2 YEARS AGO.
“I’m not going to go easy on you,” Chen said as he walked into the center of the sparring ring at Laike’s side, voice hushed like the disclosure was something of a secret shared between them. This would be one of the last matches in which the older disciple would partake—in a day’s time he was due to leave the compound and travel the surrounding lands, vast wastelands and rusty scrap yards overgrown with the shimmering circuitry of kudzu vine, seeking to cultivate himself further in the open world away from Yunji’s protections. His essentials were already stowed into a pack; his pack waited idle back in the dark halls of a dormitory that was no longer his home.
Evening swelled in a beautiful fire beyond the peak of the jagged mountain. Autumnal sunsets were always stunning in the misty landscape of the Luanshi sect’s compound, lighting trees with red auroras and a searing outer glow. The sun was just beginning to dip into the horizon, so the lighting was particularly dramatic. It proved a fitting background for a goodbye fight.
Around the two fighters gathered their peers. Younger trainees were fond of watching Xueyu’s most skilled pair of students take each other on. As was tradition, Chongwei and Jiewei manned a sort of bookie booth, furiously noting down how many rocks of sugar each child would bet on either the boy of light, or the boy of shadow. They were born hustlers, even at the tender age of fourteen.
“Ohmigod are you kidding me, Meilin?” Chongwei shouted up at the boy, hair bobbing. “A bet for who’s gonna win is SO BORING.”
“Why don’t you bet some sugar on whether or not they kiss all gross with their tongues?!” Jiewei demanded, sticking out her own tongue and making a nasty faux make out noise before she collapsed in laughter against her sister. “Aaaa~haha gross.”
Meilin made a face, either puzzled or disgusted or both. He dropped a handful of sugar before the girls to cover his original bet before he walked away.
“If it’s the last one, we should make a wager.” When Chen came to a stop, Laike began to move, circling around the elder student. Chen was the brightest light in Laike’s world: it only made sense that the teen responded so well to his position. “If I win, you have to stay up with me till you leave at daybreak.”
“You’re not going to hustle me for the last of my sugar Weis-style?” Chen’s bright eyes only briefly followed the orbit of his dark satellite. He grinned. “That bet only incentivizes me to lose.”
“If staying up till dawn is already fated, I’ll change my bet,” the younger boy said as he halted his pacing. He looked starkly at the other boy, shards of shadow snapping together to form a sword in his hand. “If I win, you have to convince Master Xueyu to let me go wander with you.”
“So be it.” Chen nodded, retrieving his sword from the nothingness of air. As its weight solidified in his double-handed grip, the disciple leveled its length at his opponent. He spread his feet as if to welcome advancement. “Ready?”
“Tell me what you want if you win.” Laike’s petulance soured his playful tone. He grasped Shenhai in a backhanded sway, strafing to test the older boy’s perimeter. “C’mon—raise the stakes.”
With no shadow to follow, Chen gauged Laike’s position by the sound of his voice. He dipped his chin after a moment, angling his gaze in the boy’s direction. “If I win, I leave here with your belt.”
“It won’t fit you,” Laike said here and there, in the shell of his opponent’s ear and twenty yards away all at once before he was gone again, strafing between shadows to better disorient his elder holding the advantage. “But I’ll let you have it if you can take it.”
“Hey—hold on. Just what are you trying to say?” Angling his sword into the light, Chen made a mouse chase out of Laike’s shadow-hopping. Turning, he followed the younger boy with a sharp reflection of light, briefly erasing the spots of dark once traveled, nipping at his heels. “Stop playing and fight me, Lai.”
“I’m daring you to take off my belt,” Laike sniped in a whisper sighed too close, appearing suddenly in the circle of Chen’s arms. He emerged from the shadow Chen cast straight down as he emanated light outwards toward all of Laike’s prior hiding spots. The younger disciple didn’t give Chen time to respond: he slammed an open palm into his elder’s chest, knocking him back and off his heels.
Laike fell back a few steps to put space between them but caught himself on a thought. “Or—wait, did you mean the other thing?”
“Nevermind, it doesn’t matter.” In catching himself, Chen’s palm landed on the ground in a beam of light cast from the middle of two distant trees. He wrapped his fingers around the projection and picked it up, smashing it into Laike’s side. It hit with the density of a wooden board despite the frequency of its construction; it shattered into a violent spray of glitter after bouncing off the shadow boy’s body, released from its maker’s grasp.
On his feet again, Chen was a flash flying into Laike’s space, sword up and coming right at him.
The younger boy was seemingly slow to recover from the heavy hit, picking himself halfway off the ground, crouched amongst all that shattered starlight. Laike shot Shenhai out before him with splayed fingers, sword like an arrow forcing his opponent to dodge.
That shadowless boy, spry and cunning, leapt at Chen’s middle, simultaneously snatching his sword out of midair on her return trip. There was no sound when the pair hit the ground—not there, anyways, not then. They disappeared through the shadowed ground like the earth was water. They left no ripple, left no mark—
only a conspicuous absence where two boys should have been scrambling on the ground.
