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There are countless tales and legends about the mysterious Wudang mountains: those told as bedtime stories to scare disobedient kids and those which serve as nothing more than background to puppet shows on festivals and fairs. Stories about the mountains themselves, those tremendous and respectable massifs, and stories about even more mysterious things that they hide, covering in shadows like a mother would cover her beloved child with a blanket.
If a darkness could ever love and care, protect and give comfort, it would be there, in Wudang.
People say that whatever it is that one can come across in those wild and raw paths between the mountain peaks is for sure nothing good, because why would anything good settle for such a place to live, find such comfort in the night and perceive deceitful howling of the wind as the sweetest lullaby? As many as there are people there are guesses on what specifically lives there, in the mountains, hidden from the light, but all these people always agree on one matter: nothing in Wudang is good, and none of it belongs to this realm.
Locals living under the rocky slopes (there are very few of them, who, for whatever reason have to stay there, in the neighbourhood of the ominous peaks - because one can be certain, if they could leave this cursed place, they would) tend to advise travelers, those lonely ones and those traveling in groups, to avoid any path or road that would lead through the mountains, even if picking a different route would extend their travel for weeks, months. It doesn’t matter - “you don’t want to mess with the gods, with demons and spirits, or just with the mountains themselves,” they’d say, and petrified travelers vow to never place a foot there, afraid of both villagers and the gods. Gods - since Wudang, being tall and massive, cold, snow-covered, reaches the sky and thus the heavens, as one of very rare links between this realm and different ones.
Some are in favour of a theory that instead of spirits, apparitions, ghosts, and gods, there are humans living there in the mountains too. Evil ones, of course, degenerate, because why else would they end up living there, hidden in the darkness? “Or maybe they aren’t even real humans, or not entirely humans, maybe they’re shamans?” - some old crank would say, frightening the kids who listened to his story with only the sound of that word. Shamans - powerful beings, vessels for the gods, able to call them and control to such an extent that said god would fulfill whatever wish they had. Gods are like tools for them, but those gods aren’t merciful, and shamans pay a cruel price for their powers. They’re more like demons, evil beasts, mad and insane already or waiting for their turn to become such. Shamans - brothers to spirits and travelers among realms, whom mortality doesn’t determine, and nor does time.
And yet, born humans and imprisoned in this pathetic human form, they can’t truly cope with the divinity they came across.
But then again, the line between what’s human and what’s divine is so thin, so bendable, so easily modified.
These are all tales, of course. No one has actually seen those “shamans” (and people don’t know that have they seen one, they wouldn’t even be able to recognise them), and, nowadays, gods are also no more than legends, whose only purpose is to make the world have at least some more sense, order and beauty to itself than it actually does. People, however good they are in their mythmaking, find it impossible to create something that wouldn’t have that integral anthropomorphic element which they love so much and can’t get rid of, because people are nothing more than egocentric rulers of the world, laughing at the face of death and ignoring the gods walking among them, because they’re so stupid they can’t even recognise one.
•~•~•
The Night Castle is a strange place, not only because gods are so close to the earth that they practically live there, and not because spirits are walking along the mountain paths, not because the wind humming in the trees and over the chasm whispers some promises, curses and prophecies; not because the stars are actually careful eyes of those who had long died and who can't let go and will follow your every step, and not because shamans live there, strange people, physically young with their vessels of minds containing wisdoms of centuries and powers of hundreds. It is because the Night Castle seems to be frozen in time and space, immune to any changes, always the same, solid form; people would leave it and come back, would die and go mad, and yet the Castle itself, with the mountains and forests surrounding it, with the ethereal stars in the night sky and spirits on the road, with the snow that never melts, hidden from the curious eyes - it seems untouched. Maybe that's how gods like the way of things: unchanged and dedicated to them. Or maybe it is because despite all the sorrows that the Night Castle brings on one, it is also the only place those lonely lost people could feel truly safe in, and the gods felt merciful enough to let it stay this way.
