Jiling sat at her calligraphy desk with her brush hovering over the page when she heard Xue’s body echo into the ground, a sick thud that thundered through every tree root and weathered stone between the Great Overlook and the Priestess’ quiet enclave. The lights flickered as her concentration ruptured.
To some degree, Xueyu’s pain was her pain. She felt his ribs crack; she felt his back ache. She felt his insides heave and his muscles strain and she felt him walk away tall and proud despite the shame running like a fever up and down his broad back. He’d been beaten by a child he raised himself but he wouldn’t admit defeat. She smiled when she placed her brush down.
Of course he wouldn’t.
The Priestess quickly put away the letter she intended to write and cleaned up her writing space because she knew there would be no time later. She knew he was hurt; she could feel him leak.
If he was not too proud, she anticipated Xue would remain in her quarters tonight.
For as humble as Xueyu tried to be, he was a very proud man. He would never really know the humility mapped through the mountain’s heart; he was a man whose blood was meant to run hot, a fighter whose fury favored emotion to garner results. Even as he slunk through the halls of the Luanshi complex, Xueyu contemplated retreating to his room to heal on his own rather than asking his counterpart for help. Were these injuries bearable, would they be the type to heal with time rather than requiring medical interference? The man coughed, wheezing in pain when a fragment of rib jostled around in his torso.
He’d been hurtled through layers of existence,
of course these injuries wouldn’t just go away.
The priestess’ door slid open and her weapon stumbled inside.
“May I interrupt you?” He rasped.
“Have I not already been interrupted?” Jiling questioned, her tone quiet but authoritative, serene but commanding. She rested an elbow on her sleeping platform with her knuckles supporting her cheek. Her deep blue eyes always asked questions she knew the answers to; Xueyu always intruded like Jiling didn’t know he was on his way.
It was an act they played over years and still they continued their commitment to the pretense.
“Lay here. Do not kneel for me. It will end the same: I will ask you to move and you will refuse. We will trade words. You will waste time.” She patted the bed, tilting her head—a pre-emptive scolding for an inevitable dispute.
The sword master moved carefully across the room and laid himself out on the bed. Had he not spent so much effort getting there, he might have taken a moment to enjoy his circumstances. He was, however, in a great deal of pain. His muscles ached, his nerves screamed, his blood spilled inside the wrapping of his skin.
He looked up at Jiling, argument free for the time being.
“What quiet is this? If you are without protest then either I am very fortunate or you are very unfortunate,” Jiling quipped at her swordmaster’s expense.
“I am unfortunate,” he replied. “But if you want me to be quiet more, then tell me. I’m not wasting time, like you wanted.”
“I thought you would appreciate a casual response,” the small woman said, mock-crestfallen as she rose to her knees and laid hands upon her fallen fighter. “Perhaps my bedside manner is lacking.” Eyes closed, she concentrated on the mess Laike made of his teacher’s insides, invading the man’s body with the swarm she controlled. Thousands of tiny nanites flooded Xueyu’s system but he was none the wiser: all Xueyu knew was that Jiling ripped the bone straight from his perforated viscera and snapped it back into place without any physical effort at all.
“I will reflect on the poor timing of my jokes for your future comfort, Xue’er.”
Xueyu cried out as Jiling worked her magic, strained noises echoing through gritted teeth, muscles tense over his fractured skeleton. There was no time for any other response but this; there was nothing Xueyu heard or felt but the sharp sting of every one of his injuries happening in reverse.
She was a master seamstress; a deft surgeon so keen she could work blind. She zipped up Xue’s insides as quick as she could to stem the bleeding and, when she was through, she rose to sit next to Xue on the bed, delicate fingers untying the coarse leather of his belt without haste. Still she was in him: modulating his heartbeat, singing his body’s aching rhyme.
This was longform suffering, an ache that would stay with him for a while, a memory that would linger even longer. Xue’s eyes closed to the light of the priestess’ chambers, her effervescent benevolence, her sacred touch gracing the grime of his garments. This was only part of the process; this was only necessary.
