Fancy Dinner
Avyr was still asleep when she finally managed to extricate herself from the garden; less dignified than he’d been before, he lay sprawled out over the couch with all the grace of a particularly clumsy kitten, limbs flopped over the cushions in weird angles. Kinda like a rug, if a rug that someone had heaped up on top of itself and decided they’d deal with it later.
A servant stood just off to the side of him, frozen in hesitation— ever so occasionally reaching a hand out before pausing, and falling back into a respectful silence. It was so amusing that Lily couldn’t help but snicker silently, garnering their immediate attention. “Honored cultivator, I’m… relieved to see you here. The councillor requests your presence in the Peony House tonight for a dinner.”
“I… alright—”
“Of course, if you don’t have any appropriate attire then you shouldn’t hesitate to make use of the wardrobe provided to you. We have a wide selection of different styles available for your perusal, so if anything catches your eye then I’m sure we could have you looking quite proper in no time at all—”
“I… um.” The servant was already making her way towards the interior of the room, and Lily hadn’t even accepted yet. “I have my academy outfit? I’ll just wear—”
“Of course not, that just won’t do, how dreadful. Unless you mean to send that message to your gracious hosts? Of course, I would not presume to dictate the desires of the master cultivators, but surely you are not so ungracious of your hosts' accommodations?"]
Lily just mutely shook her head, following along as the servant led her into a truly enormous walk-in wardrobe. She had no idea what was so wrong with the academy uniform, but… well, best not to think too hard about the whims of the rich and powerful, probably. There were a… lot of clothes. More than she’d expected certainly— the whole thing looked almost more like a silk warehouse than the sort of place where she’d ever thought she’d find herself.
The servant all but leapt into action, shuffling through all the different outfits with an efficiency that Lily couldn’t help but admire. Clearly, she’d had a great deal of practice with that… which, given that she was pretty sure nobody had used this wardrobe for the past while, as an impressively useless skill to have.
Humming to herself, she paused in front of a particularly long set, pushing aside the indigo silks on either side of it and gently unhooking it from its resting place. “How about this one, dear? It’ll go just wonderfully with that beautiful Aurelian hair, and the eyes… yes, the gold highlights will complement those quite nicely. You’d like stunning!”
It was the most awful, egregiously feminine article of clothing Lily had ever had the misfortune of seeing. She had no idea why the servant had thought that a form-fitting silk dress with no sleeves and embroidered lace slits all the way up to the top of her thighs was at all a good idea when she didn’t even like wearing dresses.
Her disgust must have shown in her expression because the servant’s grin turned into a rictus smile as she gently placed the dress back. “I see that’s not to your liking… hm. That sort of dress is in fashion at the moment, but perhaps you want a more timeless look? Let me see…” back to humming, she shuffled through what felt like an infinite variety of different dresses and outfits before finally picking out a different one— a peachy red golden silk dress carefully embroidered with brilliant designs of four-winged birds in flight, ascending to some unseen heaven above.
It was beautiful, but… dress. It also looked like it’d be a bit too big on her— the sleeves looked like they’d trail on the floor if she wasn’t helpful, and they expected her to eat dinner in that? She wasn’t sure what magical techniques they thought she was capable of, but keeping sauce out of that dress certainly wasn’t one of those.
A shake of her head, and the servant put the dress away, searching for a fresh horrible option— muttering all the while. She went through five more dresses before Lily had had enough. “No more dresses.”
The servant stopped as though struck, staring at her in horror. “No dresses? Do you have any idea what sort of statement that makes? You’d… no, of course you wouldn’t, you’re a ward…” she shook her head. “Of course, not to disparage your… humble background, it’s just that you do know you’d be offering insult by showing up in anything but your best. The councillor isn’t the sort of person to overlook that kind of thing easily.”
She was barely even part of the district anymore, and what was Guxi going to do anyways? Make her pay more taxes? Lily snorted, assuredly— “absolutely no dresses. Surely, over the past thousands upon thousands of years, someone has made outfits for cultivators that aren’t dresses.”