•~•~•
There was no humanity in the way Baji was treated in Baghra prison, and it was probably because no one there even thought he was still human. And to be fair, Baji wasn't so sure about it anymore either. He was before - when he had left his home behind, traveled to Sinegard, and when he finally got there. He was human when he was studying in the Academy, thinking he was the lucky one, the one who managed to escape a drab southern town and deceived his fate. But then everything was getting a little more complicated , and now the only thing that Baji was actually sure about is that when he had left the Academy (okay, fair, got expelled ), he had also left some part of his sanity there, a part that he really missed.
He was doing everything he possibly could to try and learn how to live without it, first by working on the ships he had been sent to as his “punishment” (whose fault was it, really? Baji never got his answer). Sure, the work was difficult, but at least the physical challenges didn’t let him turn his attention to the screeches he heard in his mind and the red bloody spots that appeared in his vision, and he thought that maybe, maybe they’d let him stay there, sailing through the oceans and seas, far from people he could hurt, but where he was useful instead, but two years later, they said they were taking him to Baghra. And suddenly Baji started missing a too-small bunk he had on the ships, and an overcrowded bedroom in the Academy, and finally the spot on the wooden floor where he used to sleep back at home, in the south.
The worst thing about Baghra was that, once left alone in the dark cell, Baji had too much time to think, and the conclusion he came to wasn’t too optimistic.
He didn’t know anymore where his mind and autonomy ended and where the god started; which of his desires were truly his and which ones belong to the god; if the thoughts that flooded his troubled brain uncontrollably were his and his only or were they dictated by this cruel being that had been occupying this mind. The line between these two was blurry, and because of that he could not guarantee his sanity to anyone anymore. He would say “yes, please, let me out of here, I’m not mad, I won’t hurt you,” and he would know it wasn’t entirely true, that he was half-insane, with someone, something way too powerful for him to handle screaming inside him, crying and yearning, ordering him to break something, kill someone, to hurt and spill blood, to destroy everything that had been made and created.
One could say that this god was vicious, and Baji would agree, but the more he lived intertwined with it the more he was learning about its nature, and how painfully simple and primal its desires were. Everything that had ever been created, born or brought to life - destroy that. Make the world empty again, filled with nothing, because the god seemed to be angered by everything else, and it hated the world as it was. There was something disgusting in that, something negating the progress of humanity as a whole, but also something weirdly beautiful. Things becoming just raw materials again, as if waiting to be picked up and to serve their purpose, and all the creatures - decomposed back to simple tissues, tissues to cells, liveless, thoughtless. It was crude and it was like a return to the beginning of it all.
But, for fuck’s sake, Baji wasn’t here for this philosophical gibberish, forcing him to discover the sense of the world and all that, and he wasn’t here to help his god achieve whatever messed-up fantasies it had. All he wanted was to learn how to fight, to become a good soldier and escape his pathetic life. He didn’t want all this .
But it was too late to crawl back.
And just how long ago he had wanted to leave his past life behind him, he was now abandoned by people who should have protected him. He was alone, left at the mercy of fate, and he had never felt so lonely and helpless before. He blamed Jiang Ziya, blamed the masters, who never really fought for him and cared for him to stay in the Academy. He was, after all, just another southern stray, thinking he was the special one, that he wouldn’t waste the chance he had been given, but the masters knew already that it was all a lie and that this life Baji had dreamed of for himself was out of his reach. That was probably why, Baji was now thinking, they let Ziya train him. That’s probably why he decided to become Ziya’s apprentice - he was desperate and power-hungry, and never wanted to come back to the miserable life he had. And, well, that one he managed to achieve. His life now was far worse than the one he had, and the only person capable of saving him had left him, lonely, young and scared.
In those rare moments of clarity of mind, Baji was cursing the name of his old master under his breath.
•~•~•
Time was passing, but he didn’t know how much of it he had spent in that cursed prison cell exactly. No daylight was reaching him, almost as if the heavens weren’t able to look at the failure he was, so days began to be no different than nights. He was either sleeping, dreaming the nightmares, or struggling with those same nightmares when he was awake. He lost care for everything in this world and the next ones, and all he wanted was peace, but, of course, the peace never came. Instead, the longer he was sitting in the darkness, the more his brain was forcing him to relive all of the things that he desperately wanted to forget.