Their garments always flowed to the right but she dismantled him due left. If ever there was a duelist more powerful than any on the mountain, a fighter who, if she were not constrained by centuries of cultivated teaching and emotional restraint, could leave a city flattened and silent in her wake, it was Jiling of the Nascent Swarm, Jiling of the Light Woven Song. Now she stripped her champion with calm hands that knew not the secondary implication of her duty, prepared to taint her bed for her swordsman’s speedy recovery.
“There is blood in your belly,” she said, rolling cloth into tight bundles and placing them under his side, his sun kissed skin swarthy against the white and silver of her chamber. “I will incise when you tell me you would like to continue.”
Jiling placed her hands on his abdomen like he was her guzheng, like every ripple of muscle was a string or a fret. Her right hand was cold: a small blade, an impossibly sharp obsidian shard, was tucked in the Priestess’ palm, just barely daring to kiss his exposed skin.
“Go on,” the fighter confirmed, sparing little time for thought to cloud judgment, to shade bravery in a cloud of fear. He’d been stabbed many times in his life—the battlefield brought scars, the arena challenges came with more—but it was never an enjoyable experience. Xueyu never looked forward to his guttings.
Jiling never really considered the action to be anything more than a necessity, never considered that this stabbing was the same as any other he took. She would not remember the specifics of this evening any more than he—at least not in terms of her own action. She would remember tonight in terms of him:
the wounds he brought her,
the pain grit between his teeth,
whatever words they exchanged afterwards,
the vigil she would keep for him till morning came.
She jabbed the blade into his side, quick and efficient. His blood poured forth and she pressed the rolled cloth to the wound to catch what she could. “Shh,” she hushed, looking up at his face. “Almost there.”
“It’s okay,” Xue managed to get out, steady breath shot through glistening teeth. His eyebrows were furrowed, but he knew this was for the best. Relief was on the horizon, pain was temporary. He just had to wait it out.
“Pain is the body and the body is hollow,” she recited like it would give him some comfort, like the living Buddha’s words could offer him some reprieve from his pain that she, his partner in all things, could not.
When she was done bleeding him out, she played her stab in reverse for him, took back the wound she’d caused to aid him in his moment of need.
“You will ache—tomorrow will be the worst of it. I will monitor you, I will fine tune your pain till today no longer lingers in your body.” Jiling always made her diagnoses sound like a song, her prescriptions like a melody. She placed her hand flat on Xueyu’s chest as she leaned forward to examine his face. “Will you tell me what transpired?”
He took a deep breath, and although that also hurt, it was imperative to his survival. Xue opened his eyes again, angled his chin slightly toward the mountain’s high priestess. “Laike was very angry and drug me through all of time and space just to slam my body into the ground. He wanted me to draw all of my swords and when I didn’t, he punished me for it. Said he didn’t want to be fought like a child.”
“Mm,” she hummed as she placed her other hand on top of the one resting on Xueyu’s chest, then rested her chin on the platform she made there. “If your life was in danger, why did you not draw them?”
“I can’t.” Xue gently shook his head. “The artifact isn’t cooperating with me.”
Jiling’s brow quirked at the admission. To some degree, she’d been aware of something gone awry but her quantum cognition only went so far: she could interpret the probability and decisions of a man’s mind but a spirit was something else entirely.
“When the Blood Blessed Blade sang for you, my Mistress before me had reservations but I assured her your will was strong. For more than a decade, the warlord has been tame under your hand.” She watched him with placid eyes, dark blue eyes tracing his profile in her bed. “Is it time to retire the Blood Blessed Blade, Xue?”
“I don’t know.” Xueyu spoke plainly, exhaustion touching every sound tucked between every peak and trough of his labored breathing. How many times had he threatened Kai Zhan before this? He’d reasoned, year after year, over and over and over, that he was a competent enough man to fight for the mountain and train his disciples; told himself that if the time ever came to ditch that plague of an artifact then he would have no problems doing so because it was a cursed object, it made him little more than miserable.
