by Will Wight
An afterlife in the service of a celestial immortal was infinitely better than his mortal existence. If there was any truth in the myths, he could still practice the sacred arts now that he'd left his physical body behind, so this might be an unimaginable opportunity.
Death could well be the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He couldn't see her face, but she considered for a few seconds before speaking again, her expression as pleasant and unyielding as a mask. “This one would not require so much of you.”
This one? He wondered if she was mocking him, or if he had somehow offended her. “Please, honored immortal, do not speak to this one so humbly.”
“Humbly? Ah.”
She considered a moment longer before clearing her throat. This time, she sounded as though she’d spent her entire life in Sacred Valley. “Raise your head and speak freely. I have no patience for the manners of this world.”
He straightened, taking the chance to look her in the eyes. It was technically rude of him, but she said she didn't mind, and he was willing to take her at her word. Besides, this might be the only time he ever met her, and he was determined to commit her faultless face to memory.
But there was one answer he needed. “May I ask, if you don’t mind…am I dead?”
A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, a crack in the mask. “Do you not feel alive?”
He thought he did, but then, who could say what death felt like?
“If you've brought me to life, then...” he hesitated, looking around at the frozen world. The Jade elders were stuck rushing forward to oppose an enemy that no longer existed.
Purple eyes surveyed the scene, her face pleasant and impassive once again. She might as well have been looking over a field of flowers. “Li Markuth was not permitted to return to this world. His attack was a deviation from fate, which I have reversed. When I depart, it will be as though your festival continued uninterrupted.”
“What about me?” Lindon asked immediately. “You restored me to life. Will I forget this kindness as well?”
“Yes.” This didn’t appear to disturb her in the least.
“You don’t think you could…leave my memory? So that I could be properly grateful?” He was the only one to receive special treatment from the heavens; he couldn’t allow himself to walk away as though nothing had happened.
She reached over with her left hand, stroking the lines of gray smoke on her right as though tenderly playing an instrument. “Temporal reversion is not memory modification. When I’m done here, nothing Li Markuth did will have happened. Your festival will have continued without cease. To spare you, I would have to temporarily withdraw you from the flow of fate.”
“Thank you for your consideration, honored messenger,” he said, as though her words were a promise. “I am ready.”
Her lips twitched, and he suspected she was using her neutral expression to suppress a smile. “It’s not a complex process for me. I can draw you out of fate with a thought.”
“Fate. So then, if you’re not offended by this one’s humble questions…can you see the future?”
“Fate is not the future. What is destined to occur does not always occur.”
He bowed before her three times. “That is enough for me, thank you. Would you tell me my destiny?”
This time she did laugh, and he was almost surprised that it sounded so human. “I’m pleased to have descended personally, Wei Shi Lindon.” A thrill rolled through him. The celestial messenger knew his name. “I can show you some limited details of your fate, if you are willing to see them.”
“This one would be honored.” He tried to hide the eagerness in his voice. Even the most trivial knowledge of the future could be used to great advantage.
The tips of two white-plated fingers met his forehead, like cool eggshells. “Then see.”
The frozen world was wiped out, replaced with another. He was still standing on the stone of the arena stage, but the clouds Li Markuth summoned had never appeared, and the sun beat down out of a clear sky. Wei Jin Amon faced him, and though he resisted longer than anyone expected, he still lost.
That night, he nursed his wounds alone when the First Elder barged in without knocking. The old man slapped a book down on his table: Path of the White Fox.
Lindon’s eyes shone at this vision. He had succeeded after all. He expected the immortal to return him to reality, but the future flowed on, coming in faster and faster images.
He watched a version of himself, years older, receive a copper badge with tears in his eyes. The First Elder smiled in pride.
His sister led Wei clansmen to fight around a carriage, while armored members of the Kazan fought. She wreathed one man’s face with foxfire, then drove her sword through a second man’s gut and left it there. Kelsa wrenched the door to the carriage open, revealing a finely wrought box. Her expression lifted.