“Yes, typically cultivators wear the robes of their sect, which…” she paused. “Wait here one moment. I think I might have just the thing.” She shuffled through some of the clothes, pressing them to the side before opening a half-hidden door behind a rack of clothing… only for it to lead into another wardrobe. Lily couldn’t help but think the whole setup was getting ridiculous. Who even needed that much clothes?
It was a much less kempt wardrobe than the first, which… well, she’d half thought that the entire clan compound had been immaculately cleaned and organized all the time, so seeing the cramped, slightly dusty room was a bit surprising. The second thing she noticed was the slight hint of qi that suffused the room. It was a gentle pressure— stagnant, a hint of old wood, deep earth and darkness… but still, it couldn’t but make her wonder. How long had that room been closed for even the qi in it to get so musty?
The servant grabbed another outfit, looking far less pleased as she held it out for her perusal. It wasn’t quite as fancy as the dresses she’d been shown priorly, but it also wasn’t entirely mundane, either. It was still made out of elegantly embroidered silk, but this time it was a simple white shirt with golden dragons sewn into it. Ironically, she felt it’d be exactly the sort of thing that Avyr would have worn, had he been, well, human. Even better, though, was that there was a nice, simple pair of pants instead of… whatever those other outfits had been.
Good enough. “I’ll take it.”
“It’s one of the old cultivator combat formalwear. You’ll have to keep in mind the message that sends to Guxi…” to Lily’s mortification, the servant immediately moved to help her get dressed, chattering on all the while. What was worse was that after an abortive attempt to shoo her off, it quickly became clear that the clothes were far too complicated for one person to put on alone. “From the old war— not the one just passed, it would have been poor taste to wear it if that was the case, but the old old war… ah, you’re probably too young to really remember back when that was the biggest thing in the history books. Feels like just yesterday. Oh, not a soldier’s outfit, mind you— so you’re not to adopt any sort of soldier’s mannerisms, not if you don’t want to be seen as a rube. This should give a message of conservative focus, but not old conservative focus, which…” and so on, and so forth. She’d not asked a single question the whole time, and the sheer deluge of information was somewhat unsettlingly intense.
At least, by the time she was finally done with that whole embarrassing debacle she looked rather nice. She definitely had at least the appearance of someone who was important enough to be dining with the councilor herself.
The servant hesitated at the edge of the wardrobe, looking a little nervous. “If you wouldn’t mind, dear, could you please go and… ah, wake your sleepy friend? I’d do it myself, but I’m afraid my old bones aren’t quite what they were—” she said, as though she didn’t look like she was in her early forties at the absolute latest.
Lily knew enough to recognize when someone was afraid of Avyr. It was unfortunate, but… she just sighed. Unfortunate. Rolling her eyes when the servant wasn’t looking, she stepped up to where Avyr was still sleeping on the couch and punched his foreleg. “Hey. Sleepyhead.” She heard a strangled noise behind her, but paid it no heed— she was a whole full rank beneath the big cat, after all, and if she wanted him to feel her attacks, much less actually wake up, then she needed to put some real force behind them. “It’s time for dinner.”
“Nyoooo… not yet—” and then some mumbled words in the language of the cats, with all its rolled mewls and chirped words and general incomprehensibility. Lily gave him a second or so to get up, but he just flopped a leg over his head and kept sleeping.
Well, he was asking for it. She grabbed onto one of his legs and with a sudden yank, cultivation flaring with the effort, she pulled him right off the couch.
He crashed to the floor heavily enough to make the whole room shudder. Yowling, he shot to his feet, fur standing on edge— alight with a blazing energy hot enough to sear his pawprints into the floor. Then he realized where he was, ears flattening back in embarrassment. “I feel asleep?” He glanced down at the scorched floor, crouching a little lower in what could then probably be construed as so far down the embarrassment spectrum that it reached all the way to mortification. “Oh. That’s… sorry again. I didn’t…”
Lily just snorted. Mostly because the servant looked like she was about to pass out from fear. It did kind of look like Avyr was crouching down to pounce at her, if you’d never seen a cat before. Not even the giant six-legged kind, but the normal kind, either.
