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She knows what it is to die.
That’s what they think, at least, and she’s hardly of a mind to correct them. She knows what it is to accept death. It’s quite a different scenario, in the end.
She doesn’t often think of that particular moment - after all, there were so many moments that day that are far more consuming, that have been scorched against her like soot marks on a hearth - but she dreams about it.
Food Souls don’t need to sleep. She knows that, but she sleeps anyway.
Sometimes, on summer nights, when the windows are flung wide open but the breeze is like dragon’s breath, searing against her skin, she dreams of that night. Remembers what it was to stand amid ashes, to breathe in the scent of charred meat, to have embers flicker and die against her skin.
In a way - in a way - those are the easy nights.
The hard nights tiptoe into her room unannounced. They slink down her spine and curl in her belly, furled tightly, like flowers yet to bloom. She slips into sleep - it’s never restful, not in the same way she’s seen in human companions, just another shadow of humanity in their creations - and they wake.
She remembers what it is to fade away. Sensation is all the more powerful when you’re losing it. There’s a part of her that knows she should concentrate on the rest (she’d never thought it would be hard to breathe in smoke, but she’d choked on it all the same that night, the smoke made thick and ashy in a way her pipe never was) but she is consumed by what it feels like to become nothing. It reminds her of a gossamer curtain, such a thin, thin veil, almost impossible to see if you catch it just right. Or perhaps of spider’s silk, floating free on the wind, just a sliver of existence that can so quickly disappear.
There’s a mirage to it, something that gleams at the edge of the horizon and fades away when you try to look.
Yuxiang wakes, and she’s not sure she’s still here.
One night, so early-late that the stars are starting to fade under the fingers of the rising sun, with a book spread open haphazardly by her side, she realizes she can’t explain it. “It’s like going to sleep,” she whispers. Her companion laughs, because Food Souls do not sleep.
The smoke of her pipe curls around her face, her features thrown into stark relief by the shifting light, and she knows that it was nothing like going to sleep.
She has always been a hungry woman. It is not a particularly well-liked trait, her ravenous appetite, because humans so rarely understand a hungry woman. And she is ravenous - she wants to consume and digest and understand. History is a powerful meal. Knowledge will sate her.
And now, with the years spread before her like a feast, both past and present - now, now she can eat.
She doesn’t know what it is to die.
But she knows what it is to learn, and one day, that will be the only knowledge left for her.