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⟁
The sound of a guitar drifts through the air.
Cupped in my hand, a snowflake quivers lightly.
Thick patches of fog draw back to reveal
A mountain range, rolling like a melody.
I have gathered the inheritance of the four seasons.
There is no sign of man in the valley.
Picked wild flowers continue to grow,
Their flowering is their time of death.
Along the path in the primordial wood
Green sunlight flows through the slits.
A russet hawk interprets into bird cries
The mountain's tale of terror.
Abruptly I cry out,
"Hello, Bai—hua—Mountain."
"Hello, my—child," comes the echo
From a distant waterfall.
It was a wind within a wind, drawing
A restless response from the land,
I whispered, and the snowflake
Drifted from my hand down the abyss.
Bei Dao, “Hello, Baihua Mountain”
Tr. Bonnie S. McDougall
⟁
He is nowhere and nothing for many years. He has no memory; he has no name. He is a thought, floating on unknown and foreign winds, a single breath, a single word: live.
He is drawn, unknowingly, to currents of resentment. To dark pools of yin energy. To corpses, graves, battlefields. He gathers himself in them, becomes the word, becomes the breath. Live. Live for… something. He is close to remembering. He coasts along a soldier’s dying gasp, drifts through the ashes of a palace, becomes something like a heartbeat in the rhythmic march of an army to war.
It is not fast. It is not sudden. He forms himself around that word — he is nothing, he is no one, he is a fragment of a fragment of a soul, but he must live.
Live for me, he remembers. A spark. He burns.
Live for me, his god told him.
So he does.
⟁
For many years after that, he builds himself up. For a long time he is only the faintest ghost fire, a gust of wind away from dispersing. It is not enough; he rages at himself every time he falters. He cannot travel far on his own, so he lets himself be dragged into the roiling wake of a war, between countries he does not know and could not name. He joins ghost fires rising from mass death and knocks against them.
The first time he meets one weaker than himself, the sputtering remnants of a boy of fifteen, he opens an endlessly starving mouth in the core of him, and he swallows it.
I want to go home, the boy wails. A dying wish just strong enough to keep him flickering above his broken corpse.
I want to go home, he thinks, after he has finished his meal. It is in a different voice now. Not the boy's, not his god’s. His voice?
The wish is not his, but it lives inside him. His fire is brighter. He is, in a certain way, made more alive by it. So he swallows another, and another, live for me, live, live.
He lives. He consumes. That empty void inside of him is never sated.
Live, his god tells him; eat, his hunger urges.
The first time a spirit fights him, instead of being quietly snuffed out, he thrills at overcoming it. Yes, he thinks. This is what I need.
He has memories. They’re hazy but familiar. He remembers long white fingers closed around his heart, holding him still, making him watch. He digs teeth into the stranger that dared challenge him for its own existence and thinks about being strong. About power.
He consumes until he can feel his body, and he rebuilds it from the instinct lodged in the root of his fragmented soul. He looks at his own hated fingers. These hands that could not save his god.
⟁
When he can move under his own power, when he can shape his limbs and wield a blade and eat and eat and eat, he hunts for his ashes. They are an unforgivable weakness, and they call to him from halfway across a continent.
He has drifted farther than he realized. He can remember some things clearly now. High city walls, the golden shine of a parade, craning forward with his eye squinted as if to peer into the heart of the sun. He searches for it, the world of his memory, but it is gone. The city is ruined. A century has buried the streets, has demolished the walls, has stripped everything familiar from the kingdom he was born to.
The only thing left of his god is him.
He finds himself covered in wildflowers.
The memories of this battle are strange, warped by his sudden, furious death. He fought many times in life, first as a boy and then as a soldier, with bare fist and half-dull sword and salvaged scimitar. When he was turned out of the army, he spent days lost in practice with the new blade, trying desperately to remember every word his god had said, pushing himself until his arms, trembling, could not lift higher than his chest. And then he crept back in for those last battles, slept a li behind the soldier’s camps, and joined them for the killing.
Often, in those last days, he was woken by bands of deserters fleeing in the night, and he had wanted to kill them too.
