Jiling barely noticed when the sun bid her farewell and sank below the horizon, only nodding a quiet greeting to the moon and stars that lovingly lit her graceful features in the silver night high above Luanshi’s compound. She took great pleasure in wandering the mist-streaked forest lining Yunji’s stone face. She climbed till she could watch the entire world flicker on like fireflies in the encroaching dark, lulled by Yelu’s soft sighing watersong, a plaintive fae lilt in the roar tamed by distance.

The priestess knelt upon a boulder perched precariously at the edge of a sheer drop, hands laid gently in her lap, shrapnel and jade mala beads clicking in slow sequence. There was a comfort in watching the clouds roll down the mountain top, enveloping the world in an ethereal dreamscape only made real by altitude.

“This body is empty,

empty is this body.”

Click.

Xueyu’s footsteps were gentle upon forest carpet, macerating needles and old leaves beneath the soles of his boots, summoning a swell of carefully approaching crunching and disturbing the silent onset of evening’s quiet, restful air. He stopped some feet behind the priestess’ back, emerging from a semi-parted curtain of trees thickly interwoven in the upper strata of smaller branches that made the splotchy canopy hovering above the mountain’s long descent. His sword swung at his side but Xueyu brought a hand to its hilt to lull it into stillness. He glanced up at the sky’s first stars, brave in the receding day.

“At least let me know when you’re going next time,” he said softly. “I was starting to worry.”

“There is nowhere I go that you do not follow,” the priestess replied like a mirror, repeating his love back to him with different words on her hollow tongue. “The night is still; it is a mural unfurling slow across the landscape.”

Jiling, for better or worse, always felt what Xueyu felt:

need.

Turning her head to the side, the tiny leader of Yunji’s esoteric sect caught the crest of her protector’s shadow in her periphery. “My faithful blade should take this moment with me; it is a long way down. Would he be willing to take satisfaction in the quiet at my side?”

“I am always satisfied at your side,” Xueyu replied, “But today I do not have confidence that I can remain quiet.” He remained where he stood, an edge retracted, momentarily better than the man deep within him who wanted to steal that woman away beneath the pastel beauty of sunsprawl twilight. “Would you allow me to pollute your peace with the indelicacy of my noise?”

Jiling returned her gaze slowly forward, nodding. One hand slipped from her lap and grazed the empty space at her side: an indication, a directive.

He stepped forward into the seclusion of Jiling’s space. Atop her lonely platform, Xueyu folded his legs beneath his weight. He arranged himself into a compact position at her side, enduringly watchful even as his sword was laid flat next to him.

“I’m worried about Laike,” he said after a moment, words catching the tail end of a whistling breeze that braided itself through chasms of that granite-toothed landscape. “Have you been paying attention to how he’s behaving recently?”

“Laike is like you.” Jiling’s observation was a bell-tone in the whisperwind calm, clear despite her minimal volume. The woman always found it strange how it was always her task to point out the obvious behaviors that were passed down from teacher to student, father to son. “If you are told you cannot have something, someone, do you want them less or more?”

“I do not base my wanting on something or someone’s ability to be taken.” Xueyu looked ahead as he spoke, watching a distant mist lazily rise from the pores of the breathing earth. “I have let go of many unattainable things in my life. I have held onto others simply because I care for them. I love you the same as I always have. Your commitment to the mountain has no bearing on that, it does not heighten or lessen how I feel.”

His chin dipped. “I have been thinking a lot about this recently. I wasn’t going to say anything but I spoke with him yesterday thinking he was beginning to grow ill and he confessed his mind’s preoccupation with the prince. I suppose what truly worries me about this situation is not that he is experiencing life outside of my control but that the life he is experiencing is going to steer him down the same path my own has taken me. I want the best for Laike. I wanted to raise him to be strong enough to defend himself, to venture out into the world and find his own happiness, seek his own path, be his own person. I did not want to raise myself but someone who could do better, be better. He deserves a much better life than this. He does not belong as a servant or obligor; he should not be forced to fit into the shape of another person’s shadow when he has the ability to make his own.”

The priestess let a bleak smile slip past her guard, more evident in those delft blue eyes than her impassive lips so Guanyin merciful. Their shadows stretched before them: hers whole before the precipice, Xueyu’s spilling long off the edge into the beyond.

Gently, she leaned toward the blade master and took one of his hands in hers, lacing their fingers together like she so often had before the mountain took her elsewhere. Her hand was delicate in his gladiator palm. She returned their intertwined contact to her own lap and held them together with her touch, two of her hands barely enough to hold his one.

“When has my shadow ever been large enough to hold you?” She was somber but wistful; she was loving under her placid cloak of the divine. “You stay at my side but your legend grows, your deeds are greater than the world’s whispers of me, greater than the mountain that made us. He will be the same, even when he ascends to Tiao’s side—when the mountain permits us to step away.”

Xueyu nodded even in his persistent dissatisfaction, his resilient lack of surety. His own digits curled into Jiling’s touch, unsoothed by the contact but happy to have it all the same.

“I’ve been thinking of summoning Chen.” The swordmaster looked to the woman’s profile, following the lines of her shape he knew by heart. “We’ve been keeping infrequent contact since he left to travel. They got along well—I think he would probably like to see Laike’s debut for the Millipede.”

“Do as you will.” Jiling’s glass words broke between them as she looked down to their hands. She toyed with her protector’s rough knuckles, stroked the calloused pads of his sword worn fingertips. “Just remember, Xueyu: in your efforts to keep him out of the shadow he chooses, be sure you don’t force him into the confines of your own.”

xueyu, you coward:

what are you waiting for?

all this talk, all this waiting: it’s so

boring. she’d loosen up if you put your hands

on her, boy; maybe she’d even feel

smething for you if you gave

her something worth

feeling, for once.