More years passed, and Kelsa was personally awarded a jade badge by Patriarch Sairus himself. She didn’t even look thirty. Lindon and his family cheered for her from the crowd, though his father looked as though he’d bitten something sour.
An unknown time later, Jaran slipped out of his house in the middle of the night while his wife slept. He hobbled on a cane, but he took an overcoat and a sword with him.
Lindon’s stomach dropped.
The three remaining members of the Shi family, wearing white funeral robes, clustered around an iron tablet with Wei Shi Jaran’s name on it. Seisha lit the candle herself.
More years silently slid by, and Lindon saw himself sitting on the edge of a roof under the stars, side-by-side with a girl he’d never met. She had a wide, open smile. He passed her a bottle, and she drank.
Now they stood together in the Hall of Elders, both wearing red, with a white ribbon tying their clasped hands together. The First Elder said something and everyone laughed, but the vision-Lindon gazed only at his new wife.
The Lindon of the present felt his eyes burn and hurriedly wiped them away. He shouldn’t show tears to a heavenly immortal, but…Unsouled weren’t allowed to marry.
Time moved on in the blink of an eye, and he saw himself cycling in a meditative position next to his son. Applauding his daughter as she conjured foxfire for the first time. Pouring tea for his wife.
Fate, it seemed, was good to him. Was this why a messenger had descended from heaven? To show him the rewards for a young life spent suffering? If so, he welcomed it.
He saw himself grow older, his children grow tall.
Then Sacred Valley collapsed.
The image passed so quickly he almost didn’t catch it. A monstrous creature that towered into the clouds waded through the mountains like a man through waves, washing over the valley and burying it in earth. Everything was wiped out in an instant.
And Lindon returned to reality, standing before the white-armored woman. Her green hair drifted behind her, and the ghostly lines leading from her fingertips to her skull flickered with light like swallowed stars. She watched him with that same mask of an expression, though now he saw a tinge of pity in her eyes.
His cheeks were wet with tears, and he felt as though his chest had been hollowed out. “I…my future, I…”
“Not your future,” she said. “Fate is only a direction. That is the direction your life would have gone, like a river flowing downhill, had Li Markuth not intervened. That is how your story is fated to continue, and how it is destined to end.”
“And now, you’ve…undone what he did. Is that still what will happen to me?”
Her smile was sympathetic, and the pity in her eyes deepened. Her compassion scared him almost as much as the visions, because that meant she knew. “It is a good fate. You only die after a full, rich life.”
“When my home is destroyed!” He’d never considered Sacred Valley his home before. Sacred Valley was the entire world.
“Not every thread is cut. A few survive, and they will go on to join greater powers in the world.” She reached over f
or her lines of gray smoke. “This is why I take the memories, Wei Shi Lindon. Fate is not considerate.”
“How do I fix it?” Lindon asked.
Her fingers froze on the lines.
Taking that as encouragement, Lindon continued. “There has to be some way to fix it. If it’s a direction, then direction can be changed. There has to be some… sacred arts, or some weapon, or…” Lindon still felt the countless tons of cold earth, pressing down on his family. “If I were strong like you are, I could change things. This one begs you. Please.”
Purple eyes watched him, weighed him. Her hand withdrew from the smoky strings, and she paced a half-circle around him as though to consider him from a new angle.
The immortal glanced to her left shoulder. He could glean nothing from her face, which remained somehow pleasant and impassive both. “Suriel requesting clearance for unbound transportation within Iteration One-one-zero. Verbal response, please.”
A woman spun itself into existence on her shoulder, like a doll made of gray smoke. That didn’t surprise him much; Forgers of the White Fox created illusions more solid than this one every day. The ghost spoke with the all-surrounding neutral voice he’d heard earlier. [Acknowledged. Consulting Sector Control.]
Silence reigned as the ghost waited for a response, but Lindon was caught by another detail: the celestial messenger had called herself Suriel. He’d never heard the name before, but he filed it away like a scroll in the clan archives.