There are no ghosts left in the field. His god had gathered them all. Even he is a shadow of that past self, barely strong enough to hold a body together. He preys on ghost fires and skirts around anything more powerful than himself. For now, he promises himself. Just for now. He has to live, to be strong, to close his fist around power.
But first, his ashes. He finds them loose in the dirt, twined with the wildflowers’ roots. He spends days and days sitting there, placing them one by one into a small lacquered box. He tries so hard not to kill the flowers.
Some of them die anyway, the roots exposed.
He grieves.
Live for me, his god had said. He sits with his ashes cupped in his palm, and thinks: I could not even do that.
⟁
When he is finished, he drifts. He cannot eat; he is starving, but he thinks of his god and the hunger tangles with shame.
For the first time, he looks for human settlements. He does not know what to do, so he tries to understand the new world around him, the slip of time through his ghostly fingers. The world has changed, but people have not — they love to talk and argue and fight. After weeks, he learns what he needs from a lecturing cultivator and her nosy juniors: that his god lives. That his god had ascended to the heavens, and once more been cast down.
He must live. He must. If he lives, he can be found. If he can be found, he can be protected.
It is then that the mountain opens.
It slips through him like he’s made of water. He shakes apart. He clings to what he can remember of himself, and it is almost not enough. The mountain opens, and he finds himself there, somehow, one of thousands of ghosts clinging to coherence, blinded by bloodlust or cowering away from power. In death as in life.
He is caught in between. At first, one of an unknowable group thronging at the foot of an impassable mountain, he is only confused — he does not know where he is, or why pain shivers through him in waves, or what he must do to escape it.
But people are people, even after death, and people love to talk.
He learns.
The truth of this place is as frightening as it is exhilarating. When they hear, when they understand that only one creature has ever left this mountain once it sealed, some ghosts flee despite the burning compulsion lancing through all of them to stay, to fight. But he has something stronger. Live.
What does it mean, here in the shadow of Mount Tonglu, to want to live?
He can’t answer the question; he doesn’t have time to think. Before he can decide, someone has already started killing. In the bloodbath he barely makes it out of, he knows that he must choose, and soon. Power, or uncertain safety. Rebirth, or withering as a ghost fire. Living for his god, or dying for what he believed in.
He thinks of his god. He thinks of being held. Of being safe, and strong, and powerful.
He crawls away when the ghost is busy gorging itself and follows strange, human tracks through the dirt.
⟁
He follows the humans, and something follows him, a whisper on the wind. The humans passed the mountain on a thin, deep river, so he lashes together reeds for a raft and swipes claws at anything that springs at him from the water. But he sees a shadow from the corner of his eye, something stalking him.
The river slips underground into violent blackness. Echoing voices scream in a foreign tongue, and something sinks teeth into his hand, and he throttles it until it dies and swallows the scraps of its power and throws it back into the water. He has not known fear since he came back to himself as the thinnest sliver of ghost fire, but now it crawls across his dead skin. Under the mountain, dread is thick. It reminds him of cold, grasping fingers. Of blood on stone.
If he is afraid, the humans are catatonic.
He finds them much later, after he has been hunted and attacked and bloodied. They are sniveling, trembling weaklings, their flesh and blood signal flares to the hungry mouths that throng the wasteland. He hates them with a burning ferocity that almost eclipses how much he hates himself. He is so weak. He has killed here in the shadow of Tonglu, but he has hardly reaped reward for it. Everything he consumes bleeds back out of him when he is caught and beaten. He has never felt more like a child tied to the back of a chariot.
But even that is useful. Remembering the child is remembering his god, arms around him, smiling. Here in hell, the memory is a beacon.
He remembers the face of his god when he sees the humans. They’re hardy enough for mortals, but their numbers have been whittled down; their boldest warriors died long ago, and the last hale protectors the injured have to their name are a wizened old cultivator and a young girl, barely old enough to be properly called a junior. She’s carrying a shattered blade with barely enough steel to keep an edge, its grip too large for her hands.
The thing that’s been stalking him, whispering to him, lurks outside the cave and waits.
At first, they’re wary. He doesn’t blame them. He looks as human as he can make himself, but they know well by now that nothing on the mountain is safe.
But he manages to kill each demon that crawls in after him, and takes enough damage in doing so that the girl creeps to him, and tears a strip of cloth from her robe, and offers it out to him as a bandage.