But that wasn’t quite the truth, was it?
There was much more to it.
Xue searched the priestess’ chambers for nothing. He wasn’t looking for any mythical answers in banal objects, he just needed to steady his mind away from the woman’s crystal gaze.
“Without the Blood Blessed Blade I am just Xueyu, a man who cannot protect himself against the boy that he raised, a disappointment to that same boy. I lost all of my matches today— Laike, Meilin, Chongwei, the Princes Tian. If the teacher doesn’t have the skill to back up the lessons being given, then they’re just empty demands.”
“There are other weapons, other artifacts—easier artifacts,” the Priestess stated, watching Xueyu’s face as his mind walked through all the shame he carried. “If the warlord does not cooperate, is it not the same as having no weapon at all?”
Sitting up a little, the small woman rested on her elbows.
“It is a heavy choice, a choice all your own. We cannot know what will sing for you because they will not sing in his presence. I trust you know the warlord better than any, better than all: I trust you will make the choice the mountain requires of you, whatever that choice may be.”
Xueyu simply nodded, closing his eyes again. “Alright.”
“Do you have other business to which you must attend or will you permit yourself to rest?”
“I’ll rest for a little while. Should I go now?”
“I did not anticipate an empty bed this evening. I will make your medicine.”
Without pause, the Mistress of the Empty Mountain rose to do as she stated. She put only a few yards of distance between them. Soon, she set about brewing a handful of herbs and tea for her swordsman on a hot plate that glowed when she was near and she spoke as casually as she was capable.
“I believe Laike feels betrayed by the second Prince,” she confided. So often their conversations about Laike took the tone of parents, more so than the other disciples that filled their halls with laughter. She gently stirred the iron pot, placing the lid upon it before she looked back to Xueyu. “I do not think this is an excuse for what he did to you, however despite your last encounter, I believe he will eventually require a father’s guiding hand to help him navigate this heartbreak while maintaining his duties. Of this I know you are capable.”
“Mm. He mentioned something about being upset by events he witnessed. I will talk to him when he wants to talk. I’ve already talked to him about something like this, but when wheels are already set in motion and you’re not the one controlling the cart, it’s difficult to stop anything from happening.” Xue folded his hands across his abdomen, careful weight resting just below the sensitive area just healed. “And anyway, Chen’s returned. He will probably help take Laike’s mind off his small heartache for at least a little while.”
“Perhaps you are more experienced in matters of the heart than I.” Jiling poured the medicinal tea into a shallow bowl and returned to the swordsman’s side. She blew the steam gently, pausing to contemplate her words before she continued. “If you believe that this hurt is small, then I will rest easy; if you believe Chen will assuage the violence that brought you to me today, then I will not question your wisdom.” Helping Xueyu to some form of sitting, the Priestess held the cup to her protector’s lips. “I do, however, believe the first move will be yours. You must show him it is okay to talk about these things.”
“Chen was the one who stopped him fighting me, I’m fairly certain he is capable. They were very close, anyway. Much closer than the week or two he’s known the prince.” Xue drank down the concoction until there was no more to be had, then eased himself back down.
“I will talk to him,” the swordmaster reiterated, this time without the addendum.
“Thank you, my champion,” she confided with a smile casting its crescent moon shadow upon her face. The words were as close to doting as her demeanor permitted and she rested her hand upon Xueyu’s wrist. She didn’t need to touch him to monitor his pulse but even she understood there was comfort in contact. “Your word brings me great solace.”
Into the evening, she entertained him with small talk, reverie and reminiscence. She inferred quaint little moments she observed in the spaces he didn’t share with her, when he was off doing whatever a swordmaster’s duty necessitated. She spoke of news from the city; she recited new poems she collected; she narrated the slivers of stories and gossip overheard from artifacts in the archives, stories whispered only to her.
Jiling didn’t find much use in idle moments
but understood the value of time shared,
so she rested her hand on Xue’s and smiled.