🦐

Xueyu’s steps were brisk on the sliver-stone salvaged hallways leading him away from Jiling’s private chamber. He made quick work of the angled corridors, followed all their twisting and turning around sacred spaces until he hit the day in full. The large man stood in the   main doorway of the mountain’s deeper recesses for a fleeting moment, watching the lazy rustling of the world beyond—its simple tuning so grand, its motions so slow that they were imperceptibly fast. A paradox, a puzzle: perfect.

The inner walls of Luanshi Sect’s mountain compound twisted some yards ahead of him, composed of stretches of dense rebar hammered into a more acceptable shape, metal bones of a fallen structure picked from her wreckage and reused to fit the purposes of a society built atop the echoes of former folly. Lungs full of the morning’s dewy air, he started down the broad stairs and down the path toward his training yard, turning just before the exit yawning before him. Xueyu dipped into a shadow-lined path between two smaller structures made of hand-mashed mud and steel. He emerged on the other side to his favorite sound—the complaints of one of his pupils being punished by the superior skill of a boy he considered his best.

When Jiling opened her delft blue eyes, she no longer prayed before the living Buddha. She was no longer surrounded by the million retronascent pearl hearts she was charged with protecting.

Instead, she, High Priestess of the Empty Mountain, was laid on her bed platform swaddled in soft silver blankets and yesterday’s silk. The grey mist morning called her name through half open screens, through marbled panels of white translucent glass reclaimed from a time long before theirs; the day reminded her that her watch had faltered in the night and it was now time to rise. Light touched hands tucked dark, exhaustion skewed hair behind her ears as she rose to sitting, folded those same hands gently in her lap as she looked to the stylized cedar cloud windows framing the real world’s sky.