Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

It looked like any other carriage on the inside. No wings or engines or anything. All that was different was they had dispensers with paper bags built into the walls, and these steel handlebars jutting out of the ceiling. Ruyi wasn’t sure what they were for until the carriage jolted into motion and she went facefirst into the seats on the other side.

She picked herself up, not really hurt, just embarrassed, and quite glad nobody else was in the carriage with her. Her stomach jumped and lurched as she grabbed hold of one of the bars and dragged her way to the windows. At this angle she could only see half the manor, receding fast into the distance. Jin was a dot waving goodbye, shouting something she couldn’t hear over the shriek of the winds, and then he was gone. The ground dissolved into a green-brown blur. She could only see the treetops beneath, a sea of darkening greens.

They were picking up speed, but there were no jolts anymore. She felt like an invisible hand was dragging her back, trying to plaster her against her seat. The shriek of the wind became a full-throated roar, and she drove her fingers into the steel frame of the windowpane and wedged it shut. Thankfully the noise ceased. It was unnaturally calm now; there must be quieting arrays on the steel.

She shoved her face up against the pane, wide-eyed. She was pretty sure she’d never even jumped this high before. The whole of the Upper City lay stretched before her, separated by brown streaks of road into neat little zones, mostly greenery with small dottings of dark brown. On the far side she saw the Wonder District, a clump of garish colors. Beyond them were the Middle Wall, a block of gleaming white marble. At this distance it almost seemed like a toy. Like if she tried, she could reach out and snap it in two. She giggled at the thought.

She got just a glimpse of the jagged Lower City skyline before they burst into a cloud layer, and it all smoothed into a wall of streaming grays. When they broke free, all she could see were the clouds—a fine fluffy carpet of them. She sat pressed up against the window, hoping for another glimpse of that tiny world, but no such luck.

Sighing, she sank back into her seat. From up here it all seemed so unreal. She’d been worried about something before she’d gotten in but couldn’t remember what it was—a little worry, easily forgotten, so small you couldn’t even see it from up here. How nice would it have been to get a flying demonform?

…Probably best she didn’t. She had enough close calls with her lioness form. Realistically, with a flying form she probably would’ve crashed into the City Wall one drunken night and gotten arrested or something. Part of maturing, she figured, was knowing what powers you couldn’t be trusted to have.

It smelled so clean in here, minty sharp. With nothing to do she started inspecting the seats. They were leather but somehow still firm as stone. She tried lying down, but no matter how she squirmed she couldn’t make herself comfortable on them. She had to use her knapsack as a pillow. Staring at the black slab of a ceiling, she tried to think.

She was eager to see Mother again. And the Li Clan Headquarters. Mother always spoke of it as some wonderful magical place, a fairy-land, yet she would never give any details—she was sworn to an oath. The Li Clan was the oldest of the great Clans; it’d been around for nearly two thousand years, and its headquarters had never been taken by the demons. Even when they’d come through on raids they could never find the place. Li Clan members were dispatched to become officials who ruled the Province’s great cities, and the Duke of Dragonspire was the Li Clan Patriarch. He was supposedly one of Ruyi’s distant uncles, though Ruyi had never met the man. He always had Mother as his representative in formal functions.

Then there was Father.

It had been so long, but he didn’t seem like the kind of person time had much of an effect on. He’d write her one letter every season, always terse, to-the-point. He never seemed to care how she was doing, what she felt; he asked what she’d done lately, and she’d write him back, and he’d render his judgment a season later. He wasn’t uncaring, she felt—that was just who he was. He wrote a letter a season to Jin too. Some people cared in different ways.

She wasn’t angry at him anymore. She could never hold onto anger very long, and it was even harder when he wasn’t there to take it. Every so often a particularly cutting memory, some harsh words of his, some time he’d made her cry would bubble up and she’d feel a flash of rage, but that was all.

She was nervous about it, but she wanted to see him again too. She missed the old fart.

***

It was like the ride was designed to make her look as dumb. After the jolt of a start it was all smooth climbing; she was clutching at the rails in the ceiling for an hour after, like an idiot.

