Memories of the Fall

Contrary to what you may like to believe, and what many among the successor generations would like you to think, the most terrible force to cross in these new enlightened heavens is not the resurgent powers of the Ancient Regime, nor is it the lofty ivory towers of the Orthodox Conclave. It is not the old powers of the Southern Continent, nor the Elves in their island fortresses. Not even the Holy Empire, the power rising to the zenith in this era of enlightenment with its boot pressed firmly on the neck of earthly judgement, or the Imperial Commonwealth with their principles of rational thought and scholarly endeavour backed up by myriad legions and ancient lore, truly stand at the apex of vengeance, despite what recent history might have you think. Rather, that crown has never changed hands, simply shifted form. In this new era, when the Pagan yoke had finally foundered and the heretics of yore are finally dispersed, it is all too easy to believe that Death is now in the hands of more enlightened beings.

It is not. Before those blessed lands were a sanctuary, they were a prison. Before they were a prison, they were a grave. The followers of the Merciful Lord tell you that only through death and service to their lord can you be saved. The Imperial Commonwealth says that the measure of your actions in this life give you longevity beyond your mortal span. They sell those promises without care, and the common man accepts it. Accepts it because this lie is comforting. In truth, while the old orders fell at the close of the Heroic Age, and those at the apex tell you that the world is now free of its chains... The Eternal City still endures, ruled by its elected Triumvirs, its great temples to the powers of old having escaped the greedy eyes of newer promises. So it is at your peril that you should neglect her eyes and the values she holds. For Spring and Autumn walks in all eras, and no matter how enlightened the priests and prophets, scholars and sages claim we are, no one, no Mortal Hero, no Vengeful Tyrant nor Heavenly Emperor, no Golden God or Bloody Devil has yet wrested those golden fields and mythical torrents from her mourning hands.

Excerpt from ‘The Lingering Darkness’

~by Caius von Lonhafven

~ Arai & Sana – The Perilous Realm ~

After some brief checking off of the usual things, such as where the ‘consistent points’ in the landscape had moved to, they set off for the ruin of the academy at a gentle stroll. Arai paused to snag some wild apples off a branch and tossed one to her sister.

“So…. erm…”

“I am still not sure what the fates we saw,” Sana muttered.

“Me neither, half of it is fuzzy and the other half is more like a waking nightmare,” she agreed.

“At least we can still wander about, even if we seem to be back to deserted land,” Sana mused.

“True…”

“Everything after the sword is fuzzy… I remember two parties fighting, but it’s like the fog of a dream,” Sana muttered.

“Yeah… it was clear in the moment but now we have awoken, it’s like trying to grasp morning mist in your hands.”

“At least this time we aren't stuck in a two by two valley and the weird mists that bar progress haven’t returned with this new change. That collapse was…”

“Kind of complete?” her sister said quietly.

“What about… what we saw outside of it.”

“That I can, unfortunately, remember just fine,” her sister said, taking another bite out of her own apple with some venom.

They walked on in silence, in the crisp autumn morning. The smells and sounds of the forest around them were calming, she found, after the havoc they had experienced just a short time previously.

“I wonder why we skipped summer,” Sana mused.

“Who knows what logic exists in the depths of this ever-changing hell,” she replied, scuffing the leaves on the track.

“True...” Sana plucked a flower from the side of the path and started to pluck its petals idly as they walked. “Time has been…. I’m going to be charitable here and say, inconsistent.”

Sana finished munching her apple and hurled the core into the far distance. Moments later, a squirrel bounded down a tree and grabbed it.

In the end, it took about an hour to walk up through the wooded valley and arrive at the rickety sign welcoming neophytes who had made it through the ‘perilous realm’. It was largely as she remembered it and apart from a few gaps and burnt trees here and there seemed to have largely escaped whatever unfolded, but neither she nor Sana had any interest in going and poking around out there. The shadows in the forest had a faint aura of sadness that hadn’t been there before. It made her uneasy in ways she couldn’t really quantify.

“I wonder if the person who made that sign had any idea of what this place would un-ironically be like at some undiscoverable later time…” Sana said, giving it a look.

“Hah.” She laughed. “True.”

“So… are we sure this is a good idea?” Sana said eventually, eyeing the walls ahead of them.

“Well, we have basically gone everywhere else.” She quipped drily.

“Score one for Dao Father Obvious,” her sister said, “However… have a look at the walls.”

“Mmm,” she nodded and pushed qi into her vision to view the walls properly.

“Oh.”

“Yeah...” Sana said dully.

“That’s… a lot of…” was all she could say in the end.

“It is, isn’t it,” Sana confirmed with a neutral tone that implied she was keeping a very tight grip on her nervousness.

What flickered before her was some impossible jigsaw puzzle of sparkling wards, screaming half forms of people and weird discombobulated shapes that seemed to hurt her inside just by looking at them. The space between them and the wall was riddled with black cracks and faintly twisting shapes. Stepping to the side, she saw those shapes were also people, but flat, barely visible unless you looked at them from just the right angle. Following the wall into the trees, looking at the gaps…

“I think we don’t go through any gaps,” she said after a long pause.

“Score two for Sister Obvious,” Sana retorted with a levity that was clearly forced.

It was the lack of anything at all that made the hair on her neck stand on end. The absence was almost oppressive. It felt like a lure trying to pull her in, baiting her with false assurances that yes, those spaces were totally safe and of course she could just walk in as if nothing was there.

Unbidden, the symbol shifted slightly in her mind’s eye in a way that only reinforced her gut feeling, honed by years of surviving in the High Valleys, that those gaps were dangerous.

