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She's the only divine thing he's ever believed in.
She's dying. She's fading away in his arms, helpless and whimpering, and her hot, dark blood spills over his fingers.
His hand holds the blade.
A distant voice echoes in his ears. Who is the true god?
Chaos?
What is divinity?
Nezha knows divinity. He's just killed it.
—
Fang Runin does not have a grave.
Her final resting place is a Gray Company laboratory, perhaps the one place she would have most hated to end up in.
Nezha dares to hope sometimes that she was more than a person. That she is still more than a corpse. That this is not her final destination.
Was the body all she had? Or was she more than that, like she always seemed to be? Does he have any way to know? Can he only believe?
He always thought she was something more, in the back of his mind.
That's what he wants to think, at least.
But a corpse is all she is.
He cannot deny it the day he watches them tear into her like vultures, and take her apart, and put her in jars as if she is nothing more than a scientific puzzle to them.
They set her on a metal table and rip her apart with their scalpels and hungry glares. They rip the insides of her body out, as if they will find answers about her and what she is—was—in her organs.
They interrogate him on the gods while they rip apart the only god he has ever cared to pray to.
And he cannot lunge at them and choke the life out of them for it, because she has cursed him to fix what she broke.
He can only watch and bite his tongue so hard so many times that the Dragon stops healing it for him and blood stains his teeth, because she broke everything so thoroughly he cannot afford to let one single crack form anywhere.
So Nezha grits his teeth and he lives beside them as he fought beside them. He lies to the Hesperians, he pretends to repent to the Maker in their churches, he pretends his god isn’t torn in pieces in their laboratories. It is his dead whom he truly asks for forgiveness, not the Maker, and never does he fall under the delusion that they forgive him.
He is cursed, he thinks, for the rest of his life.
Nezha hopes it's not very long.
But even he knows hoping is futile for him.
—
Fang Runin does not have a memorial, either.
Why would she?
They call her a tyrant, a general gone mad, a liability, a wild animal that had to be put down. Hesperia despises what it can't control, so why would someone like that have a memorial?
There is no memorial, but there was once a sword made of Speerly steel on display in Arlong with her name on the plaque.
Three years after her death, Yin Nezha destroys any and all remaining records of her, effectively shutting down the Hesperians' attempts to have her recorded in history as a monster.
The plaque, too, is no longer there.
The Hesperians take this to mean that his preferred course is to erase her from history instead. They praise him for coming around, for being so earnest in actions that will benefit them. He has lessened their work, in a way.
He wants to claw his skin off when they speak of her like that. Don't they know?
She was so cruel to him and so merciful to them. Maybe she really should have killed them all.
But Nezha has no duty to maintain Rin's memory. He only has a duty to fix what she broke and left him with. The legacies and legends can wait. They will come around again anyway—What a hideous thing for him to try to believe.
But necessary. He can't go on to rebuild Nikan if they are always whispering in his ear what a monster she was. He can't go on hearing them speak about her at all.
He will do what he must, as he has always done, and maybe if he loses everything again, as he always does, he will not be the reason this time.
But such wishful thinking is always in vain for him. History moves in vicious cycles, this he knows. Not circles. There is not enough mercy in the world for that.
Because if history really did move in circles, Fang Runin would have a monument in Xuzhou across the graveyard from Mai'rinnen Tearza's.
But the cycle does not grant Nezha the freedom that the Red Emperor once had.
There is no true memorial for Fang Runin and there never will be.
—
Sixteen years after Yin Nezha ordered the erasure of every mention of Fang Runin, the Last Speerly, from Nikara historical records, he pays his tribute.
He is beginning to wrest control of Nikan back, just a bit. He is not being monitored as thoroughly as of late, and so he can afford a small gesture like paying a visit to Xuzhou, the city of graves.
He holds two things as he approaches the city, a dull sword and a box. The rain comes down hard, and he walks hunched over the objects to shield them, like it matters.
It matters to him.
There was a time he could simply move the rain away with a flick of a finger, but that time is no more. He is too exhausted.
Inside the box he has placed a plaque and a dagger with a dragon carved into the pommel. The plaque he selfishly wishes he could keep forever. The knife he hates more than anything in the world—It cost him everything more than once.
He buries the box first, and plunges Rin's sword into the dirt to mark the spot. And he leaves it standing in the grass, a good distance from the other monuments.
Nezha sits nearby for a while at the small grave?—Not beside it, but as close as he thinks he deserves to be, letting the harsh downpour of rain batter him until he is drenched while he prays.
He prays someone will come by in the future and find this box, find the plaque and his knife buried with her sword.
He hopes that whatever twisted memory of Rin lingers in the future, someone will see this one day, and they will know it is not all there is to remember of her.
He realizes halfway through he doesn't even know who he is begging. He asks his dead for forgiveness often while he pretends to pray to the Hesperians' Maker, but he is not asking for it now.
Maybe he should.
The Pantheon could never answer these prayers anyway. Neither can she. He knows that now.
Yes, Nezha pretends to be Makerist often, but he acts the part in front of his last memory of her now.
He is repulsive. He knows.
Still, he must beg that, if history is twisted by outside interference in the future and he cannot stop it, this will change something.
He prays, if the memory of Rin is ever smited in the future, that someone will find this anyway and know that the Speerly who wielded this blade was someone worth remembering.
Nezha knows his limits. He cannot immortalize Rin's memory the way the Red Emperor immortalized Tearza's.