She should’ve brought something to do. She’d brought a stack of work letters. A lot of it was stuff from the Alchemist’s Guild about her obligations. She didn’t know why they still bothered, but they did. Grandmaster Yin kept poking her about coming to this meeting or sitting on that council, and she kept ignoring him. She wasn’t one for sitting and listening; she much preferred to go out and do. A few letters came from the Head Alchemists of other provinces asking her how she’d set up her factories, and she answered all of them patiently and politely.

There were a handful of letters from folk running her wards carrying updates—which elixirs they were short of, how the finances were doing, that sort of thing, and those she penned replies to too.

Then she’d run out of work.

She’d brought Mr. Sparkles along. It was a silly move—Mr. Sparkles had never been the talkative type. She would’ve brought Big, who was a little too talkative, but he wouldn’t have fit in the carriage.

She spent much of the rest of the ride staring out the window. There weren’t many birds this high, but she swore she saw a phoenix in the far distance. Certainly it was something red and flashy. It might’ve been a trick of the light, she wasn’t sure.

The hour that followed seemed very much like the next, and she learned once again how uncomfortable she was in her own company. If you gave her too much time to think, she started to wallow. And her wine flask had run out a third of the way through the trip.

At least the clouds were pretty.

***

She made herself nap.

When she woke, she felt like she was slowly falling, this lurching in her stomach. She scrambled to the window. It’d gone deep gray, streaming with wisps of dark cloud.

Then they broke, and she squished her face up against the glass and gasped.

She could see where Dragonspire got its name. Mountains struck up before her, faintly outlined in the dusk—from this high you could mistake them for the spine of a slumbering dragon. That was the legend: the whole province had been built on some fallen God’s corpse.Ruyi never put much stock in myths. She supposed the rivers running down them kind of looked like dragons’ feet. There were towns wedged between them here and there, marked out dots of torchlight—they seemed to her like embers in a dying hearth.

There, in the distance, nestled in a clutch of hills—clusters of lights burning like fireworks, so much brighter for the emptiness around them. Was that the capital, Cloudless City? It could be nothing else. But she’d heard Li Clan Headquarters were several horse-hours away…

As they descended she saw triangles of darkness float on by. Flocks of ravens? Suddenly the sky was lively again. She swore she saw stringy shapes weaving in and out of distant clouds… dragons? Surely not. Then a huge birdlike shape drifted close, its lamplike yellow eyes staring curiously. But a blast of qi rippled out of the carriage, buffed with a shriek like grating metal, and the bird leapt back as though stung.

There was a grayness far ahead, a grayness which ran so far she could see nothing to either side of it, but it wasn’t the horizon. She’d never seen a fog bank so big; she couldn’t see where it ended; it seemed as vast and unknowable as the sea. The mountains ran right into it and vanished. As they got closer, the lights got fewer until there was only the wall of fog. It went so high she couldn’t see where it stopped, and up close she saw long wispy tendrils curling out of it, as though grasping for lost travelers to swallow up.

Master Po seemed not to be worried. He hadn’t slowed at all.

To her it seemed a gray line moving across her vision, wiping away the known world. Then she was plunged back in darkness.

She knew when they stopped because of the jolt. Her head hit the ceiling. She swore, but she was too excited to be much annoyed.

She stepped out into a patch of clear air, a little calm in the storm of fog. All around them loomed the blank face of the fog wall.She heard running water but saw none of it.

“Are we here?”

“Almost!” said Master Po. “How was the ride, Mistress? Pleasant, I hope?”

“Yeah,” she said absently. You couldn’t tell left from right in this fog.

“We’ve reached the Godsfall region. It is said that ten thousand waterfalls run here, for eternal springs shoot out from the peaks of every mountain. They are what make these mists—but there is another force, one most don’t know. An ancient array stretches across these lands. It is meant to ward off outsiders. An intruder may wander the mists for a hundred years, never to find the Clan! Only those with a token—” He produced a silver chain with a white flower charm, faintly glowing—“and a passphrase can enter.”

Po drew his sword, shorter than Mother’s but just as blemishless. It burned with eerie blue light. Stepping forth, he slashed into the murk.

A beat.

Then the fog began to part.