The bandage does little. The ones on his face are familiarly filthy, crusted with dirt and blood. He’s barely corporeal enough for it to matter.
Body in the abyss, heart in paradise, his god said.
I want to save the common people, his god said.
Live for me, his god said.
He is so close to another death. He can feel it. The voice of something old and sick and powerful croons to him from the mouth of the cave, and he crawls toward it. It has tried to tempt him with power. It has taught him about the mountain. It promises him: power in return for a sacrifice.
The mountain wants blood. All he has to do is spill it, and he can take what he wants. He can have all the power he could ever need. He can live.
His whole body shakes. The tips of his fingers are fading, turning ghost-fire green.
Kill them, whispers the ghost at the door, like it has been for days and days in the dark. Kill, and drink, and then come to me.
Its voice is sweet and smooth as syrup. If he closes his eyes and pictures it, its face looks like his god, holding out arms to catch him. Its voice lures in others, stronger ghosts. Ghosts who want to kill, and drink, and return to become their master’s next meal.
He almost does it. They’re closing in. Some of the humans are crying. Some of them only tremble. Some of them are almost dead already.
The girl holds her blade up to him when he stumbles toward her. Tear tracks on her dirty face, blood crusted on her filthy hands. He hates her. He hates her. He hates —
Kill, says the ghost. Forge your blade, fight for me, become something worthy for me to devour.
He cries when he pins the girl. When he wrestles the shattered saber from her hand.
Live for me, his god said, and he could, he wants to, but his god would never forgive him for dooming this stranger for it. He has failed enough already.
He wants to live, but not like this.
Forge a blade. Fight for him. Live for him.
He turns the blade on himself, and cuts the curse from his body, and he screams until his mouth fills with blood and the sword burns in his hand and the mountain trembles and roars and splits in half.
It hurts more than anything he can imagine. He does imagine it, a hundred times over, a blade in his dead heart.
Yes, that voice says, closer now. He cannot open his eye, he cannot taste anything but blood. His body is coming apart — is it the mountain that shakes, or him?
Somehow he’s still holding the saber. It’s the only thing that feels real about the world: the hilt in his hand, the thrum of power into it. He wonders, desperate, hysterical, if his blood will be enough. He’s dead, but the body remembers bleeding. The only thing it was born knowing how to do.
Your suffering, the demon says, is delicious.
He remembers white hands. A bone-carved smile. The sound his god made when the sword went in the first time.
He cannot see, blood running hot into his only eye, but this demon has been slithering into his mind since he set off down the river. He can feel it in the still, dead air, its segmented body, its hundreds of legs. It creeps above them, tongue lolling down, tasting despair.
The saber shivers in his hands. It almost breathes.
It blinks.
He has only enough time to roll before the thousand-toothed jaws close over where he’d lain. The beast snarls, lunges instead toward the girl in the corner, weaponless, screaming.
His saber flies through the air, more corporeal than the hands that wield it, and digs deep into the beast’s long, smooth flank.
The battle that follows — he cannot watch it, even as he fights. What he gets from the saber is a sense of the space, fuzzed and sensitive only to motion, to heat. He had not used the eye it was born from even in life; for as long as he can remember it has been closed and hidden. Brought into the world, it does not truly see.
But it is enough. He’s still shaking, as violent as the mountain, with rage and pain and desperation. He claws his way onto the creature’s back; its thrashing brings stones down around them, reshaping the mountain in their image.
Its body, too, remembers how to bleed. When it falls, twitching with the remains of its afterlife, he is drenched in it, dizzy and sick and still fading in and out of existence.
He’s so hungry. The pit in him writhes.
The ghost dies, and he unhinges his jaw and consumes it, a power that could raze a city. He wipes blood out of his eye, his hands shaking, burning with a new power.
Live, his god commands. Live, live, live.
Under the mountain, he hears a river. The humans huddle together, sheltered from the carnage by a crag of stone. The young girl’s legs are twisted and bloodied, but hands had reached out to pull her further from harm.
They quail from him when he steps closer. She is weeping, glaring furiously at the saber in his hand. Under all the blood, it glints silver.