“Do you also feel that really unnerving pull towards the gap 20 metres to our left?” her sister asked after a moment.

“Yes,” she replied simply, “the symbol also gives me the impression that walking through that is death without a grave.”

“Funny, so does mine,” Sana gulped nervously.

“So… what do we do?” she said after a further moment of staring around.

“Why do you ask me?” Sana sulked.

“Because it was your suggestion to come here first?” she pointed out.

It was a bit childish but those flat figures had her spooked in ways that…well, they reminded her of the ‘Stopping Pit’ on the edge of the Outer Valleys. A preposterously dangerous wandering spatial and temporal anomaly that drifted around the forest valleys to the north of West Flower Picking Town.

“Yeah, I deserved that,” Sana said with a sigh.

“The path to the door seems fine though, and aside from the flickering shades to the left and right, the area here seems… to not have the same ominous aura?”

“That’s relative,” she pointed out.

They both pondered the gate, with its stretch of apparently undamaged wards. Warily, she searched around and found a sturdy branch that was mostly straight. Taking aim at it, she rather nervously tossed it across the open space to the door, getting ready to run at the first sign of anything weird. It hit the door with a *clunk* that shook some paint off of it and rattled the hinges, but that was about it.

“Well, that wasn’t conclusive,” Sana said warily.

“Your turn,” she said, casting around for another branch.

The next few minutes were spent very nervously looking to see if it was possible to get to the door safely. In the end, their paranoia turned out to be unfounded. It was possible to walk right up to it and even touch it. The door refused to budge from any kind of minor qi manipulation though, so in the end they threw rocks and finally poked it with a long branch to knock it open. The ensuing opening was a perfectly normal, arched gate through the wall, revealing a leaf-strewn courtyard beyond. There was no ominous intent or strange draw to it, but she was still sweating as they both stepped through it.

The courtyard within would have been impressive once. It still was in many respects, but now it was dilapidated and overgrown. Turning around to look at the buildings, however…

“…”

Noticing her mute shock, her sister also turned and they both stared blankly at the courtyard behind them. There was no sign of the wall or the door they had just come through. Behind them rose a large building with obvious antiquity etched into its dark stones. Closing her eyes, she focused on her memory of the courtyard beyond the gate and then looked around at the plaza they were in. They were now patently no longer the same but at no point could she recall when they actually changed places… except maybe when she turned around?

“By the Deviant Fates,” her sister hissed under her breath at last.

“Quite,” she agreed.

Looking around, the season was unchanged, but the damage was really very odd. It had both a feeling of being quite old, yet visually appeared to have been caused mere hours or perhaps even minutes before. Smoke stains still lingered on stonework now covered in creepers in autumnal colours. Melted holes in facades were as if they had cooled mere moments before, but the vegetation was incongruously starting to grow through gaps around them. The cuts on sheered columns were fresh and pale and fabric from a flag snared on one fallen column was still colourful, albeit very badly singed, despite the column now being claimed by an overflowing flowerbed.

In short, the vegetation had overgrown the courtyard like a maze. Given the climate, it could be a year’s growth at least, or maybe two. She tried to grasp the season in the battle that had seemed like a nightmare, she thought spring, but definitive recollection eluded her. Flowerbeds that lined the plaza were broken open, their soil scattered across the ground, now containing fading wildflowers and shrubs dropping their leaves. Small shrubs had grown into grassy banks with gnarled trees and wild herbs that thrived in this season, firmly rooted into the shattered ground of the plaza itself. Seeing that, she revised her earlier estimate even as Sana finally commented on the trees.

“Uh… what exactly is going on with the vegetation in here?”

She considered the trees as well, having studiously avoided them so far. Where they had not been clearly smashed by fire, or severed by other damage, trees were growing tall and strong. Far taller than anyone would ever permit in a place as well laid out as this. Many were spreading their canopies almost as high as the surrounding buildings, branches working into windows and smaller ones on openings. Fruit hung from some of them, and their leaves were a sea of riotous autumnal colours; bronze, yellow, green, orange and golden red.

Wordlessly, she scuffed the ground. The leaves on it were over her ankles. Picking up a handful, she let them run through her fingers.

“No decay,” Sana said, noting her action.

“Indeed, no decay,” she agreed, turning back to the ground.

Picking up a fruit from one of the trees that just happened to lie by her feat, a plum of some kind, she dubiously tasted it. It was a spirit fruit, which was surprising enough. Even more surprising was that it was a genuine one and it behaved entirely normally.

“If there is no decay, yet these are just fine, why is this place not covered in fruit?” she wondered out loud.

“There are a lot of leaves, but not enough to account for the growth of the trees over what they were previously as well,” Sana said, craning her neck to look up at a nearby one.

“Or they shed their leaves very slowly?” she pointed out. “Several of the shrubs have almost shed all their foliage, yet the trees responsible are all still in full leaf?”

“Mmm, it doesn’t seem like that,” Sana said.

Looking around at the rest of the plaza, she had to agree. Indeed, it didn’t seem like that, although the reason for that intuition escaped her. Rather than worry about it, she turned her attention to the rest of the plaza.

Statues lined the edges. Most were smashed beyond recognition. The damage was fresh, as if it had been done mere hours earlier. Walking up to one, she ran her hands across the rent that had split it in two. The rock was crisp and unweathered beneath her hands, its grain still fresh and pale. Looking around, she noted that most had lost heads, many arms as well. Quite a few had been tipped over, their bodies broken up into head-sized chunks, scattered and barely visible except where they lay in sheltered spots into which leaves had not drifted.