[Clearance granted.]
“I would like a tour,” Suriel said, with a glance at Lindon.
[For what purpose?]
“I’m looking for combatants.”
[Acknowledged.]
Suriel reached up to rest an armored hand on top of Lindon’s head. “Steel yourself,” she said. “Do not be afraid.”
She’d told him that already, but before he could ask what he was supposed to be afraid of, they vanished. An intense pattern of blue light washed over him, devouring every other sight. It was like being covered in a blanket woven with millions of threads, and each thread was a distinct shade of blue light. His ears rushed with overwhelming noise…but only for an instant.
Then the blanket fell away, and they stood in the middle of a royal court such as he had never imagined. Lanterns held glowing, golden jewels a hundred yards overhead, and the room stretched so far that it vanished in any direction. Lindon was next to Suriel, the both of them standing in the middle of a vast crowd of old men and women in intricate formal robes. Each of the elders wore a fortune’s worth of jade, gold, and exotic metals that Lindon couldn’t identify. Some had sacred beasts with them—a red serpent coiling around an arm here, a two-headed tiger curled up there. He could feel their wealth and authority hanging in the air; these were people that could have Lindon executed with a gesture.
He dropped to his knees even as the smoky ghost said, [The Ninecloud Court.]
Suriel flicked her fingers, and he found himself gently pulled to his feet though nothing touched him. “They cannot see us unless I allow them to.” She herself stood with hands clasped at her waist, gazing straight ahead as though none of the opulence could attract her interest for a second.
Lindon glanced around, prepared to fall back to his knees at any second. Indeed, none of the crowd so much as glanced at them.
This is the power of an immortal. With even a small piece of that power, he could do anything.
A hatch in the ceiling opened up, and a rainbow-glistening cloud descended. As it drifted down toward the floor, he saw that someone was riding on the cloud: a girl perhaps ten or eleven years old, wrapped entirely in glistening peacock feathers. Her hair was an impossible, fiery red, and she surveyed her elders as though looking down on her subjects.
[Luminous Queen Sha Miara,] the ghost said. [Path of Celestial Radiance.]
The girl reached out a hand and Forged a sword of blinding rainbow light. “Kneel,” she said, and the sea of people knelt. Lindon had to focus to keep standing. The blade radiated power and authority, such that it seemed to affect his soul directly.
Suriel nodded to the girl. “Sha Miara inherited her madra from a noble lineage stretching back to the birth of this world. In three days, she will use that sword to sink a fleet of cloudships, saving her capital city from attack by air. If you had her power, you could save Sacred Valley.”
Lindon stared at the redheaded girl and her rainbow sword. He’d never heard of this “Ninecloud Court,” and of course no one had left Sacred Valley for a hundred generations. It was a desolate landscape beyond the mountains, a nightmare from the lowest hells. All the books said so.
“Where is she?” Lindon asked. He might be able to recruit her, or beg her for help, if he couldn’t learn the secrets of her training.
Suriel gave him a sidelong glance around the curtain of her dark green hair. “If you walked the length of Sacred Valley end-to-end, you’d have to do it more than a hundred times—”
[One hundred and fourteen times,] the ghost said.
“—one hundred and fourteen times to reach the outer border of her country. The Ninecloud Court is in the Ninecloud Country, for which it was named, and that country is four hundred times—”
[Three hundred and ninety-four times,] the ghost said.
“Verbal response not required for calculation corrections. Three hundred and ninety-four times bigger than Sacred Valley. You would never get there. Here, your fate is an absolute certainty. If you tried one million times to go to the Ninecloud Court from where you are at this moment, you would die before you reached her one million times.”
He started to ask for advice when the blue flash came again, and then they were standing in midair over an endless ocean. When Lindon saw the slate-gray waves tossing under his feet, his breath left him. He hurled himself onto Suriel’s armored shoulders before he fell.