Well, people could be irrational sometimes. “You’re fine.” She wasn’t even sure who she was speaking to, at that point— the cat or the woman afraid of him. “So… do you need to get him a set of clothes too? Or will his university outfit be enough?”
The servant emphatically shook her head. “N-no, that’s fine! I think the university outfit is fine for him! We don’t have any sort of clothes for his body plan anyways, so it’d be for the best for him to, you know!” Her voice was rather high-pitched, almost panicked, and Lily was struck by the sudden sensation that she was being a little bit mean. That took most of the fun out of the moment.
“Alright, fine.” Sighing, she waved at Avyr to go get dressed and made her way to the door. “Dinner, then.” A meeting with Guxi. She steeled herself for that, because when it came to that sort of politics… it was less that she wondered what would go wrong.
Rather, she wondered what could possibly go right.
………
The feeling she got, stepping into the gaping, mahogany-gilt maw of the Peony House, was what she imagined enemy soldiers felt in the seconds before the bombs landed. It was— dread, the vast blotting cloud that rose up from the east and overtook and covered the whole sky, whole world, transforming into a pale and sweltering hope when there was no more dreading to. It was the placid, the still water over fathomless, pelagic seas, pooling in her chest until it felt like it might burst from the anticipation of the blast.
There was no explosion, though, as she passed the servants just inside the door and was ushered up to a seat just a little bit down from the front of the table, opposite where Xinshi sat. Avyr settled beside her, testing the chair a little bit before rolling his eyes and pushing it to the side. Luckily, it was a low table; if he sat up particularly high it didn’t look too awkward.
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Xinshi spared them a glance, then after an almost interminable second, went back to picking absentmindedly at the tablecloth in front of him. Lily considered saying something— almost did say something— then paused, settling back into silence instead. She still didn’t quite know how to react to how he’d spilled his guts out to her not more than an hour or so earlier.
She didn’t quite know what to feel, knowing that at last she was so far beyond the person that for most of her entire life had seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to overcome.
It was an odd sensation.
In the distance, a litany of bells rung, their quiet sounds melodic reverberations, ringing out over the compound. Sunlight slanted through the windows, dappled but only slightly by the slight green of a gnarled cypress. The curl and twist of the glass and metal really did resemble their namesake, if only abstractly…
The bells settled so slumber, quiet once more.
A flock of birds took to air, the flutter of their passing a cascade of chaotic sound—
Someone unmistakable stepped into the room.
The sound was sharp— a clack against the wooden flooring as her presence unfurled across the room, rushing over the wood and cloth and table set and crashing against Lily with an almost physical force. The two servants beside the entrance immediately dropped to the floor, kowtowing as the honorable councillor Qin Guxi swept into the room and took her seat at the head of the table. “Guests. Xinshi.” She nodded at each of them in turn. It was not a kind nod. “Servants! Bring the meal. Do not tarry.” The two servants leapt out of the door as though someone had lit their robes on fire, leaving the four of them alone.
Avyr sat up straighter, glaring at Guxi— it was the first time she’d seen him so mad at a human in a long while, and Lily hadn’t expected it. Then again, maybe she was just out of it trying not to get crushed by the increasingly powerful intent radiating from Guxi.
Sat on her throne, in her qi sight, she appeared like nothing more than a burning cynosure of terrible power, all the light in the room warped around her form as she impressed authority down over the hall. Even Xinshi wasn’t spared— she was pretty sure, at least, given how strained and pale he looked.
Avyr just narrowed his eyes further, and with a sudden glint— the qi within him, usually rotating along its same placid tracks burst from his body as he pressed his intent out against Guxi. The whole table jumped just slightly against the sudden pressure of two intents— but when it swept over her the relief she felt was instant.
Feeling a bit sheepish, Lily drew on her own meager cultivation, pressing back against the councilor’s tyrannical intent. It was difficult. Far more difficult than she’d imagined it’d be— Avyr made it seem almost effortless, the golden wave of his intangible qi slicing through Guxi’s, slowly gaining ground— but she persevered, drawing on all her experience with Qinfu’s presence and the various exercises the university had made them learn to make a tenuous exclusion barrier around her than could keep the foreign intents from scraping against her body.
