Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

It was getting late; the sun had long set, and on moonless nights like these Marcus’ study grew dreadful. He had at his desk just one lamp—bright enough, perhaps, but his study was cavernous, rising tens of strides to shadowed corners of ceiling, stretching tens of strides behind labyrinthine shelves of books, looming one over another like distant mountain peaks. His desk was an island of light. All else was dark and unknowable.

Caius had suggested installing essence lamps on the ceiling. Marcus thought there was no need for them. The dark discomforted him—it always had, and he liked that. It felt more true to be one known spot in the vast dark than to coddle himself with the illusion of light—that he could see all there was to be known. Security was a dangerous illusion. He liked that his study could still feel unsafe to him. It reminded him of his position.

When he heard this Caius had rolled his eyes, but acquiesced once Marcus pointed out that if he needed a book, he could very well bring his candle to the shelves and back. Most of the time he did not use his candle. Marcus liked the game of it. Centuries ago he knew the architecture of the room as well as he knew the architecture of his mind, knew where every scroll and book was, so that he could stride to and fro with total confidence and pluck one off the shelves first try. Now he knew the shelves, but the positions often grew muddled. They shuffled without his permission, and he was made to look quite the fool when he returned to his desk, and saw he’d plucked Daemon’s Encyclopaedia of Carnivorous Plants Vol. III off the shelf when he’d meant to grab Vol. VI.

In some ways his mind was much better than his study: he could know it totally; he could catalog its contents; when he fortified himself within, he knew he could not be broken. But he could not maintain it like he could maintain his study. It grew brittle without his permission, and unlike with the wood of the shelves, which could be treated and replaced, there was little he could do for it. It was as Selecius once said in his Analects, ‘Some forces we command—others command us.’ The Analects… where had he put that one? Three copies he had in storage, but one, the copy he was fondest of, the one whose margins had more annotations than blank space, lay on a shelf. A shelf left of the rightmost corner, six rows down…. fourteen scrolls across? Or was it fifteen? Sadly, Marcus chuckled.

Tap-tap-tap.

There was a sleeker darkness marked out against the darkness of his looming window. One inky claw perched on a sill. Tap-tap-tap.

“How odd,” muttered Marcus. He knew this raven, with its scarred beak—it was one he’d left in the Dragonspire Range.

Marcus let the creature in. In hits claws was a letter, and Marcus made out its address in the warm light of his lamp.

“To: Zhilei Zhen

From: Jin Yang, Emperor of the Human Dynasty.”

At first he thought it was a joke, but who was there to play a joke on him? Caius was the only one who knew his ravens, and he hardly the type. A hoax, then. But it was true the Hero had taken the throne… and it bore the imperial seal…

He unfurled the letter.

“To the Lord of Demons:

My name is Jin Yang. I am the elected leader of the realm of man. We have had our differences in the past—“

Quite a polite way of saying, ‘you tried to assassinate me,’ Marcus thought, and he warmed to the boy instantly.

“—but this letter is not meant to discuss them. Instead, I wish to ask you for intelligence on my sister, Ruyi Yang. In return, I shall offer some intelligence you wish to know, so long as your request is not excessive.

If you are amenable to such a request, I ask further that you offer some measure of protection to her. We can discuss the price.

If instead you choose instead to harm her, or to attempt to ransom her, there can be no price but war.

Regards,

Jin Yang.”

Marcus read it back twice, and sighed. Then he began to write. He wrote that there was no need for a price. He wrote all he knew about Ruyi—that she was picked up by Drusila, that she’d joined their elite warrior corps, that she was being treated well there. Alas he could not protect Ruyi; she was beyond the scope of his powers. And he assured Jin no harm would come to her by his hand. In fact Marcus was fond of the girl.

He apologized for the poison at a personal level—Jin, he wrote, seemed a fine young man—but he did not apologize for it at a higher level, at the level of Fate. Being willing to poison a child made him a monster; he knew that, and it saddened him. But he wrote that Jin would learn to make such choices too. That, or be deposed, which may be the nobler choice.

“I shall presume to give you counsel,” wrote Marcus. “Which you shall be at liberty to disregard. I shall prattle on regardless—I am old; forgive me. It will be easy to lose faith in the goodness of your kind. You will have a bird’s view of the evils of your realm, and you will see how powerless you are to change most of them. That is called being ruler. Should you seize power, crush your enemies, and install a council of sycophants, that is yet worse: that is called being a tyrant. You cannot control the cosmos. You can only make the most wise, kind, fair decision you can, and try to forgive yourself afterward. You will not be able to, if you have a heart, but do try. And Heavens, Heavens, keep hope! Lose that, and you doom not only yourself but your race. May Fate steer you well.”

It was not the sort of letter he’d write for publication. Those he had aplenty, and those he enameled with tight logical structures and rhetorical flourishes that would make Octavius blush. This was informal—like a correspondence to a distant kinsman. He sent it off.