He cannot even expect that someone will find such a hint and understand it the way that he understands why the Xuzhou monument of the Winter Empress does not look like her other depictions at all.
Herein the cycle can be found. Nezha has erased every trace of Rin already. He only leaves a hint pointing to the truth, all he can afford to leave behind, in the hopes someone will find it. He follows the path the Red Emperor carved so long ago.
This is all he can do for Rin now.
—
Democracy could never have worked with Nikan if Hesperia was involved, if Nikan were to head in the direction Nezha wanted it to head in. As much as he would have liked the system to be put in place, it was obvious this would not be the best thing for Nikan for at least a few more generations.
He knew decades ago that if he established a democracy, the Hesperians would interfere with the Nikara elections and pick themselves a leader they could manipulate easily or someone who already supported their vision.
One way to render that idea absolutely impossible, Nezha knew, was if the next leader was someone he himself raised, someone he trusted knows how to handle Nikan. Someone he raised not to bend the knee if they know they can afford not to.
And so Nezha's son, Yin Mingzha, has become the current Ruler of Nikan.
He is, at the moment, overseeing the process of Nikan joining the Consortium as an official member state. This should, in theory, help push Hesperia away from Nikan and cement its status as an independent country capable of functioning without Hesperian aid.
If only the other peoples of the world were not just as wary of him because he is—was?—a shaman. He doesn't know if he really counts as one anymore.
Regardless, Nezha knows he is holding his son back. When he, the last known shaman in Nikan, passes, it will be easier for Mingzha to achieve what Nezha could not, purely because of what Nezha is, what his son is not.
Fixing the country has been a monumental task that has left him near-stumbling off the edge of reality, but Nikan is finally catching up to the rest of the world without losing itself.
It is in good hands now. Nezha may have been too weak to be a good father, and he is too tired to regret it, but his son is a good leader anyway.
That will have to be enough at this point.
He wishes he could know that it is.
Is his duty to Rin fulfilled? He doesn't know if he can go on any more. Not when this is what he has become.
Nezha is weak, disgustingly so. He always has been.
He is no better than the Hesperians who would have ruined her memory if he hadn't torn it from their filthy hands.
The experiments have worn down his body over the years, and his mind even more so. Ever since he stepped down, the experiments have gotten worse. His body is deteriorating rapidly, and some days he barely remembers her name.
She haunts him anyway.
And his very existence is as wretched as the Hesperians' for it.
But he can't stop it. He erased her from history so that no one would rip her memory apart, and then he rips it apart himself.
Sometimes when he can't bear the pain of the electricity tearing its way through him anymore, sometimes when all he wants is to call the Dragon on the city and crumble it all like sand before he endures more, he imagines her.
But he can't remember things about her half the time. Sometimes he forgets her face, or the exact shade of her skin. Sometimes he imagines her in lighting he never saw her in before, sickening sterile white bulbs in the ceiling, so unlike the fire that used to light her up.
He hates himself for it. But try as he might, he can't stop himself from hallucinating, and he knows his grip is slipping.
Instead of the Hesperians slicing him open over and over, he imagines it's her ripping him open.
Instead of those expressions of thinly-veiled disgust and sheer indifference looking down upon him, it's her, face contorted in rage—For even if he's forgotten most details of her face, he remembers her anger.
He deserves every bit of pain she could inflict upon him. She was supposed to be the only one who could quiet the Dragon.
And every time he feels like he is no longer drowning after the excessive shock treatment, even so many years later, he still thinks of her.
It helps with the pain, but nothing else. He takes the faces of those she once hated most and he puts her in their place, he imagined her doing to him the things she most hated having done to her.
He wishes he could die because he can't stop, because he is losing any hold of sanity already and this always happens on its own and he doesn't know how to end it.
He doesn't even know if he really would stop it, had he the choice.
He taints her memory. When has he not?
More than any of the Hesperians, he should be the most ashamed.
There has always been a level of depravity that only Nezha could ever reach, after all.
—
One night, Nezha steals down to the shallows by the bend of the Nine Curves River, near the grottoes, to let the Dragon claim him as it has always wanted.
He goes down to die.
Nezha sits in the shallows and waits, watching the jewels in the river shimmer in the moonlight.
One hour.
Two hours.
The horizon brightens, a soft light sharpens to a burning flare.
He closes his eyes in the face of the rising sun, something he has only begun doing recently on the rare sunrise he is able to get out of bed. In the back of his eyelids he can almost make out the fire she used to shape in her burning image.
The sun climbs higher, and his breaths become more labored the brighter her flame grows. He imagines he is choking on it the same way he once did long ago.
This is the end for him.
Vaguely, Nezha recalls a conversation he had once, long ago. Chaghan Suren mentioned at some point that Speerly souls linger on long after their deaths.
Is Rin still around? Or has she passed on?
Whatever the case, he just hopes he will see her again, see more than just an illusion his mind forces upon him to keep itself in one piece.
He doesn't deserve to. How he has twisted Rin's image in so many ways, how he has destroyed her and allowed her to be destroyed in so many other ways. How he removed her from history when she deserved to burn her mark into every page of it.
It's so selfish of him to hope she lingers, when he should hope she has found peace and passed on already. But he has been nothing but selfish from the beginning.
He disgusts himself. He cannot remember a time when he hasn't.
When Nezha looses his last breath, he only hopes, if she knows of all he's done, that she never forgives him.
Nezha hopes she hates him.
But, oh, how Nezha misses her.