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It had been maybe four weeks since Xiao Xingchen had left the clouds, robes fluttering behind him as he descended into the festering valley of Earth. Baoshan Sanren’s mountain was just that – some lighthouse deep into the sky that he had to leave, sooner or later, if only to see how far the torch could stretch. And it hurt now, sure, perhaps a little more than he’d anticipated, as the thick air rushed into his lungs. His pounding heart urged him to look back, just once, and remember the view.
Hm.
No point in doing that, though, and risk stepping into the bear trap of thinking about life in shades of maybes. The sweet temptation of would haves and could haves dangled behind him – thickness of the clouds if he left tomorrow, the anticipation if he waited for the passing of the new year, the stillness if he never left at all.
But the beating wind stirred change, ice-cold through falling daggers of rain, and it felt good. The young joints in his fingers stiffened under what red skin wrapped around Shuanghua, and it felt good. The clouds that watched, soft with the tides, cheered for him, too.
The first week—the first day Xiao Xingchen lived on Earth was spent alone, decorated with a hundred-thousand tiny drops of water.
Following the first path he could – fate deserves trust, of course – he stayed in the first inn, too. A small village peaked over the horizon after a two-day journey, housing more people than he’d ever seen in his life clustered in one place.
And—so suddenly did the crashing realisation hit; he knew nothing of the world he had loomed over. The first inn he saw, he ate at, and watched as the seat across from him was filled, emptied, then filled again, ghosts morphing into shadows. Distraught famers cried into their empty wine cups, mourning crops that would fall victim to the hammering rainfall outside, their corpses lying in tomorrow’s morning sun.
So, he spent the night, and then another, and maybe, Shuanghua whispered over the quiet of their inn-room, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The rain that welcomed them into the new world was no cousin of this that beat the Earth senseless – something different, dark and evil, wrapped in shadows, stood instead.
On the third day of his second week, a figure in black shone through the morning market and called it the rainy season.
The night was loud with the downpour and fields that played along the horizon grew thick with muddy water, and the spinning-top farmers returned to their family shrines, praying a little longer, harder, against the ebbing nightmare of a flood. He sat and watched, offering them a final cup of tea, nodding to their night-time woes: business would be bad; the Gods were angry; the beautiful line of orange trees planted by their founder, that blossomed so brightly in the springtime, would die; the rain would sweep up the land and wash it away, as though it had never been there in the first place.
And then—the stranger approached, a sword tucked behind his back. Xiao Xingchen watched as he beckoned the innkeeper over for one final request – a bottle of their local wine, then two cups. He pulled out the cork and poured it for them both.
Like me? Like you? Like – we? The warm heat of the room was, suddenly, overwhelming, and exciting, and inebriating and a beehive’s worth of other things he couldn’t quite place and then—and then an invitation upstairs, free from the peanut gallery of excitable dust bunnies, to talk about the rain and how horrible it was to be victim to a cruel world that spun so wildly, violently out of control, and how they defined themselves by actions, but were categorised by their unspeaking blood instead, and how he didn’t have much in the way of family, but the only book he read on love was about a sect that was born from it and died for it, too— and then he cried.
Xiao Xingchen cried, which was strange, he thought, halfway through. Years of training had woven a thick mat for his heart to simmer, boil, burn on – staying in place, always. Anger at the night’s loud music, or sadness at the foot that squashed your beating heart; it was fine as long as they were Shuanghua’s feelings instead. To be a swordsman was to let the blade speak your truths, surely.
But Shuanghua slept with a friend on the other side of the room now, and the case for the impracticality of tears was hard to follow when the stranger – when Song Lan – was reaching for a square of cloth to hold against Xiao Xingchen’s cheeks, murmuring something he didn’t quite catch. Something he wanted to catch. Baoshan Sanren spoke so briefly of love, like it would escape if she widened her mouth enough, and flutter away with the wind. He remembered, too, how the only thing she said of the Gusu Lan Sect was that they, too, lived on a mountain – that, if you looked across the sky on a clear day, maybe you’d see them looking back.
“You didn’t strike as much of a drinker, but never a lightweight,” Song Lan offered again, louder, smile too sincere to catch his own joke – but the first full smile of the night, nonetheless, written in the lines above his cheeks and the raised bone of his brow.
Xiao Xingchen ducked his head. They had been drinking in little lightning sips, yes, but no mountain dweller lasted the stretch of winter’s cold on raw vegetables alone. Not that Song Lan knew that, of course. Somehow it hadn’t come up in conversation – the story he’d clamoured through too many times already, each time some curious ghost would ask what corner the clouds on his sleeves called their own.