In the dark, there was nothing—no light, no space, no continued march of time. There was only the soft weight of Laike’s arms around Chen’s middle and the echo of his plea:
Throw the match, Laike begged, more ardent than any prior play-fight taunts lit by the waning day. Let me leave here with you. I’m ready. Chen: tell Master Xueyu I’m ready.
Shadows thrived in the absence of light. Whenever Chen fell victim to Laike’s obverse full of darkness he felt like he was suffocating, like his very existence was compromised. He was breathing underwater, seeking safety in the void of space—Chen was gripping Laike tight in his below-above, black knuckle grasp firmly dug into the nebulous consistency of the younger boy.
Laike. Do you really want me to just concede? What makes you think that Master Xueyu will listen to me? For as much as Chen wanted to simply turn on a light, perhaps he wanted that moment of privacy with that converse creature more. He was so soft; breathless, blighted. How can you tell me you’re ready and simultaneously beg me to take up your arguments?
I don’t want you to go, Laike cried under cover of the dark, holding Chen a little tighter. Light and Shadow were both so fleeting, always chasing the other away. But if you have to go, I want to go with you. I’ll run away like Jian did—then you can search the wastes for me like Yan does. I don’t want the title Master Xueyu says is mine—I don’t want to be here forever, not when you’re gone. Please Chen—you’re like Mistress Jiling: you can inherit the Heart of the Mountain, can’t you?
It’s not meant for me, Laike. Jiling made her choice. Chen sighed into Laike’s shape. Listen to me. Commit these words to your heart and keep them there like a promise: If you run away I will not come looking for you. If you stay here, I will return to you.
Suddenly, the petulant dark spat Chen out. He emerged from the side of the cliff face backing the line of spectators like he was falling straight downward, knocking over both Weis and their impromptu bookie stand, rock sugar scattered all over the ground.
Laike himself swung gracefully out of the dark, landing on his feet. He advanced through the trench Chen’s body left in the dirt, sword aloft as he strode after his prey.
“You were given a gift in that, weren’t you?” Laike spat, riled and spiteful. The boy had always been honest. He found subterfuge difficult; he was incapable of masking how hot his blood ran, how abandonment struck him so venomously cold. “So my only recourse is waiting? How can I do this? There is no action in waiting. There is no honor in waiting.”
Chen groaned as the two teens were shrieking and scrambling for their spilled sugar, furiously shoving pieces into their mouths when their hands and pockets became too full. He threw his sword in the air and it dissipated into a million flecks of light falling downward like a shower of particles burned up in the pressure of his atmosphere.
The older boy picked himself up, a little slower this time, and paused the bright rain mid-air. He began to fling them at the nightstalker, one after another after another and another and ten-fifteen-twenty-fifty more, a salvo barrage of needlepoint sword shimmer seeking to pierce the night.
“There is honor in respecting the choice that I am making. There is honor in walking your own path until ours reconvene.” Chen was firm again, breathing sunshine from the air. “I’m going to miss you more than anything, Laike.”
Laike was helpless to the onslaught. Even as Shenhai shattered into a thousand wasps to counter Toushe’s vicious darts, Laike was exposed. With no shadows for him to escape into, he simply had to weather Chen’s storm, deflecting as best he could with Shenhai’s vespine defense.
One came through, then another. Shards of light nicked his skin, cut through his robes as he tried to fall back. A cut to the cheek, three cuts to the thigh; Laike gritted his teeth. A pair of incandescent blades caught Laike by the throat and he spilled his red upon the ground. He stopped, frozen in disbelief, eyes wide. He coughed the same red into the air, let the same red drip from his lip as he clapped his hand over the deep wound, oozing the same red from between his fingers. He stared at Chen with confused hazel eyes—Laike was an animal, an idiot mongrel who never understood why things happened the way they did.
“Oh—fuck. FuckfuckFUCK.” Chen was immediately stripping, ripping off a section of his white robe as he ran over to the younger boy. He swatted Laike’s hands away from the wound across his neck and wrapped the cloth snugly over it. He placed the boy’s hands back atop it for pressure then scooped him up in his arms.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, Lai.” He was running Laike back to the inner halls of the complex, nimble feet making quick work of the strange terrain. At the first face he saw, he demanded Jiling on a ragged breath.
In the upper recesses of Yunji’s maze of halls, Jiling’s chambers were perched high above the strife of Xueyu’s training yard. She plucked a song from an aged guzheng with light strung across its bridge instead of strings. Long before she ascended to leadership of Luanshi, she held fond memories of coaxing the light to sing, especially in the winter dark of the world beneath when she wandered it at Xueyu’s side.
Looking up to her companion, she tilted her head as she played. The question seemed to come out of the blue—their prior conversation had been about Fanxing, tea, and fleeting moments of a shared childhood. “Xue’er: are your pupils currently engaging in their exercises without your guidance?”
“Exercises are done for the day. A few of my students begged for an easy day today so they could prepare a farewell activity for Chen.” Xueyu looked up from his teacup chuffing spindly steam to meet the clarity of his priestess’ bright eyes. “Why do you ask?”