“I find it disconcerting how the ones that have suffered the most brutal disfigurement are the women and men wearing armour or robes,” Sana said, coming over to stand beside her.

“Yeah,” she ran her fingers across the base of one. The inscription had been eradicated.

“Whoever did this, it was like they were smashing up an evil cult or something,” her sister added, taking in the rest of the ruin.

“Well, except for those two,” she noted, gesturing at two statues that stood at the far end of the plaza before a grand looking building with a lot of columns in a strange style.

One was of a grand looking youth wearing a spikey headpiece and gesturing in a grand fashion. Beneath it were words in various scripts. The line in Easten read ‘Edward Everkind Lothring, 9th Duke Elector of Lothringrad’, another was of a stately man in grand robes and a breastplate. He was holding a scroll and some kind of ruler rod in a weird design. His inscription read ‘Herman Lucius Marcellus Karsten, 6th Grand Duke of Karsten’.

“I wonder why these two are undamaged?” she mused.

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” her sister muttered, leaning against it and again looking around the plaza. “Maybe the people who trashed this place had some respect for them, but not the others?”

“Seems weird, though. They really trashed this place; if there was such a degree of disagreement why would they have statues to people they hate?”

“Maybe they belonged to a third party or something, like a sect or a power that both sides had some friendship with?” Sana said speculatively. “Remember how complex all that stuff they were talking about between Duchies and wars and powers was in the beach conversations?”

“Yeah, that’s probably it,” she agreed. “If this is a different era… or some other world that’s trapped in here somehow, what does it even mean to us?”

She turned around to take the ruined courtyard in once again “Well, whoever went through this place seemed intent on wiping out all traces of these people. The aura is actually quite unsettling now that I think about it.”

Shaking her head, she stepped around the statue and considered the doors behind. They were closed tight and gave her a slightly uneasy feeling, so instead, she walked across, beyond the line of trees, and peered through one of the open ones into a further courtyard, again strewn with leaves. The buildings here had been smashed open.

“This place would have been beautiful before it was destroyed…” Sana murmured, walking up the nearby steps to peer into one of the open doorways.

“Looted to within a hair’s width of its existence as well.”

Nodding, she turned and something odd caught her foot in the leaves. Pausing, she reached down, picked it up and stared at it. In her hand was a long bone, half a leg bone if she was right, charred grey-white from extreme fire. Looking around, she scuffed the ground. Something cracked beneath her foot, under the leaves. Sweeping them aside, she realised she had just trodden on what appeared to be some ribs. Frowning, she cleared aside more leaves and eventually uncovered half a skeleton, somewhat disarticulated and sprawled on its side in a large scar of grass that was still burnt.

A slow chill that had nothing to do with the flat autumn sunlight settled over her as she considered this courtyard again, her eyes somehow drawn to odd lumps and divots, the weird depression to her left that was hidden in some rambling shrubs, the strange drifts of leaves against the buildings at the end. Mechanically, she walked over and pushed a plant aside from the edge of the depression in what had once been a grassy lawn or similar. It was deeply flooded with leaves, but she still kicked a few away and uncovered-

“FATES’ CURSED—!” she stumbled back up the small slope and sat down in the leaves as Sana came trotting over at her shout.

They both stared at the pallid face, staring back amid the reddish-gold drift.

“Oh….” Her sister looked uneasily about. “Oh dear… what exactly happened to this place?” Her voice sounded strained amidst the rustling autumnal breeze.

Nervous now, they cleared away more leaves after taking a moment to compose themselves. It took about twenty minutes and was rather grim work, but finally, they had half the crater largely exposed. As she had very morbidly expected it was carpeted in bodies. If the rest of it was the same there should be almost thirty in here, she estimated, in various degrees of bodily dismemberment.

The corpses looked as if they were only hours old, just like the damage. Many wore robes of various kinds. Most were aged around fifteen to twenty based on their physical appearance, but if they aged like cultivators, who was to say. Many were missing limbs, several missing heads. Severed heads had been thrown on one side, which was what she had found.

Gingerly, she reached down and found she could pick it up. Blood was no longer flowing from the bearded young man’s neck, but the skin, while cool to touch, was not the icy cold of a corpse more than hours dead. All around, she realised the earth of the crater was stained with gore. Wordlessly Sana poked the ground, her fingers coming back reddish. Without speaking, they re-covered the mass grave with leaves and turned to consider a nearby drift of leaves.

…

In the end, they found roughly eighty corpses strewn throughout the courtyard and as many again in the buildings. Those in the courtyard appeared to have been gathered up and tossed into piles. They mostly stopped looking at or in the buildings after the first few. She was not squeamish, but somehow the individual stripped, mutilated or tortured bodies scattered through rooms made her skin crawl even more than the charnel yard outside. All appeared to be civilians and had died in horrible ways. Strangulation, dismemberment, disembowelment or various elemental themes: burning, freezing, acidic corrosion and more. Both men and women showed signs of defilement or debasement before and after death. That was about the point when they stopped seriously exploring and returned to the courtyard.

Standing in the sunlight, she thought of those uneasy memories from before the collapse of the village that had been piled high with distant corpses, hanging bodies and the pall of smoke. Of the soldiers who had seen them with bloody blades. The memories after hearing that immense shout of ‘die’ and before everything started to collapse were still vexingly vague, but it was clear that this place perished in warfare.

“Do you think we are in the city we saw in the distance?” Sana said quietly.

“I think that’s a fair bet, somehow,” she agreed. “This place perished in slaughter.”

“And yet, beyond the visual and material horror, there is little sense of it in the aura?” Sana exhaled, sounding nervous.