***

The smiths and the lore keepers, the brewers and the butchers, and much of the warriors too had been sent to the front of the march. With their Arts they raised snow and ice glistening with essence, plains of it wide enough for all their sleds to run on. They raised more than the material—they raised a coldness, an atmosphere, a spine-tingling chill that marked the lands of the Frigus Tribe apart. Teams of sagefurs followed, grouped in dozens, plodding along, trailed by beastmasters, trailed by huge leather sacks strapped tight to the sleds’ steel legs.

Most folk walked. Ruyi rode Dow. From up on his back she could see all across the bustling tribe—it was nothing like the orderly march of a human camp; it was like a procession of clouds. Folk clung loosely to each other, in families or by professions, and those groups clung tight together too, so the Tribe became one heaving moving mass. She could feel the way they connected—she could see it, the way they spread and contracted, always coming back to one another. She could hear it, too; every so often one corner of camp would start up a marching song, and it’d spread, an infection of good cheer, until they were all singing, even Ruyi, who didn’t know the words. She could get the tune quick enough, so she figured it didn’t matter. She made up the words and joined in anyways.

The Frigus were not known for big outbursts of emotion—it was why Ruyi was considered such a weirdo sometimes. But they did have a knack for good humor. Everyone seemed pretty happy most of the time. And sure, there were the nastiness that all folk had—she’d seen a fight break out on the street every morning on her way to breakfast, and again on her way back home; warriors or shamans wrestling and screaming, even children punching each other. Nobody stopped these fights. Somehow it was a good thing: it got all out of the anger out of them, so by the end they were as cooled as they ever were—they were ready to make up.

Humans could dislike you and lie to your face about it, and sit on that anger, and let it fester into huge pools of hate beneath their smiling surfaces. Demons seldom let it get there. They did fight a lot more, but it didn’t matter. It might be more barbaric but she liked it much better. Back in the human world, it felt like Ruyi spent half her time trying to decode what other folk were telling her, and getting all worked up and anxious about it. She was very good at inventing reasons other people hated her. Eventually she’d learned to hide her feelings, to put on cool masks and to stick out bits of her true self hesitantly; she was someone else at the Guild or at her wards. She could only be true with her close ones, like Jin and Mother. Here she was herself everywhere. It was awesome—it was normal.

***

That afternoon, she fed Dow a blood carrot, and he licked her.

It was possible he just thought she had a little more in her hand and was making sure he got all of it, but it was still maybe the best day of her life.

***

That night they stopped for dinner, and Sabina broke out a package of meats and shared them around a campfire. As usual, the praetorianus ate together. Ruyi finished hers early and stole a chunk of Darius’s, who made the mistake of sitting next to her. He sighed. “Really?” She stuck out her tongue at him.

“Ahh!” cried Aelia. Then she started to poke her skewer at the ground, rustling up a drawing of something.

“Heh?” said Ruyi.

Aelia squinted, sighed. “It’s no good. I’ve lost it.”

“Heh?”

“The feeling,” Aelia explained, gesturing vaguely at her.

“Heh?”

“It’s sculpture!”

“Heh?”

“It’s the little things—feelings and moments. You catch them, or they fly away! You have to wrestle them into the wood. Or snow. But it’s gone now.” Aelia sighed, then brightened. “Hey—wanna see a sketch I made of you? I did it just today.”

“Heh?”

She pulled out a block of wood, and there was Ruyi’s face, eyes closed, smiling, looking like she’d just sighed happily, looking quite content at something. It was maybe the most beautiful thing Ruyi had ever seen. She gasped.

“See what I mean?” Said Aelia.

“You sketch me?”

“All time time! I sketch everyone, but I like yours. You have a very colorful face. It makes picking the feelings off easy. Here—I have others—”

Aelia reached into her sack and a half dozen paper-thin carvings came out, all of Ruyi’s face. She seemed mad in one, her cheeks puffed up angrily; she was happy in another; she was yawning in a third.

“Woah…” whispered Ruyi. She held one up. “I love it!”

“Mm, it’s magical, isn’t it? It’s the only place things hold still, and you can really take something in. Well, maybe you can—” She pulled out another of Ruyi’s face looking quite intense—“But I have trouble. For me when I try to focus on something it runs away, I can only see it when I’m not looking for it, does that make sense? Unless I sculpt it, that is.”

Sometimes talking to Aelia felt herding cats. She was the only person Ruyi had met who distracted herself so much she could cut herself off three times in a sentence. It was like there was no barrier between her brain and her mouth; she just poured herself out.

“Uh—“

“Here,” said Aelia. “I have more!”

She pulled out a few more; of drakes, of old women, a few of Sabina and of Drusila and Darius, but something about her drawings of Ruyi in particular had this indescribable charm.

“You should make more of these,” Ruyi told her, pointing at the drawings of her face. Something about them made her feel as content as her face in that contented picture. “Everyone should have one.”

She imagined a young feral boy waking up in the morning, and seeing her face on his tent wall, and feeling the same way she did. It would be a great start to his day.

“Lula,” drawled Darius, picking at his teeth with his skewer. “This may hurt to hear, but not everyone is as in love with you as you are.”

Ruyi flushed and punched him.

“Alright, everyone,” said Sabina. “We reach the Springs in a week’s time! Let us speak of what awaits us…”