Another pair of notes escaped Jiling’s featherlight fingers as she considered Xueyu’s words as though they were written in the air. “We will soon receive company.” She looked down to resume the last few measures of the song before chaos came to roost in her enclave of quiet. “Perhaps you could roll up the rug? I am afraid our guests may be in a state.”
Eyebrows expressing all the confusion he managed to keep choked down, Xueyu stood to begin the process of taking up the carpet.
He, however, didn’t get very far. The door was flung open shortly after his rising and in trampled a frantic Chen, arms full of a bleeding Laike.
“Lady Jiling, I’ve done a terrible thing.” He was on his knees before the small woman, spreading Xueyu’s star disciple out on the carpet the man was trying to remove. “Please help. Please help him, hurry please!”
Wide-eyed and full of horror, the swordmaster grabbed Chen by his wrist and yanked the boy to his feet. “What is the meaning of this? What have you done?!”
“We were sparring and I went too far. I thought he could defend himself.” Chen sank back to his knees in the hold, ever submissive before their teacher. “Please help him. Please!!”
Laike shuddered on the floor, eyes open but mostly unseeing. His free hand reached for something, anything, to hold. He found the corner of Chen’s bloodstained robe and grasped it in a weakened fist.
“Who will bear his pain?” Jiling asked, bell chime voice unphased by the commotion suddenly before her. The soft sweep of a scale accompanied her words as she continued to play the light beams at her fingertips. She didn’t rise to inspect the teen shivering from blood loss on her floor. She was already in his bloodstream, in his veins, microscopic swarm invading the spectral boy’s body and fighting to cull the bleeding, reverse the blood escaping into his throat, flooding his lungs and his mouth. “Decide quickly.”
Both men lurched forward, but only one prevailed.
“Me—” Chen shoved Xueyu away with an open hand strengthened by the fury of adrenaline. The swordmaster stumbled backwards, catching himself on the wall as the older of his disciples readjusted to welcome Laike’s torment.
“Does the teacher protest?” Jiling’s question came as she cast a glance up to the swordmaster bested by the blood soaked young man before her. “Who is at fault? The teacher, the student, or the boy who bleeds?”
Her fingers manipulated the notes, bent them to her will; she gave the air mournful sound.
Xueyu stepped forward, hand coming to rest on Chen’s shoulder. “I—”
“I am at fault. Please let me take responsibility for my actions, Lady Jiling and Master Xueyu.” Chen shoved the swordmaster’s limb off. “I am old enough to accept the consequences of my errors, I am strong enough to take back the pain of the injury I have caused. Please. Laike is my brother. Pain is nothing compared to the light of his smile.”
The swordmaster met the priestess’ eyes again, silent.
Jiling didn’t seem to respond to the words. Laike’s gasp, a rasping wet sound from mouth and open windpipe, was the only accompaniment to the Priestess’ sparse song.
It started slowly: Laike’s red colored drowning was mirrored into Chen’s lungs. The young shadowstalker went from plaintive gasping to hiccupped breaths as his discomfort ebbed into a strange sensationless euphoria that left him midway between alive and not quite, breathing but not feeling the presence of air in his lungs.
Chen bore the weight of Laike’s breathless suffering, even though he was without a mark.
Slowly, like a snowdrift tumbling thoughtlessly down a mountain’s side, Chen doubled over. He was gasping for air, suffocating in the weight of the blood belonging to that boy before him, choking on the air he so desperately sought to swallow. Everything was red—his hands, his clothes, his vision. He was tumbling blindly into the nightstalker’s pained dark, offering himself to the void in Laike’s stead, nightmare feeling eclipsing stark reality.
Jiling’s fingers were a glissando slide before she struck a heavy chord, discordant as the sharp strike of all Laike’s pain in reverse: the ache of the wound, the body’s shock, the separation of flesh. As Chen suffered, Laike fell still, his wound closing as his hand fell away. The younger boy breathed a quiet sigh as his eyes fell shut and his grasp on Chen’s robe fell away.
Xueyu knelt at the boy of light’s side, placing an affectionate hand on his back while he endured the pain, but all the boy longed for was Laike. This time it was Chen reaching out to take the shadowboy’s robe, wringing it fervently in a closed fist, face buried in his own knees. No more sound came from Jiling’s guzheng—just the soft reverberation of the chord that struck Chen through.
“Take care of him tonight, Chen of the Immemorial Incandescence,” the Mistress of Yunji said after the sound decayed into nothing, folding her hands over the stringless body of her enchanted instrument. “He is weak; he is bloodless. Take him to your chamber and stay vigilant through the night.”
Chen waited for the pain to fade like he waited for the tide to leave, for the sun to fall, for the world to turn. He waited with a quiet patience, with deference and great reverence for the progression of time and his placement in the grand scheme of space.
“Yes, Lady Jiling,” he said when he was able. Another moment and he was standing, gathering the younger boy back into his arms, struggling to leave.
Xueyu silently watched his disciples depart, brow furrowed for the sort of adoration the older possessed for the younger.