“Well, there is certainly a sense of death and dread here…” she pointed out.

“But this kind of slaughter should have spawned death qi or, left unattended like this, wouldn’t there be vengeful—?”

“Yeah, let’s not go there?” she said equally nervous now.

“Even before that, before we started uncovering them, all you could say was that this place felt a bit off,” her sister said still looking around uneasily.

Her sister was right, she had to concede as they made their way back to the courtyard. The feeling of this place was strange – muted, almost. Now that she really looked, she could still feel the presence of death and slaughter. Morbidly curious, she walked over to the pool and swept away the leaves on the surface. The water beneath was dark, stained with blood. In the depths was the head of a humanoid-looking person with grey skin and horns on their head reminiscent of a deer. Looking around, she realised the body had fallen just beside it, a metre to her right, the bloodstains on the paving still reasonably fresh.

“Another beast kin?” Sana said edgily, squatting down to look at it.

“Maybe. I was thinking some kind of demon kin actually, given it’s only got horns, and the grey skin,” she guessed. “It’s very different from the others though.”

Sana rolled her eyes, but her heart clearly wasn’t in it in this sombre and unsettling place. Most of the dead were like them, though. They had found several already who had pointy ears or looked a bit different, but such mutations existed outside as well, usually suggesting some ancestry with a mysterious being or a hint of some ascendant qi beast. There had even been several with ears of various animals, limbs with fur like cats, or eyes that were more reminiscent of wild beasts in spite of looking like mortals in every other respect. They had been among some of the most brutally defaced and defiled as well.

Sana said eventually, “Even in this other time and place, beast kin are still among the most disliked, it seems…”

“Although not to the people of this place it seems.”

“Well, shall we? I don’t feel like loitering in this graveyard,” she said after some further consideration.

Sana nodded silently and stood up.

Both of them stared back at the grey-skinned warrior a final time before making their departure. Individuals with minor traits of Demon or qi beast origin were not... uncommon in the Blue Water Province, but they were mainly travelling traders or mercenary groups from further east. The Bureau Authority of the region tolerated them but did not give them much influence. However, the Blue Morality Scripture favoured by those from the Imperial Continent named them abominations and gave them few rights in any land where it held proper sway. Frequently they were kept as bound servants, house guards or, among particularly unsavoury clans, slaves, but only nobility in Blue Water province made life difficult for them. Given they made life difficult for everyone that was not a very high bar of discrimination to overcome, she mused as they made their way out of the plaza, leaving the other drifts of leaves and buildings undisturbed.

The tree-lined street they entered, leading up the hill, was just as torn up it turned out. Devastation stretched in all directions, barely disguised now amid the drifting leaves. To her right was an overturned cart with armoured bodies piled up in it. Shopfronts were smashed and burnt, their wares tumbled across the ground. Much of it appeared to have been hit by some kind of rotting disease, she noted, which just added to the weirdness. A swathe of armoured figures, their skin decayed and putrid, were scattered across the far side of the street, almost hidden amid grass bursting out unnaturally from the paving of the street.

“Why is there grass growing out of the pavements?” Sana said, bending down to pluck some of it. “It’s almost like the vegetation that is grown here is in spite of the presence of the town?”

“Huh, now that you mention it…” she turned in a circle, considering Sana’s words.

“I mean, it’s been bothering me since we started looking at the bodies. Call it displacement activity or whatever, to distract from the circumstances, but this place could have been destroyed an hour ago?” Sana went on, studiously avoiding looking at the corpses.

“And the weird destruction of these fruit stands and the other produce in the shopfronts that are left here just further cements that. The only thing that’s growing here are the plants, but when they ‘shed’ anything, what if… they also get caught up in whatever is stopping everything else decaying?”

“It’s as good a theory as any,” she agreed, still considering the rotten fruit.

“It’s also fate-thrashed weird that while there is slaughtering intent and death qi and all sorts of unpleasantness permeating this place… it's far too muted? Almost like it’s sealed away, or separated from the world somehow?”

“Or… we are not quite in this place?” she suggested.

“Or that,” her sister said a touch less confidently, running a hand through her hair.

As they walked on, there was no let-up in the devastation. The rotting of produce even extended to some corpses’ clothes, wood on store fronts and plants in planters. It made the juxtaposition to healthy vegetation growing rampantly through things all the weirder. They avoided looking at the corpses nailed to some shop fronts. Just like before, all of them were badly mutilated. Several also showed visible signs of abominable debasement. It was a crude and disgusting reminder of how inhumane people could be to ‘others’, she thought with a shudder. Even worse was the aura which, now she was properly looking for it, was not as subtle as it first seemed. It permeated everything but it wasn’t madness, or hunger… or even really fury; instead, it held a sort of lingering sense of righteousness. As if whoever had inflicted all this torment had believed they were doing a good thing. That the people of this place had deserved this horrific fate meted out to them in some way. To her, it felt inexplicable, inconceivable even.

-How could you hate someone or something this much? She thought as she stared at a fountain, festooned with children like they were garlands of flowers.

It was only the unreality of the situation and pushing all the unease into her mantra that was stopping her from going somewhere and vomiting in disgust, or simply crouching down and weeping on their behalf. The symbol in her mind’s eye was also sending her subtle impressions that it too was deeply disgusted with this whole scene. She could tell that Sana, walking just ahead of her, was equally disturbed. Her sister’s body language was hunched and twitchy, eyeing alleys and not focusing on any one thing too much.