Because Baji, poor boy, wasn't reckless, disgusting and shallow: he was just scared. And no one taught him how to handle this fear.
He never dared to explain that to anyone, because there was no one around him who would care enough to hear that story. And, besides, it didn’t fit his character, this personality he wanted people to see and believe it was real. He wasn’t like that, all sad and tragic, mysterious and dark. He was supposed to be funny, light-headed, careless, simple, like there was nothing more to it. And Baji sometimes thought that if he managed to convince others that this was who he really was, he would manage to convince himself, too.
He was scared of love, because he didn’t know how to handle it. Scared both of loving someone and someone loving him, because everything he had so far lived through convinced him that love wasn’t for people like him, and he didn’t know any better but to blindly believe it. He didn't want to turn out this way, and he knew there was something repulsive in it, in him. He was painfully aware of that. But again, who was there to teach him any better? How to control that darkness deep inside him - not the god, but all those painfully human parts of his soul, if he still had it.
During those worst days in the prison, Baji was thinking about everything and everyone he left in the south, and he felt guilt clenching his heart. He didn’t care much about his father, who hated him, and about his mother, who was never there to protect him or his siblings, leaving him to do that instead. And the siblings were the ones he was truly missing, and the ones that memories containing them would make him shiver in shame.
He should have taken care of them, shouldn’t he have? He was the oldest of them all; they trusted him, because they couldn’t trust their parents nor the world behind the leaking walls of their wooden cottage.
One could’ve thought that, attached to his siblings, he should’ve stayed.
He should have. And he didn’t. He fled as soon as possible, as far as possible. He wanted to save himself, and he failed in that, too. And now he regretted every decision he had ever made.
Gods were not lonely, or, at least, no one would ever say that they were. Maybe, for gods, an idea such as “loneliness” was just far too human. But Baji was no god, and he found himself sobbing in the darkness of his cell.
He later learned that this feeling had been familiar for all the shamans; for the vessels, priests, warriors and messengers, who were too powerful for people and yet too fragile for gods. They were living somewhere in between that and that was where they were dying, too. Always lonely.
•~•~•
Baji never meant to become Ramsa’s big brother, of course. For fuck’s sake, after failing the thing with his other siblings completely, with his real siblings, and then proceeding to accidentally destroy everything and everyone he ever got close to, he never wanted to take care for another human being, ever. It was just too dangerous, not for Baji himself, but for this person, which was one of the reasons he never let himself get attached to anyone. Plus, it wasn’t like anyone would even want him to get attached to them, anyway.
It was all sort of an accident, something that happened beyond them both, despite Baji noticing it and trying to stop it. It was like the gods, those same gods that were screaming in his head and that he had to call to earth, decided to play some especially cruel joke on him (again).
This elaborate divine prank began with putting the two of them, a thirteen-year-old scrawny boy with pyromaniac tendencies and no eye and a guy twice his age in the same prison, in the middle of nowhere, at the same time (more or less - Baji later found out that he spent less than half a year in Baghra, whereas Ramsa had been there for two years. That shocked Baji and made him even more careful of the boy, because he had barely survived those six months there and he couldn’t imagine sitting there for years). The two of them didn’t really have a choice - it wasn’t like they had hundreds of people in front of them, waiting in a line to become friends with them. They had to work with what they were given, and Baji found himself lucky to talk to anyone after those months he had spent isolated.
Even if that “anyone” was a particularly annoying brat.
But then, as his time in the Cike was passing, Baji found out that you couldn’t help but get close with those eleven people you were stuck with and who were stuck with you. None of them could allow themselves the luxury of hating other members of the Bizarre Children, and they had to learn how to tolerate each other, at worst. At best, Baji noticed he genuinely started liking those strange people, their company, that he was missing them when he wasn’t in the Castle, and that they started being for him the closest he ever had to friends. He started trusting them, even if involuntarily. After all, no one would understand a mad shaman better than another mad shaman, all of them scared for their lives and sanity every day, depending helplessly on each other.
