustrated, staying here. The natural world was collapsing around them. His own efforts to make some change in the world might have failed, but what good did it do to hide in a sanctuary invisible to humans and pretend nothing was happening?
And now it had come to Crane Moon. Or something had.
He must have said something out loud. Sanmer said, “They must have followed her from Easterly. To find out where Crane Moon is.”
“Why? Why would demons follow her to attack here?” If demons knew Chenguang was a phoenix, why hadn’t they taken her while she was unprotected in Easterly? Here at Crane Moon there were beings who knew what they were, as opposed to the helpless humans whose suffering was demonic food and drink. Here at Crane Moon, as those pieces of charred flesh on the forest floor attested, there was Aili Fallon.
Yisue shuddered. He’d never seen Aili like that.
Sanmer shook her head. “There were so many of them. It was a coordinated plan of some kind.”
“To do what? Have Chenguang bleed all over the floor for days?” He clenched his fist on the table. “To force Aili to lie there staring at her?”
“Shut up,” Sanmer said. “What is wrong with you? Don’t you think Guiren is working to figure out what they were doing? We’re all trying to do what we can – ”
She turned away, and Yisue put his hand over his eyes, ashamed for upsetting her even more. This was, possibly, even worse for Sanmer than for him. Aili and Chenguang, Crane Moon: they were her whole life. Unlike him, she’d never left Crane Moon on her own, not since Aili had found her near a broken demonic array as a child.
And she was a demon, after all, even if she was a renegade, even if she didn’t cultivate corrupted power. She probably felt guilty, even more than he did.
Yisue took a deep breath. He was the elder, even if she was the fighter. “Where’s the human woman?”
“Her name is Lanse, not human woman. She comes to ask how Chenguang is every day, but she doesn’t go in, she’s afraid of Aili. She’s still very confused. About everything.” Sanmer’s blade went slashing across the corridor to bury itself in the wooden window frame, then dissolved and reformed, glimmering gold in her hand. “She doesn’t understand anything and there’s no way that the disciples can make her welcome. They’re all a mess since Aili’s not explaining anything to anyone.”
Yisue privately thought Lanse was unlikely to enjoy the company of Aili’s disciples, spiritual creatures who studied the sword with her and shapeshifted from animal to human form. He certainly didn’t enjoy them.
“She’s stubborn,” Sanmer said.
“Who, Aili?”
“No – I mean yes, but I was talking about Lanse.”
Yisue nodded. He had been very surprised when Lanse had chosen to come back to Crane Moon with them, instead of getting on the train back to Easterly. Even after he told her flat out that Crane Moon was a place humans didn’t come, that he and Sanmer were not human beings, that Chenguang herself was not human, that she would be better off going back to Easterly and forgetting that this had ever happened.
“She comes every day,” Sanmer said again. “She…she asks how I’m doing, too.”
Well, enough of the distraction. Time for the real conversation.
“How long since the last time she left the room?” Yisue said, quietly. “Aili.”
“Four, five days?”
“And before that?”
“Five days, maybe.”
“So you’re saying that in two weeks, she’s just stayed in that room watching Chenguang – She’s going to lose her mind, Sanmer. We can’t leave her this way.”
“Who can make her do anything else? No one can get her to leave the room if she refuses, Yisue.”
“This is so useless, just waiting. We have to do something,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “What if Chenguang dies? Or whatever it is that phoenixes do?”
“She is a phoenix, she won’t die,” Sanmer hissed, “and keep your voice down, what if Aili hears?”
“They’re bound together,” he hissed back. “Chenguang would be reborn in the spirit realm, isn’t that what will happen? But what would happen to Aili?”
Sanmer narrowed her green eyes at him and opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, another voice came from behind him.
“Yisue, did you want to see Chenguang?”
He jumped a bit at the hoarseness in Aili’s voice. His mother’s short blond hair was lank and tangled around her face, her blue eyes staring. If she had heard his whispers to Sanmer, she made no sign.