Finally turning the corner of the boulevard of carnage, they found the first of the obvious dead belonging to the attackers. They might actually have passed it by were the scene not so totally incongruous. Scattered street goods and even corpses on the ground had been caught in a jagged splash of petrification that split most of the street. Within it, half a dozen armoured soldiers were forever preserved in various acts of attacking a lone robed youth in the process of throwing away a crate of apples while two younger children cowered behind him.

“Well, that puts a different bent on the casualty ratios in this place,” Sana said dully.

“It does somewhat, doesn’t it?” she said, looking back down the street.

“So most of the armoured figures we saw in the courtyard that had been lined up at one side, near the undamaged statues, were attackers based on this…”

“And those in the cart and the group that were half-rotted away in the street."

"…"

Sana looked about. “They must have been starting to collect their dead when whatever... happened... happened.”

As they progressed onwards – a bit more rapidly, as such tableaus of carnage were not uncommon – Sana grabbed her arm and pointed up one of the side thoroughfares just ahead of them.

“Check that out…”

She considered it, pensively agreeing with her sister’s unspoken sentiment. “Yeah… that’s some seriously inauspicious formation work.”

In her vision, it was almost bleeding out into the street. A wall of seething intent that became several times stronger, now she focused on it directly. Walking forward, staying on the other side of the street, they considered the avenue heading off it. Looking along that avenue, the intent that was directed towards the attackers was so malevolent that it made her skin prickle to the point she had to check it wasn’t drawing blood.

The entire thoroughfare was solidified in a way that seemed to exceed the simple idea of being frozen. With it came a pricking cold that almost seemed to break the space itself, although it didn’t appear to radiate.

“Well, that’s definitely not a place we are going,” she said after a long moment.

“Uhuh,” Sana agreed, making no attempt to hide her unease now.

If they walked in there, she was certain they would die almost immediately, just based on this deep, freezing intent that lingered on, even after the death of the person who had manifested it.

The pointy-eared old man, who was the source of the chill feeling, was like a bottomless void the longer she looked at him. It was almost like there was some point behind or maybe even within him that drew her gaze and made it hard to focus upon his form directly. Even so, she could make out that he was dressed in a dark grey and green robe, similar to that worn by the women at the beach, with a leaf mail shirt just visible beneath it.

The deeply unsettling and ominous tableau was locked at the point he was slamming a spear staff into the ground. From what she could determine, this action appeared to be the origin of the cold wave. Finally tearing her eyes away from the strange draw on ‘him’, she noted the familiar black ‘cracks’ radiating outward from the impact point of the staff on the ground. At his feet was a green-robed woman. It was hard to say whether she would have been alive or dead at the point everything was locked in this moment, however, she was rather obviously impaled through the stomach with a Jian-like sword, holding a broken talisman in her hand.

Shuddering, she turned her attention to the rest of the scene. Over twenty soldiers in various degrees of integrity and a few men and women in ostentatious robes, all robbed of their colour, were also trapped within the field and the wave of intent that was sweeping out beyond it.

Some had started putting some kind of formation around it, their desperate attempt to constrain what was certainly some kind of spatial art now also frozen as well. Buildings on either side of the street were shedding masonry subtly. There was a subtle ripple through the faces that seemed, to her at least, to centre on the old man and roughly tally up with the spread of the freezing intent.

“Do you reckon the youth is the cause of all this?” Sana asked.

“Youth?” she redirected her gaze to the tableau and finally saw who her sister was talking about.

The youth in question was dressed in fancy armour and had the kind of ostentatious air about him that immediately screamed ‘young master’. She hadn’t noticed him before, she guessed because he was stumbling back and only a few feet from the old man. Everything there was hard to focus on as the eye was continually drawn to the black cracks and the sight-devouring corona around the old man. His expression was certainly interesting, frozen somewhere between shock and confusion as he reeled backwards. The look in his eyes suggested a certain lack of comprehension regarding his own imminent demise. Several black cracks ran through his body, shifting it into three pieces that drifted slightly out of focus if she moved her gaze too quickly.

Another soldier behind him had an orb of some kind out and was in the process of doing something to it. Others were running, cowering in terror, some were even attacking, their eyes filled with dead desperation. Beyond the edge of this, other details of the street now started to sink in. People on the ground were not corpses, but also frozen in sprawls or in the midst of diving for cover. On the far edge, several soldiers were dragging a half-clothed young woman from a house by her hair, their act of attempted debasement forever sealed within this place.

“Whatever the blind fates permitted to happen here evidently pissed off somebody,” Sana muttered.

“Yeah… let’s move on... Just looking at this makes me feel like I’m looking at a cursed ancestral tablet,” she shivered, trying not to think about the expression on the young woman’s face.

Leaving that place of horror, they had to stand in the sunlight in the main street just looking at the sky for a while. In the moment it was easy to be dispassionate, but this place was… she didn’t have words for it she realised. It was only her mantra that was allowing her to be this composed, she was certain, under the torment and mental strain from things like blood ling trees or… far too many things really, now that she thought about it.

Making their way onwards, other such incidences became more common. Another street was consumed with still-flickering flame, boiling out of a building in the process of exploding outwards. Dozens of armoured men and women, frozen forever in the process of being half burnt to death. That was still nothing to the plaza they entered.

“Well this mostly answers whether or not the freezing effect touches everything,” she said eventually as they stood there, observing with horror the scene before them.

In the shadow of the tall buildings that surrounded the plaza, hundreds of armoured men, men and women in robes, both plain and ostentatious, were frozen in death. The ones closest to the edge of the plaza were still falling, while the ones in the middle seemed to have all fallen before the effect took hold. At the very heart of the plaza, on a raised dais, was… She focused hard on it, wrestling with some strange intent that was making her eyes skitter away, and determined eventually that it was a spear... no, a staff? It was impaling a large man who was standing on the dais to a stone stele behind him. His red and purple robes seemed vaguely familiar to her in some inexplicable way, probably because all the ostentatious jewellery and brocade suggested power and wealth.