He smiled sheepishly to Song Lan, watching his hands as he refolded the cloth. Surely Song Lan wasn’t about to apologise for it. Surely not. His own cheeks were flushed, filled with the Song blood that ran through his ancestry, too. Surely, he wasn’t about to act as though he had been caught in the middle of something illicit and build invisible walls to hide behind.
“It will be,” Song Lan whispered instead, quietly giddy on something. He met Xiao Xingchen’s eyes with steady resolve – and the clouds of wine parted for them. “A sect without blood – it will be, and if not… make it so!”
He could feel his face heating – there were simply not enough words. He nodded once, and then again, harder, leaning in. “Let’s.”
As the second week came to a roaring finish, Song Lan explained the rumour that led him there. A sect that had recently fallen from grace kept their ancestral shrine on the southwards path from there, and there was no one left to care for it. The spirits were restless, now. Travellers spoke of floorboards that danced like river water, and the wooden outskirts of its windows were cold enough to burn any resting hand, and the whole thing was flooding with mist.
“I’ve made a habit,” Song Lan began, every part holding to the solid ground, “To always offer what I can.”
Xiao Xingchen was still growing familiar with the curious way Song Lan chose his words. Rarely would he entertain wandering conversation, and never let his teeth sink into the world that flew by, preferring instead the liminal space of short points, or bold statements. Part of him wondered, quietly, deceivingly, why. Was he holding back? Was there nothing to say? What would he look like, cloak peeled back, forced to speak only inanities?
So, he smiled in reply, teasingly, because Xiao Xingchen’s ticket to this new world was new and unbent, still, but he learnt best by watching. “As have I.”
The third was easy. Song Lan worked quickly, methodically, and his sword stance was nothing like anything Xiao Xingchen had ever seen before. His long limbs moved with sharp intention – never hesitating, never putting himself in a position to hesitate. Maybe that was the trick of it all, really.
By the arrival of the morning birds, the floorboards were still, and the wooden outskirts of windows were warm under the rising sun. Xiao Xingchen traced the length, following ring lines against the pads of his fingers. Across the shrine, the other window welcomed the sun inside, hitting the golden centrepiece and smashing through the glass hairpin that balanced in the middle.
Then, next to his hand, another.
“My master showed me how glass is made. They heat it enough to rival the sun, then bend it at whim.”
Song Lan spoke quietly, as though he said nothing at all. Xiao Xingchen let his gaze flicker across Song Lan’s profile in the dim light, the bridge of his nose jutting out into the world before them both.
He smiled – they both did. His third week on Earth, their second in Heaven, and the warm space between them was filled with their fingers now, reaching out to reveal the sweet fruit inside.
The fourth rolled across, and Song Lan became Zichen, soft correction whispered to the still moon. Tomorrow, they were due to leave. The rain would still come, of course, sure to follow them until the sky had emptied itself, but now it was up to the Gods alone.
The farmers offered thanks to the two travelling Daozhang for offering their words. “Take what you can carry,” one of their wives insisted over a basket full of green. “You’re at least a week away from the next bed!”
“Some cabbage, then,” Xiao Xingchen supplied, reaching to one of the heads, watching how it hid behind his palm as he scooped it up. “And… this is?” Something behind it, small and brown, had caught his attention. Shrivelled skin wrapping tight around some small boulder – nothing like anything he’d ever seen before.
The farmer looked as though he was talking to a wild animal waiting to be put down, then shook out an uncomfortable laugh instead. “Daozhang has never seen a water chestnut?”
“Ah,” and for the first time, he was embarrassed of his own naivety in a world that grew out from the ground and ate it, too. “Never, no.” He threw his gaze back to Song Lan, standing behind him as a breathing shadow, while the farmer cast a nervous look to the gathering recess of clouds above. “We don’t have to though – even one would be too many,” he said, moving to pick up another head of cabbage instead. “There will be a better chance later, I’m sure of it.”
And Song Lan was clearly thinking about something, somewhere else. Maybe he was waiting for a swinging backdoor to throw himself out of, or a window he could jump from. Maybe the idea of holding a knife shorter than even the handle of Fuxue was enough to push him away – maybe there was something nightmarish about having to separate meat from bone with his own two hands.
Song Lan nodded, like he was agreeing with something in the air, then turned to the farmer. All Xiao Xingchen could see was the curve of his eyebrows, the light in his cheek, the soft look in his eyes that never wavered. “Then two, please.”