Something new in him knows the mountain down to the core of the earth. He can feel the ghosts crawling on it, waiting prey; he can feel the ones that have gorged themselves as well as him, and knows that they can feel him in turn.
This mountain has reduced them to animals, stalking their prey in calculated silence. This pathetic band of humans is nothing but meat to put into their stomachs.
He points the saber down, to a passage uncovered by the fight’s destruction. The river brought them in; the river can take them out.
“Go,” he snarls, the first word out of his new throat. If he looks at them for a moment longer he might kill them all, just to prove that he can. The anger is brilliant in its clarity: he remembers, suddenly, the thing he used to be. Names he used to claim.
None of those names feel important anymore. All that matters is that his god had looked at him when he said them.
They’re all staring at him. Some have staggered up, some are hobbling or crawling away, down and out, but all of them stare. Something is burning. His hands are shaking, his vision red with blood.
The girl is filthy. Her fingers are crusted with blood and dirt and rot. She reaches out to him, and he cannot stop her, because the world is shaking apart from under him. He is dead already — it shouldn’t feel so much like dying.
A crash. A tremor. The world falling apart in a clap of endless thunder.
⟁
“What are you,” someone says.
It’s bright. The sun is searing. He stumbles, reaches out, grips a shoulder so hot it scorches his skin.
“What — hey, what kind of ascension is this? What’s your name?”
“Where did you come from?”
“Is he alive?”
The voices overlap, clamoring. A few hands reach out and prod him. Someone touches his wrist, probes dead meridians.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.” The voice is confused, but benevolent. He blinks as best he can, focuses through the light and the pain and the blood.
Where is he? A trick of the mountain?
No. He knows. The faces that swim in front of him are too perfect, the new power lancing through him is too sharp, too alive.
My god, he thinks. But this is not a place he can find him. They have cast him out, ground him beneath their heels.
“Get lost,” he snarls. He swipes his saber at the hands that grab for him, and feels immortal flesh give way. He watches the god yelp, and bleed, and keep bleeding. A wound that will not close.
One step backward. No one else reaches out to him. He feels rabid, desperate. If he lets them take him, he might never escape, might be bound to them for eternity. At the mercy of those who cast down his god with nothing but scorn and laughter and shame.
Another step. Another.
And then he falls.
⟁
He ends up where he began. On his knees in the perfect, blood-soaked darkness, the miasma of death thick in the air. The cave is silent. He does not need to breathe, but he does it anyway just to remember he exists.
Slowly, painfully, his eyes adjust.
He is alone, almost. Most of the humans are gone, fled down toward the river. He is strong enough to make sure they are not pursued.
But two of them remain. The old man, dragging the young girl with shattered legs, empty hands.
His whole body is reshaping itself. Godly power, dulled by the mountain as soon as it flows through him. Ghostly power, from the pit in his stomach that yowls at him to eat, kill, consume. They don’t clash; they hardly exist in the same places. In between them, a silver sword gleaming in the dark.
“Go,” he says again, voice thick and heavy. “Get out of here.”
The girl is staring at him, eyes shining white.
Thank you, she does not say. He does not hear it. He will not.
The humans leave. He waits at the mouth of the tunnel, a perched predator, and kills anything that approaches until he feels them vanish from the mountain.
He seals the cave with a stone carved into the crude, blind imitation of a god. He glares at it, blood crusted in his lashes. It is nothing but a shape.
He can do better. If any god should be worshipped on this mountain, it will not be him.
⟁
Time loses meaning. It’s different now that he’s powerful, though he’s just as trapped as any of the thousands of ghosts pinned between the Kiln and the borders of Tonglu. He spends hours or days killing in droves, dragging the shuddering, bloodthirsty hordes into himself.
Those first few years, when there are still enough of the crawling masses to form rank, he sometimes loses himself and lives only in the perfect fit of the saber in his hand. It kills effortlessly. It makes his enemies remember bleeding, if they’ve forgotten. It stares at him, baleful and furious, and he keeps it sheathed at his back to watch behind him with that fuzzy, growing awareness of the world around it.
He calls it what it is. He wakes from hazy bloodlust with his fingers cramped around its hilt.
Once, he realizes that it’s been days since he prayed. Days spent stalking through the ruins of a temple, rooting out the demons beneath it and swallowing them whole.