The relief, again, was instant. She sighed loudly, the first sound since Guxi had sat down on her throne— even if Avyr had managed to suppress Guxi’s actual, physical pressure, the sudden liberation from the qi that scoured against her spirit was… a relief, in every sense of the word.
As Avyr pushed further, Guxi’s expression changed. Slightly, ever so slightly, but it was clear that— somehow— Avyr’s cultivation was more powerful than Guxi’s was. Given she was cultivating the Bloody Saffron Sect’s method, that was impressive. Still, the councillor didn’t give up— merely tightening her eyes and doing something with her aura that disrupted the delicate balance between her bloody essence and Avyr’s brilliant sunlight.
For a single second— Lily gasped as the whole world around her turned topsy turvy with a turbulent qi, the homeostatic quietude of the moment interrupted as Guxi’s aura burst— a thousand spikes shearing outwards shredding into qi with little resistance even as Avyr’s qi raced inwards to fill the gap. Then it rotated, shearing away the flood of unreinforced qi that’d begun to reach dangerously close to her.
Lily grunted as a lancing strike struck her in the stomach, the sheer force of it concentrated in a way her earlier pressure hadn’t been. It felt like being punched by a particularly cruel opponent— and quickly, before any more could land on her, she reinforced her earlier shroud of qi against the direction they were coming from. Not a moment too soon, as her spirit reverberated with the force of four more impacts, each one just as powerful as the last. Xinshi looked like he had it worse than her— he clearly hadn’t managed to get a shield up in time, and had been hit by the full force of the attack. A slight groan and the disheveled state of his clothes was indication enough to know that he was having it rough.
Lily blinked, refocusing— sinking once more into qi sight to feel the swirling, fiercely battling intents between Avyr and Guxi. Avyr was starting to adapt to the sudden change, but Guxi’s aura had resolved into nothing less than a swirling maelstrom of bloody qi, dragging in everything that approached her and slowly pushing out towards them.
Lily certainly did not want to know what that’d feel like when it reached her. She didn’t even want to see Xinshi subjected to it, really— but yet, it expanded. She’d just begun to think that maybe the best course of action was to— stand, run, break that farce of a battle— when Avyr took things into his own hands.
Or paws. Or whatever. The metaphor kind of broke down, but Avyr… finally, he stood, and pulled on something. The whole of his cultivation, maybe, though Lily hadn’t gotten the impression that he’d been holding back earlier. Or maybe he was just pulling on… more. Faster, less limited—
His aura transformed. Just subtly, so subtly that Lily wouldn’t have been able to sense it at all if she’d not known him so well, and even then it was a challenge— and when he burst alight with qi, this time it seared through Guxi’s qi, blasting back the maelstrom and flooding towards the councillor herself.
A burst of radiance, light incandescent—
“Enough!” Guxi immediately retracted her qi but for a hard shell around herself, and, despite his clear reluctance, Avyr pulled back on his as well. “Enough. I will not suffer this insolence in my own home. Show your respects, or suffer my displeasure.” Given that Avyr had been about to reach her with his aura, the threat was a fair bit weaker than it otherwise might have been, but it still wasn’t nothing. Lily gulped, pushing herself further back against her chair in fright. She most certainly did not want to get on the political bad side of the woman who controlled the entire district. “Servants! Clean up this mess!”
For the first time, Lily realized just how much of a mess really had been made. It’d been more or less fine when they’d been having a simple battle of wills, but when they’d gone beyond that— when Guxi had started her strange technique— the entire table arrangement had been flung out of place. The tablecloth was twisted and rumpled, wrenched from alignment— dragged, by that same furious rotation.
It was an utter mess, but before Lily could wonder if they were going to have to move to a different room, a swarm of servants scampered out from the side of the hall, quickly rearranging everything with a practiced ease that suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d had to completely reset the table in no time at all. It took essentially no time at all— and after that came the feast. It was so much food; such an overwhelming abundance of beautiful dishes, meats, vegetables, steaming pots of rice and oil-flecked broth, bones, mounding and delicious smelling—
Profligate in its waste. It was enough for twenty people, and even then there would have been leftovers. Guxi watched each servant as they carried out their tasks with an almost laser-like focus, like the sort of person just waiting for someone to slip up— but the servants all preformed admirably, and before long they were once again alone in the ornate room.