Of course, Baji would never admit that, unless on his deathbed. And besides, if anyone asked Ramsa what he thought about his older friend, he would probably just start cursing in utter disgust, so they were even.
Ramsa wasn’t an emotional kid, either; he seemed to have so many feelings bottled up inside, so many things he was stubbornly denying. Baji never even tried to convince Ramsa to speak about them, afraid that the kid wouldn’t handle all of the emotions at once, and Baji wouldn’t be able to help him, because he didn’t know how to deal with such things, either.
And so, as the time passed, and now days and nights weren’t becoming one, Baji, when looking at Ramsa, saw his siblings. He couldn’t help it, even though he tried. It seemed like everything he had ever learnt while taking care of the younger kids, and which he had later forgotten about, since it had stopped being valuable, now made its way back to the surface of his mind, begging to make use of it again. Ramsa was just like those children, and those children were just like Ramsa: so young, so hopeful, and yet not too sincere, because life had already disappointed them one too many times; not exactly innocent and pure, but still full of energy and faith; weirdly optimistic and simple in their way of thinking, despite being born in hell.
That innocence, he was thinking, that childish hope one had in life. Another word for it was naivety.
But Ramsa wasn’t naive, he wasn’t stupid. He had learnt enough and more was already waiting for him to be learnt, and despite all that he was still faithful. Maybe he was as mad as they all were, Baji thought. That would make sense.
He remembered when he first saw Ramsa, in Baghra prison: Baji, locked up in his cell, hearing someone walking down the passage. He peeked through a small, barred window in his door, curious, because such motion in the prison wasn’t happening often and he was hungry for any sort of entertainment he could possibly get. And outside the door, Baji saw something so weird and grotesque that he later thought it must had been some hallucination or a vision of a crazy man he was now becoming. There was a boy, looking like he was ten years old, small and lanky, escorted by three guards. The prison uniform was hanging off him, way too big for a child, and the handcuffs on his wrists and ankles were visibly too large - the kid could effortlessly release his limbs out of them and run away. He didn’t do that, though, and proceeded to follow the guards, the chains on him clanging. He didn’t have one eye.
Later, when Tyr visited Baghra and offered the three prisoners a once-a-lifetime, wonderful, impossible to decline offer to work as the Empress’ assassins (“Hooray!” Tyr had actually exclaimed at the end of his speech, which made Baji more scared than the speech itself), Baji met Ramsa again - he was given the same offer.
What, in the fuck’s mercy, was this place they were taking him to, since they decided the job is appropriate for this child as well? Or a better question - who was this kid? Or was Baji dreaming? Did Tyr belong to a cult? (He did, but that’s another story.) What the fuck did all of this mean?
He found out he was both terrified for him and for the child.
“Hi, my name is Ramsa, I had parents and both eyes, but then my parents decided to become terrorists and die. You stink,” were the very first words this wonder-child had spoken to Baji. It seemed like he had rehearsed them while he had been still locked up, waiting for an occasion to introduce himself like that to someone.
Baji’s honest reaction to that was, well, he’s sorry for the eye and parents, and also they didn’t give them any luxurious royal baths in Baghra, since they barely even gave them food, unless he missed something, so Ramsa stinks too.
Ramsa’s response was just looking at Baji with his one big eye and saying that, well, Baji didn’t look like someone who was starving, and then he bit him. Tyr had to make sure, on their way to the Night Castle, that Baji didn’t get rabies.
That was how the strangest friendship on earth began.
Despite being often annoyed by Ramsa’s surprisingly accurate taunts and despite arguing with him like any other person would argue with their irritating, hyper-active, unbearable younger brother, Baji felt the need to protect him and to at least try to save him. After all, Ramsa wasn’t a shaman; he could still leave this place and had a chance for a relatively normal life, right? But all of the things he felt weren’t something he could openly show, especially because he hadn’t even fully understood them. It only later occurred to him, during one sleepless and sad night, who Ramsa resembled and why Baji wanted to protect him at almost all costs, why he was ready to even die for this little boy.
(He would; but at that time, he didn’t know about it.)