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Xie Lian is failed, and fallen, and shackled, and so he is very surprised when he once more feels the tug at his self. A whisper requesting his attention like a voice from another room, too muffled to hear more than the fact it carries speech. This is more than a prayer.
It should be impossible. He shouldn't hear anything, much less feel it. This can't be anything like the hundreds of thousands of prayers he once received daily. It plucks deeper at his soul, at his constrained divinity.
The unheard voice calls with an urgency that would have sent him hurtling into a follower's dream once, long ago.
That power is lost to him now, locked away in penance, and now this poor lingering believer is left to suffer alone. What a poor penance he chose, making himself helpless to answer when he could have followed this whisper with barely a thought. Wordless fervency murmurs within his soul.
Xie Lian is shackled, and unable to answer this call.
Xie Lian, for all his faults and well deserved bad luck, is a clever and strong cultivator.
The faint hum of prayer never ceases, not even for sleep.
It is months before Xie Lian manages to find the artifact, one that doesn't call on his own power to work. He closes his eyes, and lets himself fall.
He can't visit this strange voice's dreams, that ability was truly lost with his divinity. This artifact though, pulls the voice into sleep, across unknown distance, to him.
His mind is quiet, well practiced calm now reflecting a rural road in fall. He can see a lone fire red maple blaze with autumn in the distance. The ache is quickly released.
He hears a scraping, sees dust rise in the distance.
In the way of dreams, the owner of the voice who never ceases calling to him arrives all at once, as though they have always been right there with him. As though he was never left alone.
Xie Lian blinks.
Black robes coated in so much blood they have turned the color of rust.
Strong thin arms clinging to an impossible thing.
Carven image dragged here with the voice.
Chisel and hammer ready to drop.
He looks into the man's eyes.
"Dianxia?"