He falls on his knees outside of it. He digs his fingers into the earth, which is only ash.
Help me, he begs. He wants to live. He wants to remember that he has someone to live for, someone he must live for; if he doesn’t he’s no better than the rest of the monsters that crawl at the mountain’s base, slavering for power.
Out of a fist-sized piece of stone struck from the foundation of the temple, he carves a flower. He is more adept with his power now, more familiar with the different channels it can flow through. A ghost can be any shape it likes, any imitation of a body; it can be crude, or it can be carved into something resembling a person.
The more he eats, the more he carves. This flower is almost right. One petal is dimpled softly, as if stroked by a gentle, delicate finger.
He goes back to the cave, pushing aside that first, hapless attempt to capture his god in the stone of the mountain. He can do better now.
He carves, and kills, and eats, and prays.
⟁
After a long stretch of years, there are only a handful of them left. Thirty or forty monsters, slinking around the foot of the mountain, trying to kill enough of their fellows to crack into the Kiln. They’re learning together, aware of each other in a way that he thinks means the mountain is playing with them. He knows now that the crawling thing that stalked him at the start was barely a child, for all that it had a dozen human lifetimes on him. These are old, powerful ghosts who want to pry their jaws open and fit him through them.
He will not allow it. Raw strength is not enough, not anymore. He learns to hunt, to track, to believe what he can see and taste on the hot, bloody wind more than what he can feel through the hum of stone under his feet.
Once, he kills one of those great, powerful beasts. It has spread itself huge and thin across the empty sky, more a membrane than a monster. E’ming splits it open, sends blood pouring down onto the ruins of a great, beautiful city. He lifts his face and he drinks it, gulping in power. He fills his whole being with it.
He could be anything he wants. He could fill the sky. He could be the shape of any beast he’s killed, as easy as blinking.
But — he looks at the blood coating his hands, and as much as he reviles them, he would not change the heart of his shape. He shifts his skin often, practices turning himself into something that could pass as human, something that a god could look upon and smile to see. He is building himself a body here on Tonglu as he eats. He needs it to be the body that his god had held.
How many ghosts have made it this far? He learns, later, that when the killing field has been whittled down to four it has been seven years of blood.
He is the youngest of the four of them, the most human-shaped. One is a slavering, four-legged beast that sticks to the ghost woods. Another is a serpent that slithers in the wake of the walking mountains. One is almost a person, but she stands at thrice his height; she is covered not in flesh but in a thin, silvery skin of shimmering insect wings.
Some of them have eaten more than he has. It takes him half of another year to kill one, and he only manages in a moment of desperation, when he thinks he’s already lost, when he’s stuck in the gullet of the serpent with acid eating away at the core of him. His saber cuts him out of the demon, splits it open. He slashes at empty air and E’ming makes the sky rain blood, and the blood washes away the venom, and he kneels in the slitted carcass and drinks its poison into himself — and he knows, then, that he can do it.
Live, live, live, cries the dead thing. I have to live.
The forest-beast dies to his last opponent, he feels it as much as he hears the gutted, thousand-voiced howl. And then it is the two of them, racing each other to the peak of the mountain, the Kiln that crawls open and begs one of them to die to reach it.
She wants it as much as he does. She wields a jian that flies on those same silvered wings, as hateful and powerful as E’ming; the first time they meet, his skull reverberates from the impact. E’ming does not shatter, but it shudders. It will not take many more blows like that.
So they dance. He keeps his god at his back, the familiar words grooved into his memory by a cool, gentle stream of water. He thinks of his god on the battlefield, shining with radiance.
Somewhere, a human woman believes in a cursed, shattered ghost that sent her home on a river of blood.
He is bleeding, and breaking, and burning. His saber flies through the air, wrenched away by her jian. She pulls him close, dangled above the mouth of the Kiln, and the wings that cover her cut him thousands of thousands of times.
They do not speak. They both know that winning does not mean they get to live. It is only one more obstacle.
She doesn’t have eyes. He tries to stick his claws through her throat, and she catches his fingers, nearly severs them on silver. She wants to eat him slow and close, wants to savor each trickle of his blood and power on her tongue.
That, at least, is her undoing.