The name etched into Xueyu’s blade glimmered the texture and cadence of laughter, a silent sound only shared between captive swordsman and taunting blade.

“I—” Xueyu turned away as the noise of a tinny voice cut through the clarity of his thoughts and the mire of his subdued emotions. He looked down to the blade sitting harmlessly beside him then out to the vast horizon once again, unwilling to respond to the malicious glimmer of its goading.

“I think Chen could teach him some valuable lessons outside of those I’ve already taught him. It’s about giving him the freedom to choose, not putting him on some path I’ve already plotted out for him.” The swordmaster tilted his chin, angled his head. “He asks about Lai, too.”

His sword, Kaizhan, had a voice like funerary static, white noise syllables a targeted broadcast for Xue’s internal enjoyment alone.

ugh, you’re so tedious—

if you can’t even make a virgin shout your

name, then stop thinking of how it’ll

sound in her mouth all the

goddamn time.

it’s sad that, even without a body, i’m the

only splash of satisfying red in your bullshit colorblind world.

xueyu of the blood blessed blade: what a fucking joke.

i know you, boy. i fucking see you.

Jiling, unaware of the sword’s taunting, was only aware of the tension keeping Xueyu’s posture rigid despite their relaxed circumstance. “It has been some time since Chen has been home,” she finally acquiesced, looking out over the dotting of electric day lighting up window by window as the mountain’s swarm swept through the compound—from dormitories to library to the hospice quarters for the pilgrims come to die. “It will be good to hear of his deeds.”

“Yeah.” Xueyu was suddenly listless when it came to talk of his prodigy, posture reformed into a slumping mockery of his typical height. He took his hand back from that woman he loved, unwilling to taint the importance of that moment any further with phantom abuse of his bloodthirsty weapon.

The man knew that he could only ignore the spirit for so long. He knew that the more time he spent not acknowledging the foul litany the worse it would get. He exhaled like a sigh.

shut the fuck up.

i bend to your will most days,

i give you whatever you want

why do you have to do this now?

you know i’m not going to take

advantage of her, no matter what

shit you try to get me to pull.

so shut the fuck up.

Xueyu laid his palms flat on his legs.

don’t get testy with me; i’ll make you regret it.

you have an hour:

either anoint my blade in fresh blood

or come kneel before the mirror to pray.

i miss you, xue—

come show me how

you miss me too.

“Is everything okay, Xue?” Jiling’s gaze turned on her companion the moment he pulled his hand away. Physical contact was rare between them; Xueyu willingly relinquishing those brief moments of affection was rarer still. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” he replied amid the tumult of his distraction, voice enthused enough to make a modest attempt at playing the part of his lie. He adjusted again to stand. “I should head back to make sure the evening’s tasks are progressing. Laike has been falling asleep in strange places, pushing himself too hard, not eating as he should. I need to make sure that he’s able to make it to bed and rest properly rather than planting his face in a book.”

Jiling nodded before she looked once more over the landscape, smoothing her hands over the perfectly laid white silk of her dress.

“Very well,” she replied. “There are horses coming up the mountain.” A pause drifted between her words as she tilted her head, gaze blank, directionless. “…Three horses, four riders. You may escort me down to greet the princes.”

“…Princes?” Xueyu’s eyebrows knit but he offered his hand to the priestess still, motions automatic when his moments bled into the obligation of duty. “Were you expecting them?”

“No.”

Jiling took Xueyu’s hand and rose to standing, boots barely rustling the blanket of fallen leaves when she stepped down from her stone platform.

“There were no birds sent,” she continued, glancing at her protector, studying his every response. “But they are riding like there is an emergency.”

“Hm.” The perplexing approach of the small caravan seemed to negate some of the tension that Xueyu accumulated in the muscles of his shoulders, his arms, his stomach half-sunk. He collected his sword and reunited it with his waist, strapping leather to his liking before turning to head back to their home. Xueyu had no idea what the next moments would bring them—this could be anything, but he hoped this anything would take less than an hour.

“Strange,” he said, anticipation pulling the strings of him taut again.

Jiling was there and not; present but elsewhere, present but everywhere. She relied on her protector to guide her down the path as she spoke aloud the intelligence the eavesdropping swarm provided for her, so both the lady of the mountain and her swordmaster would be prepared upon receiving their unannounced visitors.

“Both Princes. Ren Li, wounded. An inlayer named Hua Jin. A wager on the Jade Millipede.” The woman exhaled slowly. “My night, it seems, is just beginning.”

Xueyu nodded his simple agreement.

He led the petite woman down the paths her own feet carved by repetition, through thickets of low-hanging branches and trails of packed earth and pebbles easily scattered. The way was shadowed and widing to their precariously perched mountain compound, but the gentle lights of that temple aglow always called them home. Xueyu was doting and attentive in their partial descent, careful to steer the priestess away from roots that would conspire against her blind walking, making nature pliant against his will as he pushed clots of overreaching bushes aside like they were overeager worshippers.

On more stable ground the swordmaster released his hold. However, he remained close to Jiling’s side amid the now immediate clopping of approaching hooves.

Jiling stood next to Xueyu just within the internal gate of their high-elevation compound, the gate that separated Yunji’s budding town from the sanctified spaces of disciples and buddhas and the cores of a million lives gone dim. She watched the boys approach and awaited their greeting, the statement that would justify their unannounced arrival.