On the Hills of Eden

“I don’t think we should go back to Sayda,” Pallas said.

The wagon creaked softly underneath them, the horses entirely lax in their slow trek back to the Town Hall. They had no trouble retrieving the Xiafan Blade and tending to Qingxi’s injury, though aside from what had to be done; there was little mood to chat.

Soleiman looked over his shoulder, seeing as Pallas hugged her knees in silence, Rumi doing the finishing touches on Qingxi’s newest bandage.

“We should be fine, Pallas,” he tried reassuring her. “Think about it, why wouldn’t they have just arrested us while we were there, or attacked us with the help of the local guards?”

Pallas took a moment to answer, Soleiman’s attempts at logic doing little to calm the war drums thundering within her.

“What if they do?” She asked. “What if they thought just three of them would’ve been enough, and there’s more of them waiting back there?”

“If they’ve chased us all the way here, then they must know something about what happened in Minlos,” Soleiman countered. “There’s just no reason to target a group of foreign travellers just doing the local government’s errands. They must know us. And they wouldn’t underestimate us, then.”

“...Then what’s happened to the villagers?”

Smoke. Cinder. The smell of the burning corpses of her neighbours drifting into that dark, amber-lit room.

“It’s unlikely anything happened,” Qingxi said. “Like Soleiman said, they wouldn’t underestimate us if they knew the true extent of our involvement with the villagers, so why only send three at once? It’s likely the villagers are fine and the Hashashiyyin just sent out a small dispatch as a precaution after what happened in Minlos.”

“Yeah,” Soleiman said. “And Sayda’s still a Janubi town with Janubi oversight. Given their animosity towards the Ahd and the fact the Hashashiyyin were unwilling to complicate them in that fight at the Cemetery, I doubt they’d be too keen on stationing men there to lie in waiting for us, anyway.”

“We already know that the Janubis are openly willing to side with us against the Hashashiyyin from what happened to Soleiman a week ago," Qingxi added on, thanking Rumi and shuffling forward to sit by Pallas."That must mean that they’re genuinely cautious of a very real possibility that the Janubis may turn on them.”

But fear defied reason.

Powerful as their words may have been, they still weren’t enough to calm her heart.

“Think about the reward-”

“Um, guys,” Rumi interjected.

They all turned around, seeing as she had unsheathed the Xiafan Blade. Lying it flat on her lap, right side up.

“I think something happened to Qingxi’s sword.”

Streaks of black metal now ran down its length, terminating with the wicked, gaping maw of a serpent; cackling victoriously.

Qingxi damn near lunged from where she sat next to Pallas, scurrying along to cradle the sword in her arms, Pallas and Soleiman following closely after her as the horses trundled along.

She lifted the blade closer to her face, then up into the light of the sky above. And sure enough, those streaks were as real as the gash in her forearm. When she ran her fingers along it, she felt nothing. But when she grabbed its hilt and passed a slight current of mana through it, the streaks glowed.

A sinister, blasphemous red.

Rumi chimed in, saying, “I don’t-”

“What the fuck?” Qingxi spat, still staring down the cursemark that writ itself in the steel of her sword. “Soleiman, what is this?”

She turned around exasperatedly, scaring him away slightly as its tip came dangerously close to poking him.

“I- I don’t know! When did it get there? Rumi?”

“After the invocation,” she replied, her voice starting to waver. “I didn’t see it when it picked it up from the corpse, I promise!”

Qingxi said something in Sinitic, and though they couldn’t understand her they knew full well from the fear and the venom and the panic in her voice that it couldn’t have been anything good.

“No,” she said, denying the situation as she looked about aimlessly. As if for an answer. “No, no!”

“Qingxi,” Pallas cut in, putting a hand on her shoulder as she tried to calm her. “Calm down, we can sort this out.”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Soleiman said. “Let’s just slow down and-”

She was inconsolable. And, somehow, that made Pallas just a little less afraid of returning to Sayda.