E’ming takes her head off from behind, and she bursts into a shower of silver wings that he catches, stuffs into his mouth like a starving child taking food from his god; he cannot care that they slit his tongue and his throat from the inside, because they are a part of him too, now. He has a long moment of powerful exhilaration, where one of her wings twists and shudders and becomes something new, something he can feel.
And then, once again, he falls.
The Kiln opens its mouth, breathing hot. Hungry. Waiting.
And when it swallows him, the world is gone.
⟁
Darkness. Burning. Pain, endless pain.
It is not a thing to describe. If he were anything less than he is he would be gone, instantly; he would be nothing but a swirl of ash inside the mountain’s gullet.
He survives the fall, the first obstacle. He survives the landing, the second.
He is one of a bare few who have lived to feel this; if rumor is to be believed, only one has crawled out, and it is no longer alive to tell the tale. He has no map, he has no history. He has excavated a dead language that cannot help him here.
The mountain fights to unmake him, and he fights to make himself.
At first it is simple. There is pain. There is magma, hot and white. For a while he evades it, as it rises; he flings himself onto more and more precipitous perches, uses his saber to grapple up the slick black stone walls. The first time he falls he almost disperses at the pure agony, and holds himself together only by remembering hands reaching out to catch him.
Live, he imagines his god commanding. He drags himself out and wishes he had his statues, his murals. He blinks at the stone under his hands.
The next time he falls, he has already begun to work the stone. The mountain trembles, bucks, flings him like a horse shaking off a fly. He tries, fails, to catch himself; this time, the knowledge of the pain that awaits him makes the descent even worse.
But he looks up, as it begins to consume him, and he thinks: I have to finish this.
He cannot die with his god looking down on him.
The ninth time he falls, he remembers wings. He calls them, reaches for the last great thing he consumed. Instead of striking magma, he bursts into a swarm of razorblades, his body and mind fragmented. His wings catch the light from the magma below and scatter it against the cold walls.
He reforms, and takes the place of the flower in his god’s massive, outstretched hand.
The first gauntlet was simple pain, and the agony of crawling out of it again and again. The second is darkness. At first it is a relief — his eyes no longer burn when he looks down, but carving is infinitely harder. He has been honing his spiritual power on it for years now, but now he maps the stone with his hands a dozen times before he strikes, terrified of stripping away something he cannot replace.
But the darkness does not stay kind. It warps his vision, shifts the stone under his hand. He gets lost, wandering around the new, jagged floor; he traces the walls with one hand, trying to find his way back to his god. For a moment he’s blinded by panic, when he feels the same distinct, curved hollow three times in a row.
A maze, he thinks. A children’s game. He does not need his eyes, but he keeps them open; he leaves an insect, half-formed, without any light to reflect off its wings, tucked in the hollow. The next time he passes it he searches, and finds the hollow empty.
Even now, the Kiln hurts him. Every step sears the bottoms of his bare feet, his will to shield them burned away by the magma. His shape is crude. He keeps all his power coiled tight in his core, leaves his limbs cold and half-formed. E’ming is slung across his back, eye peering sightlessly into the dark. He walks, and burns, and soon enough when he blinks he sees the glint of swords.
The Kiln tastes him, and knows him, and proves that it knows him by bringing him home.
And home, of course, is a battle.
A duel. A saber, a sword. A golden mask.
His hand is pressed against the wall of the Kiln. His hand is wrapped around a dull, lifeless saber. The fight is quick, ferocious; he can feel that he is not holding back.
In the darkness, another speck of light. Something falling from the mouth of the Kiln.
The golden mask turns, looks up; the sword wavers, then drops. In his hand, the saber flies toward the exposed neck, a sliver of skin, pale underneath the swing of a red pearl earring.
He won’t. He can’t. He’s helpless to the impulse, the pull of the dead saber, the mouth of the Kiln opening to drink his despair.
Stop, he begs himself, but finds that the only thing he can do is —
He buries the blade in his own stomach. He pins himself down into the stone. It’s raining again, hot blood in his mouth. He can’t see. There is nothing at all in all the world: only the Kiln, and the blood, and the sword.