If only he had been able to fight. If only he was stronger. If only he could have kept Chenguang from being hurt.
Yes, dragons were powerless away from water, yes, he had never been a strong fighter and could call no weapon, but he could at least have transformed and used his claws or something. If only. Shock, surprise, fear, indecisiveness, weakness, lack of confidence, lack of skill, whatever it was, it all added up to failure. An all too familiar feeling.
Aili was a tall woman, muscular rather than thin, with broad shoulders, but she looked very small to him now. She sat on the side of the bed, Chenguang’s hand in hers. The stab wound in the center of Chenguang’s chest still bled, a slowly growing crimson stain through the freshly changed bandages.
“Why is she still bleeding?” he asked, helplessly, sick to his stomach.
Aili shook her head. Of course, she didn’t know anything more than they did yesterday, or the day before; why had he even asked? She traced along Chenguang’s eyebrow with one finger.
“Tainu said she may be able to hear,” she said. “So I talk to her.”
Yisue had a flash of Chenguang’s smile, laughing about Aili’s cooking, and bit his knuckle in frustration.
“Don’t you need to sleep, Aili?”
“Tainu said that if she keeps losing blood, if the wound doesn’t heal, though, then it will be a downward spiral.” She continued as though she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t understand, it’s not like them to attack in coordinated numbers like that…Yisue, don’t go anywhere unless one of the fighters is with you…” She rambled, her eyes focused only on Chenguang’s face, as though she had forgotten him.
Yisue racked his memories. He was eight hundred years old. Not old for a dragon, but still, hadn’t he ever learned or heard of something,anything, that could help? Something about demons and what powers and weapons they might have, to cause a phoenix to be trapped in her own undying body?
His mother’s best friend, Zhu Guiren, was a renegade demon, like Sanmer. Yisue had called him Uncle Demon for years, until he’d decided that he needed a more dignified way of addressing adults. Aili must have demanded everything Sanmer and Guiren possibly knew about the crystal weapon by this point. If they had no idea what had been done to Chenguang, what could he possibly offer?
But, he reasoned, as Aili stumbled into silence and laid her head against Chenguang’s limp fingers. But.
Guiren had left his demon clan centuries ago. Sanmer had fled from her clan when she was only a child. They wouldn’t know about recent things with demons.
But Yisue knew someone who would.
#
Well after midnight, he stood at ocean’s edge.
Out over the dark water, the waves crashing on the rocks around him, he could just make out the dragon gate: the sea-arched rock that stood with its feet in the water. Earth, air, and sea together.
The dragon gates linked the world together for him. He would enter the arch here, holding his pearl and his intention, and on the other side he would leave from a different dragon gate in some other part of the ocean. He’d used the gate only rarely since coming to Aili and Chenguang, just to visit his dragon parents in the abyssal zone. All this time, all these centuries, he had worn his human form to travel the human world, using his feet, trains, and once an airplane, which he’d found so excruciatingly uncomfortable that he’d sworn never to do it again.
Enough of the human world. He’d tried to live in the human world, and failed, just as he had failed as a dragon.
But a dragon lived nearly forever, and it was time now to be a dragon again.
“Going somewhere?”
He turned around, surprised – he hadn’t heard Sanmer coming at all. Probably she had transformed into a crow to fly down after him. She used to do it to tease him, when he was annoyed with the little redhead following him everywhere.
“You can’t stop me.” He was confident of that at least, since he was already touching the ocean.
“I know. And I don’t really want to.” She crunched over the pebbles to stand next to him.
“I left a note so Aili won’t worry.”
“Ha ha.”
“It’s the only thing I can do, Sanmer.”
“Where exactly are you going?”
“Daxian Republic. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Big brother, I hate to be the one to mention it, but you thinking you’re not going to have problems doesn’t mean problems will not exist.”
“Thanks, I had no idea.” He was touched by it. She almost never called him big brother. There had been a time where he had constantly demanded it and she had constantly called him little brother instead. Infuriatingly, she’d been taller than him within a few years of her arrival.