Dropping the blade onto her lap, Qingxi buried her bandaged face in her palms, with only two of the five fingers on her wounded arm being able to press against her face.

“I shouldn’t have left,” she said, voice broken. Utterly afraid that the one goal her father had entrusted her with had been forever lost. “I need to go back.”

“Qingxi,” Soleiman pleaded, his voice drowned out by her lamentations as Pallas rushed around to try and draw her into an embrace. He looked up briefly, seeing as Rumi had shrunken into a distant corner of the wagon, face tinted with fear and body rife with tension. “Please-”

But fear defied reason.

“I want to see my Mom again.”

She broke. And from the dark stormy clouds above did the rains fall once more. So terrified by the scarlet glow of the serpent, so paranoid that they would not return to that dojo to try a second time, that they fell inconsolably.

The droplets cried out as they crashed against the uncaring dirt, pleading in a foreign tongue neither the hills nor the rivers nor the trees understood. Pleading to see the mountains they once came from, mountains located thousands of kilometres from where they fell.

“Rumi,” Soleiman said, his back still turned to where she was. “Pass me some tissues, please!”

But there came no response.

For the rain terrified Rumi; and all Soleiman turned to see at the back of the wagon were their supplies.

She’d never once feared the rain. But when the cries of falling thunder and rolling lightning reached her ears, they rang within her the bells of the past. They reminded her all too well of the roars of those she’d wronged, of those who had put her to the belt, the cane, and to their hands.

And remembering the pain, the tears and the trauma, she had crawled away. Leaving the terrifying downpour for the safety of the shade. A silent, lonely shade– where there were neither hills nor trees to stand by her; where she waited, letting the rain pass slowly with time.

Deep down, she knew better than to leave the wagon. That it made no sense to simply step out without speaking so much as a word, to do nothing but stand by and watch as it trundled on back to Sayda without her.

But fear defied reason.

And she found herself frozen under that shade, watching helplessly as the rain faded into the distance.

“Rumi!” Soleiman called out, cresting a hill that just barely obscured her from view of the wagon. “Rumi! What are you doing!”

“I…”

He scrambled his way towards her, nearly faceplanting a handful of times in his frantic hurry. He planted his hands against her shoulders, though the burnt remnants that were his right merely pressed against her limply.

“I’m sorry, I-”

He hugged her. Squeezing her for but a brief moment.

“Come on, we gotta go,” he said, holding her right in his left.

“But...” she struggled. "I think I'm scared."

“There’s no need to be,” he insisted. “Qingxi won’t hurt you. No one will hurt you anymore.”

Her gaze dropped to the ground.

“We can walk outside by the wagon if you want,” he said.

And so they did.

Fear defies reason. That much is certain. But what is also certain is that fear is not invincible. It is not unending, nor will it forever stalk you like a phantom through dark, sleepless nights. Because the sky always lights up again. Through warmth and understanding, patience and empathy, the night is beaten back bit by bit. The veil is lifted, inch by inch. And given enough care and love and companionship, it will retreat in almost all its entirety. Then can we see clearly what lies before us, our judgements unclouded and our rationale untainted.

Thus, then, did the party members continue trundling along in their wagon; afraid but not alone. Holding out for the dawn of clarity with naught but a simple candle of compassion.

Later that day, once they’d made a quick trip to the Town Hall and when night began to fall, things finally seemed to settle down to a point where the two siblings could try and figure stuff out. They and the rest of the party had gone through with their nightly routines, though with a distinct lack of conversation throughout the whole thing. Rumi was reclusive, Qingxi was distant, and in the midst of the strife Pallas silenced her fears for the moment to help share the burden of smoothing things out with her brother.

Rumi had already fallen asleep, though this time she slept where Soleiman would. Qingxi had made her some tea specially selected for encouraging sleep, and after fixing the brew for Rumi in silence she had retreated to lonesome meditation just outside the wagon.

This left the two siblings alone on the three beds that took up most of the wagon’s floorspace, where they could discuss in peace.