The staff itself was a simple thing of dark wood and black metal two metres in length. One end was a ring that held several tassels and rings, a series of golden bells and one larger, fist-sized copper-coloured bell. The other was a dull black blade some forty centimetres long that was sunk into the stele, impaling the villain. It put her somewhat in mind of the staffs that wandering Buddhists sometimes carried as a symbol of authority.

There was no evidence of who threw it, but the reason was pretty clear from their vantage point. There were a dozen headless, naked, chained corpses of men and women in the square before the red and purple-robed… she decided on the spot to just think of him as ‘The Villain’. It was a pretty accurate descriptor in the context. Another individual in white robes with red trim, in the process of collecting one of the heads, that of a blonde woman it seemed at this distance, was forever frozen in the act of handing it to an armoured youth to put on a spike.

“How truly barbaric,” Sana muttered, holding her arms and shuddering. “The folk we saw in the valley all seemed like nice, normal people… why would someone censure this place like this?”

She didn’t really know what to say other than to nod in agreement. It was truly an act devoid of the civilised ideals of the wise sages that their father had often spoken of to them. Turning away, she was about to suggest they move on around the edge of the plaza and just leave this place well alone when something caught her eye in the changing light as some clouds covered the sun.

Around the nearest corpse, frozen in the act of falling backwards, trying to push something away and making a sign of some kind, was a faint distortion. Frowning, she looked at it more closely, stepping sideways to try to get a better angle on it without approaching. They almost looked like misty grey flames? Within them was a strange and ominous sense of oppression. The longer she looked, the more uneasy she began to feel, as if some part of her was being drawn away.

With a hiss, she diverted her gaze. In the process, she now noted that most of the other figures near them had similar, near-invisible distortions around them.

“Do you see the flames around them?” she asked after a long pause.

“…” there was silence as Sana considered a nearby corpse before nodding.

“That is a very unpleasant feeling that goes with it,” her sister said eventually.

“It is,” she agreed.

“I don’t recall seeing them before…”

“Hmm…” Sana frowned, looking up at the now somewhat overcast autumnal sky.

She followed her gaze to consider the approximate position of the hidden sun which had moved around in the heavens. It had been mid-morning when they entered, it should now be well past noon.

“Because the light has shifted?” she wondered.

“And the last few were all frozen fires and the like,” Sana mused.

Wordlessly they turned to look at the nearest pile of corpses, dumped at the edge of the square. They also had the same shimmering distortion around them.

“So that is what is causing the freezing effect that’s keeping everything as it is?” she asked, as much to herself as Sana.

Her sister gulped and nodded slowly, looking around again. “It might well be, but if that is the case, at least it doesn’t seem to affect us, not obviously at any rate.”

That was true, thankfully. They had passed well within range of corpses that had the distortion until just now, when the light subtly changed. She looked again around the plaza with its ruined fronts and frozen carnage, seeking some alternative or additional information, but none was apparent.

“This thing…” Sana turned to look back at the weapon, “Is it actually a mystic weapon?”

She considered what little she knew of mystic weapons, those above the Immortal Step at any rate, and their capabilities in their own Great World. It was impossible to tell if there was even suppression in this place, now that she thought about it. She had just assumed there was, but… at their current realm there was nothing functionally hindering her cultivation beyond the oppressive auras of this place.

“I… think it should be stronger,” she eventually ventured, thinking of the weapon Elaria had been swinging all of a sudden.

“This other place should be a remnant of a higher world, I get the impression that at its height it was a much more formidable place than our own Eastern Azure Great World. An Immortal weapon could level a mortal city, but these people are clearly all cultivators or this world’s equivalent of that. Not to mention, in a city this size, there should be some very powerful ones…”

“So a Dao weapon….” her sister muttered, fear finally creeping into her voice.

Without comment, she put an arm around her and gave her a hug of solidarity. She was just as terrified, really, and probably not hiding it any better. However, all they could do was move forward and search for a way out of this mass grave of a metropolis.

“Probably,” she went on. “We know that this school was powerful and had a great history. This city is likely the same. Its protectors should have been terrifying old ancestors, at the very least comparable to those who watch the Bureau’s and the Duke’s Estates in Blue Water City. People who wrestle with the fates to try to ascend.”

“Yeah… not helping…” Her sister muttered.

“Sorry, I guess what I am saying is that it stands to reason that the treasures defending here would be exceptional. Perhaps that spear-staff was one of them?”

“Yeah, but suggesting we are walking around a battlefield…”

“But we are...” she felt compelled to point out.

“…”

“Shut up,” Sana elbowed her in the sigh.

“… Okay,” she admitted, defeated in this.

“So what… do we try to backtrack? And look for a way around? Or try climbing over the buildings?”

They both stood there silently surveying the square. Without going through it, their progress was properly stymied. They had arrived here mostly by process of meandering elimination of other paths leading off the main street.

“Huh, that’s kinda weird,” Sana said suddenly.

“What is?” she turned to see where her sister was looking, which turned out to be up at the rooftops.

Low fog was swirling across the city rooftops. She wondered how she hadn’t noticed it before… until the sun peeked through the clouds once more and the light shifted subtly again. The mist was gone.

“…”

Wordlessly she turned to look at the same falling figures, just on the other side of the subtle wall of ‘intention’ radiating out from the square, that had stopped them. The scattered little flames were gone and there was no sign of any strange distortion.