“I’ve been there before,” he said. “While a war was going on. It can’t be worse than that.”
“What’s your plan?”
“My uncle, Beilong. He might know about whatever spell they used to do this to Chenguang. Beilong is the bane of demons, he’s fought them for thousands of years, maybe he’ll recognize – ”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
He was stunned at the offer, and for a moment he considered it. Sanmer could protect him, Sanmer was a fighter – but no. Aili should have one of her children still with her – he wasn’t a fool enough to believe that she would be happy with his going. And Aili and Chenguang had always worried that Sanmer might be tempted to cultivate corruption again, if she were under too much pressure. Crane Moon was a safe place for her. The Daxian Republic, far from home, without guidance – it would not be safe. What good would it do to save his mother, and send his sister into a corruption she could never return from?
Of course, it wouldn’t be safe for him either. But it was the one thing that only he could do, because no one else could use the dragon gates, no one else could find his uncle. “I’ll be all right.”
Sanmer didn’t try to give him a hug, or any other mark of affection, but her being here was enough. “Be careful.” She stood watching in the dark, as Yisue took a deep breath and ran lightly to his gate, his feet splashing in the low tide. His heart’s intention settled as he manifested the pearl in his hand: a gate off the northeast coast of the Daxian Republic, on the other side of the world. The beginning of the dusty road to his uncle Beilong, the great dragon of the Sorrowful River.
Chapter Four: Liu Chenguang: Once and Again
Something cold and blue, like ice, stabbed at Chenguang’s heart. Her blood poured out, her healing blood, to protect her. She lay in a swirl of brilliant crimson and gold, the colors of her feathers when she transformed. Blood-red and sunset.
I can’t die, she told the ice, and the ice chittered in amusement. Its edges were sharper than obsidian, sharper than the finest thread of razor wire, sharper than memory.
Chenguang wanted to get away from the ice, so she forced herself to her feet, stumbling forward into nothingness. Her chest was agony. Blood and sunlight trailed behind her, like her useless wings, but she couldn’t transform. Her wings weren’t really there.
“None of this is real,” she said out loud. The ice stabbed, tearing into her heart, and she screamed and fell to her hands and knees, the agitated swirl of scarlet surrounding her in desperation.
Aili?
Aili stood in front of her, and she herself was standing now. All her pain was gone. Aili was within her arm’s reach, but even as she stepped closer and opened her mouth to say Aili, let’s go home, she stopped in confusion. An enormous tree covered them both, hoary and winding in all its branches, dusty green leaves rustling in the hot sun. Shifting light and leafy shadows fell on Aili’s beloved face, on her shoulders and hands and the swell of her breast, beneath the uniform of an army that no one now remembered.
It was Aili, but it was Aili three hundred years ago.
Aili’s dark golden hair was long, braided around her head in that complicated way she had used when they first met. And her blue eyes were confused and hurt, because Chenguang had promised to explain, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t explain anything, because no time was left for them.
How had she come back here, to the choice she had made three hundred years ago? To this very moment, to Aili’s pain, and the unfamiliar terror of running out of time? To the last moments of her own existence as a complete phoenix?
Three hundred years ago, the heat built inside her. Inside her heart, where the rebirth fire would soon nest, burning her to dissolution and immortality.
I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to make Aili immortal.
I could let her go to war. I could let her die.
Horrified fascination at the idea crept over her.
None of this would have happened. None of this would have happened at all: Yisue, Aili, Sanmer, Crane Moon. I could just let her go, death was her nature as immortality was mine. None of it would happen if I didn’t – If I hadn’t –
But there was no time.
“Aili, I’m so sorry, sorry for everything,” she whispered. Again. As she had three hundred years ago. The fire danced in her blood like sparks. The decision was made, and she was no more than a ghost in her own past. Her hand was moving, her hand had grasped Aili’s wrist and brought it to her teeth, letting her lips feel the tearing of Aili’s skin, and her mouth the taste of her blood. Aili screamed and tried to tear herself away, but Chenguang steeled herself to give all the last strength of this body that would soon dissolve. All to hold Aili still. To make her immortal.