No one is coming. A great hand reaches down from the black sky, white and clawed; it pins him down, drives the saber in deeper. He thrashes against it, nothing but a ghost fire burning low and useless. Everything hurts: holding himself together, refusing the raw, starving power that presses into him from every side, a forging pressure.
Just die, the Kiln whispers. Doesn’t that sound easier?
It does, it does, it does — but —
His god could not. His god did not. If he dies here, he abandons his god to an earth and heaven that revile him for his kindness, that condemn him for being forced off the sheer cliff of his own goodness.
He will not be one of a hundred swords. He will not die.
His ashes are tucked against his stomach, close to his core. He can feel the lacquer creaking in strain. It’s a risk to carry them with him, but it would have been worse to leave them in the cave with his gods. He fumbles with dead fingers. Opens the box.
The Kiln is full of heat and ash and fire and pressure. He breathes it in. There’s not a hand above him, there’s not a saber inside him. There’s only darkness, and pain, and he drinks it like he’d swallowed ten thousand ghosts on the killing field and pushes it through his palms, until he is nothing but the Kiln writ small.
He will not stay vulnerable, a pile of ash ready to blow away on the next wind.
When he comes back to himself, his hand is clenched around something hard and faceted. He slits his eyes open and sees it catch a glint of light, scattering it into stars against the black stone ground.
Above him, a shining, silver butterfly beats its wings.
⟁
Time doesn’t matter in the Kiln. Every moment is disjointed, separated entirely from the one before and the one after. He finds his god again, the crude beginning of his shoes, his robes, his hair. He had completed the hand first, palm-up. In the absence of time, he works.
It is not easy. The mountain shakes him off of it; the Kiln works with every bit of power it has to unmake him from the inside out.
He falls, and sometimes hits magma, and sometimes saves himself. He blinks into darkness and relives shared nightmares. Sometimes, demons of the mountain he cannot fully understand leak from the crevices of stone and try their best to kill him with blades and claws and teeth, and he and E’ming dance together and drink their power.
He does not sleep, but he thinks sometimes he dreams. The mountain speaks with his god’s voice, shapes the stone lips he crafted with the sharp edge of his own power.
What do you want, little ghost? Mount Tonglu asks him. It is not a benevolent question.
The mountain, he knows, is hungry. It is only the force of his will that keeps him from dissolving, from giving in to the urge to feed it.
Everything the Kiln has ever swallowed comes back to haunt him. Every ghost vying toward ascendance challenges him in the black pit, and when he kills them he knows them, knows how they died here inside the mountain, burned in magma or dissolved by poison winds or impaled on their own weapons, lost to madness.
No, he tells the Kiln, over and over and over. I am going to live.
While he refines the smallest facets of his god, he starts testing against the stone. He climbs higher, over his god’s head; he balances on the hilt of his saber, embedded into stone, and knocks against the top of the Kiln until he is thrown back down.
No one had been able to tell him how to make the mountain let him go. They spoke of it as a myth. If you can escape the Kiln.
He knows now that nothing ever has. There is no masked face that appears to him, not even in the poison nightmares. However that monster was born, it was at the top of the mountain, not in the belly of it. The desperation makes him wild, tempered only by the cold certainty that he will not die here. He has survived everything the Kiln has tried to destroy him with, and the longer he spends in its stomach the more powerful he can feel himself becoming.
He sits on his god’s outstretched hand, illuminated by butterflies. He breathes, on purpose. He carves himself into the most whole shape he can imagine. Each strand of hair separate. The crease under the nail beds. The scarred half of his face where his curse used to take root.
The curse is gone. He wields it now as a weapon, and it bends to his command.
He is not the one chained to misfortune any longer.
What are you, little ghost? Mount Tonglu croons.
He breathes it in, the endless breath of despair and hatred and death.
I am going to live.
⟁
Stone shatters. The sky stretches out above him, pale and endless.
He takes his third life with both hands, and he gives it to his god.
⟁
Needless suffering,
needless waiting,
the world, like your laughter, is empty.
The stars are falling —
cold and wonderful night.
Love is smiling in its sleep,
love is dreaming of eternity…
Needless fear, needless pain,
the world is less than nothing at all;
from the hand of love, down into the deep,
slides eternity’s ring.
Edith Södergran, “Night Full of Stars”
Tr. Stina Katchadourian