“Right….” Sana said dully. “That’s not good.”

“Or maybe it’s a sign we have been overthinking things,” she muttered, looking back the way they came.

“Humour me, shall we backtrack when the sun vanishes again?” she said, still thinking through her proposed action.

From what she could see, the flames and the distortion had only been revealed with the sun being shrouded in the low cloud. Given that the mists had always provided an impenetrable barrier to their traversal, she was erring towards it not really being a cloud, but something more like a visible representation of the instability of the boundaries in this place. Akin to the walls in a formation maze, maybe?

After a few moments, the sun went away again and the shadows returned, the mist and the distortions swirling faintly. Walking back down the street, they only had to go a few hundred metres before her suspicions were confirmed.

“We walked across those, didn’t we,” she said, pointing to the scattered pile of bodies cut down in the street.

“…”

“Monkeyshit, we did, didn’t we,” her sister confirmed, considering the shifting mass of distortion fields and occasional bits of greyish-white, almost invisible fire.

What was more important, was that that same ominous intent that was practically a wall in the plaza was here, much more subtly... like pools? Not around the corpses, but around the frozen attackers, as if it were targeted very specifically at them.

“The intent is only focused on the attackers,” Sana said eventually. “Also, is it my imagination or is the grey fire really only focused on them as well?”

“Yes.”

Looking around, her sister’s observation there was in fact spot on. The few flickering flames that were amid the dead on the ground before them were associated with a few individuals in white robes with red and gold trim. One had been shot in the head with an arrow, another just had a hole where their heart should be. The obvious conclusion was that they had been standing here, in the middle of this swathe of corpses, when someone assassinated them.

“Not to mention,” she added. “If we were going to be affected by the freezing or the weird fire, it should have gotten us here, or probably any number of other places we never noticed it, walking along in the sun. Where we detected nothing.”

“As far as we know,” her sister said stubbornly. “For all we know, it might be harmless in the sun and dangerous now.”

“Yes… but in spite of all the unsettling auras and horror here… have you gotten any sense of ill intention directed at us from anything?” she went on.

“…”

“It struck me before, but what if this is almost like a living painting or a diorama preserved by formation, akin to our recordings with the scrips?”

“We are stuck in a painting?” Sana said flatly. “You’re just full of wonderful ideas right now, sis.”

“I mean… I thought about this before, but what if much of this place… isn’t really real?”

“What we saw when we were sat on the tree,” Sana said eventually.

“Yes, what if this is like a painting, or a series of moments, anchored around those points in some subtle way? The structure remains the same and the broad details never change, but the moments they reflect… do?”

“I feel beholden to quote; you speak some words but what do you know?” Sana said with a faint smile.

“And I exercise my sisterly right to poke you in the ribs for being a tit,” she added, doing just that.

“Well… yeah, but still…” Sana sighed. “I know; I’ve actually been thinking something similar, it’s just. This place… just… it’s creepy as anything.”

Sana took a moment to gather herself, then went on. “So, your rationale is that we can eat the food, pluck the plants, dig holes in the earth, even vaguely make people notice us – except for that one freaky moment – but we are somehow like bystanders to this in some subtle way?”

She nearly jumped vertically in the air as the symbol in her mind’s eye sent a short implication of wry applause.

“Are you… okay?” Sana asked.

“Uhuh… yes. My... Uh… symbol agrees with you, it seems.”

“So… what, we test this?”

“It’s that or try to wait out a gap in the cloud for long enough to run across,” she said.

They both stared at the now leaden afternoon sky. The blue was fleeing for the horizon.

“If it looks like this in overcast weather, I suddenly don’t want to be out here at night,” Sana said finally.

“…”

-No, me neither, she agreed to herself.

A few minutes later they were stood back at the edge of the plaza. Steeling herself, she stepped into the plaza, through the subtle shift in the density of the freezing. Nothing at all happened, beyond the symbol shifting subtly in her head, as if considering her surroundings for itself a bit more actively than usual.

“Well, that seems… anti-climactic,” Sana said eventually, looking around.

“I’m all for anti-climactic,” she said drily.

Experimentally, she poked a running figure. It was like touching a statue. Suddenly curious, she reached down and picked up a piece of masonry, which was fine. A short while later they had accrued a rather mind-boggling list of stuff that was movable. Bricks, ruined paving, plants in the planters that remained, a cartwheel, all could be interacted with. On the other hand, they had no luck with discarded weapons or anything associated with the people fleeing the square. The closer they got to the hybrid staff, the more obvious the grey flames became. Now they were like little coronas around the corpses.

“None of the dead belonging to the city seem to have grey flames here, either,” Sana noted, eyeing the piles of corpses. “I wonder what they are?”

“They kind of make me uneasy, like I want to forget seeing them,” she noted.

She nearly walked into Sana as she stopped dead in front of her.

“That one,” her sister pointed at the last ‘corpse’ on the dais ahead of them, where the ‘Villain’ stood frozen.

The young woman was… somewhat familiar for some reason, slumped as she was, with her arms bound. She still had her head, having been stabbed downwards through the shoulder. The armoured man holding the sword had a look of abject horror on his face, the sword in his hand melted and twisted. Now that she looked closer, his arms were also dispersing outwards weirdly with red mist around them, as if he was in the process of dissolving as well.

“Isn’t that…” Sana said dully.

Taking a few steps forward, she finally got the perspective to look at the woman’s face, framed in curly golden-brown hair, and felt genuinely ill for the first time, even with her mantra helping keep her emotions in check.