Blood swirled inside her, around her, lit with flames, until Chenguang felt nothing but the fire itself, and the seeking sharpness of the ice.
#
“Hmph,” said a familiar voice, deep and a little hoarse.
The blood and ice drew back like a curtain, and her hands were before her eyes, her pale fingers spread against a floor of dark polished stone, inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli. Against her skin she felt the brush of heavy silk, the formal robes of a cultivator. For some reason she was kneeling in the posture of full prostration, head to the floor.
“Get up,” Beilong said. “I’ll tell you when you need to be polite.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, sitting back on her knees, then rising to her full height, unexceptional as it was. Aili was gone, but Chenguang knew where she was, now, and for some reason here she was no longer trapped, forced to move and speak as she had in the past. “This happened three hundred years ago, too.”
“Did it?” Beilong lounged on a fantastically carved wooden couch, dressed in the royal robes of some forgotten human dynasty, brilliant gold embroidered with a white dragon. Chenguang’s gaze was drawn to it. The eyes of the embroidered dragon were a deep azure. Like Yisue’s eyes.
Beilong stood up, more than six feet tall and enormously fat. His one eye glinted at her, the other hidden behind his eyepatch. He snorted out, a rumbling “Hah” noise that made the long strands of his gray beard tremble. “You’re dreaming. And I’m dreaming. So we’re dreaming together. What do you see?”
“When I met you three hundred years ago,” she said, stumbling. “When you gave Yisue to Aili, to live with her. With us.”
“Interesting,” he said, his deep voice rumbling in his chest. “I see something completely different. I see a phoenix about to die.”
“I can’t die,” she said, automatically.
“You can. We discussed this. Three hundred years ago. Which is why you are probably dreaming about it now. Don’t you remember?”
Of course she remembered. She remembered the shock of having her own growing sense of wrongness confirmed. How she had carefully hidden her dismay beneath –
“At that time, you pretended not to know.” He coughed, a long, rattling spasm that shook his shoulders. “You gave your power to Aili, a human being, bringing her into the fire of rebirth against all the laws of spirit and nature. I do not judge. Dragons are intimate with sacrifice. I told you then: you will not have another rebirth.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m dying right now,” she said, feeling oddly petulant.
He grinned widely at her. “But I am.”
Another shock. “But – but you – how can you die?” A dragon lived as the earth lived, as the water lived. Beilong was old as the Sorrowful River itself, countless millennia of water cutting through stone.
“All things have birth and death save phoenixes. Well, phoenixes other than you. Let us be honest with one another, phoenix. I wanted to see my little nephew again. Has the great dying affected him? Is he well?”
“What do you mean, the great dying?”
His single visible eye went flat and inhuman, and he growled at something outside her field of vision.
The scarlet and gold swirled, reminding her that outside this calm memory she was trapped in endless pain, and she shouted, “No!”
The world firmed again: black and gold floor, wooden throne, the great dragon immense before her, one eye narrowed black and polished.
“There is a power in the world now that seeks out and destroys dragons,” he said. “Remember this when you wake. Tell Yisue. Warn him.”
He growled again. One hand whipped out in the air and held a simple cane, wooden with a golden head. He struck the floor with it.
Boom. The palace shook around her. Water the color of blood flooded around her feet.
“Phoenix,” he said, “why do I see you impaled on a crystal, like a butterfly on a pin?”
The pain lanced through her, and she screamed, falling again to her hands and knees in a parody of prostration. The red flood swirled up her wrists, then climbed like vines all over her, failing to protect her from the crystal shard that went all through her body, keeping her either from falling or rising, keeping her still and frozen, unable to move.
“What is that obscenity?” the dragon roared, and disappeared beneath the sea of blood and fire.
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