She reached out and delicately grabbed a small bowl of plain rice, tasting it once before nodding and placing it to the side. “You may eat.” Xinshi immediately started digging in, and after a second to make sure that she wasn’t falling into some sort of trap, Lily also started to dish herself up.
Avyr didn’t eat anything. Judging by the heap of spices and sauces that drenched every single dish, Lily wasn’t sure if there was even anything he could eat.
The meal passed in uncomfortably tense silence, a silence that didn’t really end, because there was no end to the food. They could continue eating as much as they wanted, and even when she was stuffed full, they just sat silently caught up in the potential that the meal was still ongoing, that they didn’t have to move onto the next phase of the whole awkward meeting.
It seemed to stretch out interminably long.
It seemed to take no time at all. “I’m impressed.” Those were the first two words that Guxi said, after almost an hour of silence. She didn’t sound impressed. “You’ve come a long way for someone of such utter disenfranchisement. You have the potential to go a longer ways still. My son could learn from you.” Lily shivered at the scathing tension in the air, not even spiritual, just… emotion bubbling up from within her. Opposite, Xinshi stiffened in grim anticipation. “You do your precinct proud. I hope that you will continue to represent the 32nd district well. After all, there are a great many groups out there, and I’m sure more than one of them wants you dead.”
“Dead?” Then she stiffened, realizing she’d spoken out of turn. “Sorry. But… dead?” That was rather… “oh. The Twin Pines clan.”
“And others. You have strong allies in the Bloody Saffron Sect, but you must never let yourself think you’re invulnerable. All it takes is a single lucky blade in the night to snuff out your great potential and unravel even the highest connections.” It was presented as a helpful warning. It sounded like a threat. “You should be cautious with—”
“Who do you think you are,” mewled Avyr, low, almost whispered, but just as equally threatening, “to tell us what to do and what not to do? Are you Hsu Qinfu, Core Formation cultivator of the Bloody Saffron Sect? Are you Ohm Zhihu, Foundation Building outer disciple?” It was funny, but also a little worrying, to see Guxi struck dumb by Avyr’s sudden refusal to bend. “You mention our connections, but fail to realize their reality. Do you think we’d take your advice over theirs?”
Guxi scowled, and for a single long, terrifying moment Lily thought that their earlier battle of auras was about to resume. She reached down to her qi, preparing to call it up at a moment’s notice— but Guxi just settled back into a placid calm after only a second. “I’m not talking about the cultivators you consort with. You know to whom I refer.” Then, without so much as a single other word, she got up and walked off. Simple as that.
Weird… but, Lily couldn’t help but think she was pretty sure she knew what Guxi was getting at. She even had a bit of a point. Compared to Qinfu or Zhihu or even Ruqian, or any of the other powerful cultivators they’d met…
Mingtian was just a mortal, and yet… she did cling tightest to his advice. Over anyone else’s, he was the one that she thought of when it came to the crux of things.
Interesting.
“Sorry about that.” Xinshi’s sigh was enough to drag her attention off of those grim thoughts. “My mother can be… pushy, and pushing back only ever makes it worse. Usually she’s pretty harmless. Or, well, at least she’s not going to have you killed or anything. She didn’t even have that authority when you were in school here, and she definitely doesn’t now that you’re top students at the University of East Saffron.” Funnily enough, that did make her feel a little better about the whole situation.
She sighed. “It’s fine.” It wasn’t like she cared about what Guxi had to say anyways. “Thank you for…” not much, really. Being there? That sounded stupid, so she decided not to say anything more.
They finished the meal in silence, and went their own ways, and— come the star-speckled empyrean dark of night— in the most ornate room she’d ever slept in, quiet amongst earth and heaven both… she couldn’t not think of what Guxi had said.
Tomorrow. She closed her eyes and fought off the urge to sink into meditation instead of sleep. Then she’d get some answers to her thoughts, whatever they ended up being.