The Door To All Marvels

When he’d been younger, he’d always thought that the Human was quintessentially the artificial. He doubted that any human would really understand it, were he ever to describe why— it simply did not fit in their minds, the view of his kind, the difference of his kind. When he was younger, he had thought them vastly different, so far removed from one another, between their divides of the forests of Refuge and the cities that towered out of the coast, bastions against the wild—

It was not an uncommon feeling amongst his kin, he imagined. Wrenched from everything they knew and forced to adapt to a foreign world where everything was set by mortal hands and the forests were simply a dream, their value abstracted away into the vast gyre of a foreign society that so arbitrarily despised them… To live in their new world, of glass and plaster, and bricks and asphalt and smoke, and oil slicks on the street that gummed up between one’s paws, and… he could only imagine why Ji’an and his fellow cats had grown to despise humanity. The Empire of Nine Sunlights was too far to truly hate, and they were human too, in the end.

He wasn’ entirely immune to it, either. Sitting there, breathing in the delicate aroma of the councillor’s feast, not daring to actually eat more than the smallest morsels for fear of condemnation over manners he could not possibly replicate— he tried to imagine a world where it was his kind who were the oppressors. He could imagine someone like Ji’an tearing down the walls of East Saffron, and in its place planting the seeds for a vast and bloody wild, or… but try as he might, he could not for the life of himself imagine an Empire of cats taking over the human lands. The whole idea just felt… absurd.

No, theirs was the fate of just holding on, in opposition to everything, and so— the mistrust, the disgust, he could understand it. He did not accept it, though. Lily was proof enough for him that in the end, at the core of the matter, they were far more similar than they were different.

It was a sharp contrast to the councillor, who was everything he’d imagined about humans in his youth and more. If Lily was a normal human, long-since used to living in the artificial world of her kind’s creation, then Guxi was that artificial thing, that fake soul. Everything about her was a careful presentation— a facade over a separate falsehood that lay beneath.

Carefully, deftly pulling on his qi to hold them steady, he used his chopsticks to pick up a small morsel and guide it to his moth. The motion caught the councillor’s eyes, and even as she continued to discuss some policy or another with self-assured grace, he could not help but feel like she was studying him. Lily had told him once that she thought her a petty kind of ruler, filled with too much ambition and too little good sense— caught between what could be and what should be. Avyr wasn’t sure if he agreed. That facade of polite respectability…

It only covered a deeper falsehood. All the way down, an artificial being, replaced by her own ambitions until she was the creature who would sit on that not-throne at the head of the dinner table and lord her small power over even her own family, and the servants, and the guests…

A light sigh escaped him, brushing aside the steam in front of him and sending it, eddying, swirls catching the light and playing those faintest shadows off the tablecloth beneath. He wasn’t sure why he was feeling so melancholy. Maybe it was because the solstice’s eve was supposed to be a special time, and yet here he was suffering another insufferable dinner at the Qin clan compound. Maybe it was because of all the time he’d spent with the orphanage, with the children all burdened by their own so-familiar issues, and yet still so much more bright and real, and genuine, even amongst the city that seemed to stretch out forever around them. Maybe it was just… a random bound of melancholy.

Lily glanced his way, gaze laden with what he recognized as concern of a sort— clearly, she’d recognized how he was feeling. That managed to spark a little bit of warmth deep within him— different, warmth, from the ever-revolving core of burning sunlight that was his cultivation. Intangible, emotion, yet for that all the greater than any force of cultivation could be.

Beneath the table, she reached out a hand and gently pressed it overtop his paw. A small reassurance, but… reassurance enough.

Guxi glanced at that— the brief moment not left unnoticed— before she simply huffed and sat back in her chair. “Well. I see that this level of conversation is uninteresting to you.” The insult didn’t really land— other than on Xinshi, who stared intently at his food. “No matter. It’s about time for the ritual of things, anyways. Servants!” Without even having to be instructed further, a handful of servants quickly ran up to them, placing tall glasses of clear liquid in front of everyone. Alcohol, by the pungent aroma of it… he sighed. Another thing he couldn’t drink.

Guxi raised her glass, swirling the liquid inside it about for a long moment. “The year has passed, and the precinct remains strong. My son, Qin Xinshi, was accepted into the University of East Saffron and has good chances to continue forward beyond that— to walk the path to immortality and in his footsteps elevate the family and precinct both. Ganbei!”

Xinshi and Lily raised their glasses, and even he felt compelled to raise a paw— despite how he wouldn’t be drinking anything. “Ganbei!” For a second, there, it almost felt as though they were at a normal party, with a normal family.

Just for a second, though.

“May heaven bless his endeavors and bring him success in his pursuits. I’ve ordered the kitchen to prepare his favorite treat— hawthorn, sugared and lightly caramelized— and would be delighted if you all would give us the honor of partaking in…” a servant ran up, nervously whispering something into her ear. “What? Tell him to go away. I already have one of them here— who do they think I am, a charity? I—” a second servant dashed in, wide eyed, and this time Guxi scowled. “What? A cultivator? They dare? I’ll turn them into a rug for—”

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The doors to the Peony House slammed open, and Guxi choked on her words, eyes wide— face paling, terrified in a way that Avyr had never seen her before. A… it defied description, but he could not help but feel the presence that filled the room, the sheer existence of something that curled through the air and brushed across each and every little wisp of steam, brush of fur. The way Lily’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head as she stared at something only she could see was just as striking—

Ultimately though, it was not any of that which was the most startling. No, as he followed their gaze, and stared at the doors open into the midnight dark outside, and the single being that stood in the center of it all, whereupon the whole world seem to bend inwards around them—

Avyr blinked, wondering if he’d gone insane. “Rr?” He breathed out softly, stunned. “Is that really you? What are you doing here?”