She stood with perfect equanimity, every hair in place, as an invisible force peeled him off her shoulders and placed him next to her. His feet were firmly planted on air. On air. He couldn’t trust it. His gut was certain that he would be dropped at any second.
“Do not be afraid,” she reminded him for a third time.
[The Trackless Sea,] the ghost announced.
And then they dropped.
Stomach lurched, and he plummeted into the ocean. He panicked as water closed over him, flailing his arms even as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding his breath. He’d learned to swim in the Dragon River, as any Wei child did, but it rarely ran deeper than his shoulders.
“Breathe,” Suriel commanded, and he realized he was still dry. He cracked his eyes open, but almost shut them again. Aside from a bubble of air surrounding him, the immortal, and her pet ghost, water stretched infinitely in every direction. Light glimmered above them, increasingly distant, but they plunged lower and lower. Into the darkness.
He finally caught his balance, forcing himself to breathe normally and not to cling to the white-armored woman as though to a raft. She seemed to be treating this as nothing out of the ordinary, so he took his queue from her. But he did stand very, very close. Not only was he trusting her to save him, she was the only other person in this world of black water.
As they fell, Lindon saw that they weren’t alone after all. Someone else dropped alongside them, a man sinking through the water like his bones were weighted with lead. The stranger was a mass of muscle, his eyes glowed golden, and he had his arms folded as though impatiently waiting to reach the ocean floor. As they fell into darkness together, the ghost spoke again. [Northstrider. Path of the Hungry Deep.]
The absolute black beneath them shifted, and Lindon slid closer to Suriel. A dragon’s head emerged from the dark, followed by a serpent’s body that coiled endlessly. It must have been miles long, and its jaws gaped open into a pink tunnel lined with teeth.
Northstrider unfolded his arms, revealing hands gloved in pitch-black scales. With one hand he seized a fang longer than he was tall, but the monster’s momentum carried him past
Lindon. A wall of scales rushed past him, blocking out everything else.
“Northstrider consumes sacred beasts in the deepest places of the world,” Suriel said. “He takes their power with him to the surface. He could level Sacred Valley on his own…and you could save it, if you had skills and powers like his.”
She’d said that already, but she had withheld the most important part. “Honored immortal, how? I am Unsouled. Where could I possibly learn his skills?” He hoped she would answer him, but feared she would call it impossible.
She smiled at him as though she knew his thoughts, and another blue flash took them away.
Inside an ordinary inn hewn from rough logs, eight people in intricate golden armor laughed and clinked glasses together. A woman tossed a gold shield down, saying something with raised eyebrows. A man pulled his helmet off, revealing a red eye in the center of his forehead.
[Western Chi Ning City. The Eight-Man Empire. Path of the Eightfold Spear.]
“These eight call themselves an empire because they conquer wherever they roam,” Suriel said, striding through the room. She let her hand drift behind her, as though she meant to run white-plated fingers over the local men and women, but she never touched a thing. “So far, they have not been defeated. They could easily save Sacred Valley, as could you, if you earned a place with them. Their armor is a cross between a Remnant and a construct, and when one of them dies, they pass it on to a successor.”
“Are they all Gold?” Lindon asked. He hadn’t seen anyone outside the valley wearing badges, but he supposed the armor might serve a similar purpose.
Suriel stopped with her palm hovering over one member of the Eight-Man Empire, a woman with yellow hair who lay facedown on a table, snoring. “Larian was raised in a noble household. Her father wouldn’t let her play with the other children until she reached the level you know as Gold. When she was six years old, she did. Today, an army of ten thousand Gold-ranked sacred artists couldn’t scratch her armor.”
Larian grunted in her sleep.
The blue blanket fell again, but this time it lingered. He and Suriel drifted in a blinding sapphire void. She stood in the same position as in the inn—arm outstretched as though to deliver a blessing, her visage all the more inhuman for her green hair and seamless white armor. Without turning around, she spoke. “You have twenty, maybe thirty years before disaster strikes.”