“Okay okay,” Soleiman said, quietly so as to not disturb either Rumi or Qingxi. “I think I know what happened to Qingxi’s sword.”

“Alright, hit me with it.”

“So I recall that Iblis’ Serpents are like Instruments in their own right,” he said. “Just like Qingxi’s sword and that one weapon the Hashashiyyin had at Minlos.”

“Mhm.”

“And you know how Tinkerers make Instruments by sacrificing a bit of their soul to create a soul puppet, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And how they change these soul puppets to carry out certain algorithms that give the Instrument in question its unique skill?”

“Mmmhm.”

“Well, what makes Iblis’ Serpents unique is that while their soul puppets are made from the fragments of various Tinkerers’ souls,” he said. “Their very vessels– their physical forms– are fragments of his flesh.”

“Which is why they’re snakes?”

“Yes, which is why they’re snakes,” he said. “And when their algorithm is activated by the invocation, as we saw earlier today, they push massive amounts of mana through their physical vessels using the help of their user.”

“Uh… huh.”

“And what this achieves is that it forces the soul puppet of the Instrument to meld to flesh of the Instrument. Something that doesn’t– can never– happen in Instruments made from inanimate objects.”

“So,” Pallas said slowly, organising her thoughts in an effort to follow him. “They meld the puppets to the flesh of… Iblis?”

“Exactly,” Soleiman replied, staring her down. “And when both the flesh and the soul of the Instrument are, in effect, him… he is recreated. Summoned, if you will.”

“Mm,” Pallas hummed. She did not like that thought.

“But,” Soleiman cut in, drawing her attention again. Putting his face even closer to hers. Did he think it would make understanding what he was saying easier?

She didn’t mind, though.

“And this is where Rumi and Qingxi’s blade comes in,” he said. “You remember the snake? It’s face?”

“A little too well.”

“Did you notice anything about its eyes?”

…

“They were covered in… like a lot of sparks?”

“Yes, exactly,” he said. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

“Really?”

“Mhm! If I recall, they’re supposed to just be normal eyes, just like the rest of its body. Except, well, made of fire. Back then, I didn’t know what to make of it, but I think I know now.”

Were its eyes… imperfect? Pallas thought..

“I don’t think it really saw you. That he really saw you,” Soleiman explained. “Because Rumi buried Qingxi’s blade into the invoker’s body the moment the chant was complete, part of the mana the snake would’ve drawn solely from its user also came from the blade– just because of how all three of them were connected in that one moment. What I think happened then, was that the blade’s soul puppet and the snake’s soul puppet both entered into a state of cooperation through the sharing of mana, a collaboration between two simple lifeforms, so to say.”

“They… worked together?”

“Yes!” Soleiman insisted, though he had to quiet himself after he realised he may wake Rumi or disturb Qingxi with his raised voice. “Think of cogs! You move one cog, and the other one connected to it has to move too!”

“Ohh.”

“And when that moment of cooperation happened, Qingxi’s sword’s soul puppet took for itself a part of the influence of Iblis’ flesh. Becoming a little bit like him, and preventing the snake’s soul puppet from carrying out the transformation to completion. And in taking that influence, it gained the cursemark.”

“The sword… became him?”

“Part of him, and part of what would’ve been a part of the fire snake,” he replied. “What part that is, exactly, I’m not sure. But given that the final fire snake lacked eyes, I think we can guess with some certainty what it is.”

Pallas huffed.

“Just listening to you explain all that made me tired,” she said. “Should we tell Qingxi tomorrow?”

“Mm,” he hummed. “Tomorrow sounds good. Let her rest for tonight. And we should try and find a Tinkerer when we get to Hibara Shrine, so we can make sure what exactly happened. And to see if anything bad actually happened to that… change Qingxi said her father made.”

“Alright then,” Pallas replied. She paused for a moment, smiling after a while. “Thank you, Soleiman. I don’t know what I’d have done if not for you.”

“Don’t mention it,” he responded, smiling in turn. “It’s the least I can do for you.”