The Great One’s gaze settled on him, weighty with the pressure only a truly powerful cultivator was able to bear. For a long moment, he was silent. “…Avyr. It’s been a long while, hasn’t it?” Since they’d last met, a figure out of his past, somehow, impossibly, stood right there in front of them. He looked so… normal. Avyr knew what he was, and yet still— he looked normal. Then his gaze flicked to the others. “Leave us.”

Lily was the first to scramble to her feet, shooting Rr’an fearful look— but he stopped her from actually leaving, placing his paw over her hand and keeping her close. It was selfish of him, but…

Surprisingly, Rr’an said nothing, merely turning his attention to Guxi. Something passed between them, whispering fast— like their competition of auras back when they’d first met, but so much impossibly more than that. Guxi didn’t stand a chance— she recoiled as though struck, a line of dark blood dripping out of her mouth. “Of… of course.” She coughed into her hand, and though she hid it— he could see it’d come away bloody. “The hospitality of the Qin clan is completely open to you.” Then she scampered.

It was so ridiculously out of character for her that it was almost amusing. Not even the outer disciple of the Bloody Saffron Sect had set her so ill at ease.

Then again, a Sundering cultivator was to an outer disciple even of that great sect as a mountain was to a pebble. To compare the two was like comparing heaven and earth; the distance was all but immeasurable.

The moment their hosts left, an absolute torrent of qi erupted from Rr’an, flooding through the wood of the room and evoking it— alive, it twisted and writhed covering the windows and cutting out the lights, replacing it all with a flood of— green. Leaves unfurled, from tiny, delicate half-moon things that cascaded down vines to enormous fronds, and trailing banners and lanceolate daggers outstretched, and petals— golden and pink and white and all the other colors of the rainbow, each softly aglow with their own inner light until the whole clearing was the very image of a mystical grotto tucked away in the far wilderness.

Beside him, Lily gaped at the transformation. Understandably— it was a beautiful thing, a powerful thing… but to him, it evoked a different emotion entirely. Almost crushing, overwhelming as it surged forth— that nostalgia. That memory, of times forever passed… he stepped forward, raising a paw and tracing the delicate curve of a flower that blossomed out like a star, feeling the soft touch of its petals and remembering when they weren’t just a dream. “Why now?”

“I found you.” Simple. To the point.

“Not so Great if it took you this long.”

“I was burdened with conveying our people across the sea and ensuring that, even here, so far removed from everything that we knew and held dear, we could still survive and thrive. I didn’t have time to search for someone I thought dead, or lost.

It was logical. It felt wrong. “Not so Great, after all, if—” it was petty, but the emotion came nonetheless— “you couldn’t even protect your disciples.”

Rr’an flinched, then sighed, head drooping. “Oh, little ribbon-chaser… if Sundering was enough to let me do anything, then the world would have been a very different place. You weren’t there… or you were, but not truly. You were simply one of the many sent to flee… the Empire swept over us so quickly, and it was their choice to stay. It was their choice to take the pass, and make that final stand.”

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Do you want the cruel answer, or the real answer?”

“Both.” He felt like a kitten, again, sat beside someone who he’d been told was great, yet who just seemed like another kind uncle to him— “both. You owe me both.” Neither of them commented on how ridiculous it was, for him to dare say that Rr’an owed him anything. Logic was beyond them, long left behind.

Rr’an stepped forward, brushing his tail against him and bidding him, sit, a paw gently settling him down to the ground with none of the force he could have used. It was odd— when he’d been a kitten, Rr’an had been a larger than life figure. The next best thing to divinity itself. Now, though… he was almost his size. Both of them were adults. It felt wrong, in more ways than one.

“The cruel reason is that I could not. I could have stood in that gap, and struck down each and every one of the imperial soldiers that came until I was grappling with generals and they had long since retreated. Yet, I was needed in the Great Southern Gap to root the all-devouring tree. Had I not done that, their sacrifice and so many others would have been for naught. Yet… the real answer is, had they not sacrificed, then my stand would have been for naught, too. They chose that, Avyr.” He leaned in, until Avyr could just bury his face in his fur and pretended that all those years, all those hardships, were nothing— as lost dreams, scattered to the far winds. “They chose to stand in the pass, and save as many as they could— and for that, Avyr… the last stand of the Lords of the Peerless Paw is legendary, even amongst my fellow Great Ones.”

Cold comfort, he wanted to cry, or scream— cold comfort that it was legendary, because they’d still been taken from him anyways. To others, maybe, they had been peerless warriors… but to him?

They were still gone.

A second sensation joined the others, so faint compared to the all-encompassing peace of Rr’an’s presence. Soft, but… slender fingers wrapped into his fur, just where he liked it, and Lily whispered— “I’m sorry. For your loss.” Nothing more. Nothing more was needed.

He wrapped a paw around her and pulled her close— the motion abrupt enough to elicit a squeak of surprise from her. For a moment he didn’t think Rr’an would allow it— a human, so close to him, in that same embrace—

Yet, he said nothing, and for a second that seemed to stretch on forever, he was simply there, amongst them— silently weeping for everything that had been lost.

What a wonderful, terrible existence, theirs.