Marcella’s expression was... she wanted to say calm, but resigned might be closer to the reality of it. However, her eyes held the last dying embers of something inexplicable that made her heart hurt. It was hard not to overlay the laughing, vibrant woman at the beach, talking about arts and telling strange tales of a wondrous city. Turning away, she avoided looking at the other corpses, afraid that she might see more faces in the heads already on spikes. From this angle, it was more apparent that the crowd of people here had been gathered to witness what was likely a public execution of important people from the city.

“What a horrible end,” Sana whispered, her voice suddenly sounding very small.

She nodded silently, feeling sick to her core. This close, the man on the platform was almost like a caricature of an evil villain, one hand half-raised as if trying to pluck the impaling weapon from the air, face twisted in outrage and just a hint of denial. One of those despotic old ‘evil path’ monsters that you read about in tales who refined the souls of virgins and sacrificed mortal cities to summon demonic powers.

The men and women who stood around him were frozen in death, wreathed in ghostly coronas of grey sparks. All of them were dressed richly and elegantly; in robes and gowns of whites, reds, golds, greens or blues brocaded with beasts and flowers. Some wore armour, most wore weird hats – either floppy or pointy – with broad brims and lots of gold and silver. They were so at odds with the military outlook of almost everyone else, it was jarring. In many respects, they gave off the vibe of ‘young masters or ladies’ at an almost subconscious level.

Looking up at them, it struck her that it was almost like they were here to witness this scene specifically. Steeling herself, she walked up onto the dais to get a better look at them. One woman, dripping in jewels and wearing a dress that seriously overemphasised her cleavage, who hadn’t been facing the plaza at that exact moment, had a bizarre expression of derision and mockery as she gestured towards Marcella. The rest were caught, toasting the death of the people below with still-full wine cups, or in the process of eating delicacies from golden platters held by what were presumably servants. Almost all had expressions locked between mockery, disbelief, and terror. Unable to stand the scene any longer, she turned away to look back across the plaza. Everything about this made her skin crawl, and the unsettling grey fire, like a mist around them, was making her eyes itch now. In truth, she was, she felt, truly uneasy for the first time.

Almost unbidden, the thought arose in her mind at the same time as the unease became palpable, that there was something else wrong with the plaza. She had sort of begun to think about it as they made their way across, but not really understood because of the perspective. Really, all she had concluded was that the grey-white fire wasn’t just fire but also some kind of misty ephemera that looked like fire.

Now, looking outwards, it struck her properly that the grey ‘flames’ really were not such. From this new perspective, they were more like the breaking crests of waves. Rolling outwards from this point like an ephemeral tide consuming everything in the plaza, and then beyond, that had dared to desecrate it. What she had taken for autumnal mists above were also part of the same wave, just more visible due to the way light reflected through them. The entire plaza was submerged to a depth of a metre or more in the swirling waves, with spray scattering high into the air. What she had taken for the natural tendency of the rock to be a bit shiny in the afternoon light was, from this angle, the true extent of the ‘waters’, a mirage of dampness barely touched by the light.

The sun shifted slightly through the clouds and the plaza darkened just a fraction. If she had been able to teleport, she probably would have in sheer terror.

In that momentary shift, the world was changed. The frozen figures before her now screamed in a tide of murky ephemeral water, grey with mud and carrying dark currents beneath its surface that consumed everything it touched. It was as if she were on the shore of some primordial river flowing out of the depths of a hell, focused on Marcella. They swept through the plaza, breaking over buildings like a tidal wave, subsuming everything living in their path. Frozen as she was, she could only look on, as within the turgid yellow-grey waters the dead rose up, grasping for the living. A torrent of souls untold and uncounted, screaming of the justice of heaven in myriad tongues. The intention of every word that whispered through the maelstrom carried a soul seizing damnation of those who broke oaths and forswore honour. She, nothing more than a witness to the judgement they brought upon the people who desecrated this place and killed its occupants.

The sun shifted, and the moment passed in the same instant. Normality returned and the overcast plaza was as it had been.

“YELLOW SPRINGS!”

She realised she had screamed out loud and tumbled backwards, sprawling on the dais.

“T-t… These people… were all… all killed by the waters of the Yellow Springs—” it was horrifying just saying it out loud.

Sana, standing below, lost in her own thoughts, scrambled up to her, looking shocked. “What about the Yellow Springs…?”

She took a few deep breaths. She didn’t dare to close her eyes in case she saw the whole scene again.

“T-this place... Look at it – the fire isn’t fire, it’s spray… and waves, these people, these attackers are all damned by the Yellow Springs…”

She realised she was babbling, even as something – the symbol – connected with her mantra and quelled the chaos in her mind on her behalf.

“Sis. Don’t flip out on me like that.” Sana arrived beside her and put a calming hand on her shoulder.

She let herself catch her breath, trying not to shake too hard. Now the involuntary shock of that strange moment had passed, she felt a tiny bit foolish. Although only a very tiny bit. The Yellow Springs were seriously infamous. It was a power that exceeded heavenly mandates or crude questions of fate and touched upon something much more profound and primeval that anyone, no matter your views, affiliations or status treated with deference, respect and yes… Fear.

“Yeah… sorry… it was just...” she exhaled again, finally getting control over her hands to stop them shaking.

Sana stared out at the plaza, clearly mulling over her words, and didn’t say anything else.

“The waters originate from Marcella,” she said after a moment. “It doesn’t seem like the freezing shadow extends from there.”

She wasn’t sure how she arrived at that conclusion, but she had felt no sense of the locking down of the moment from that primordial flood of souls from the afterlife. As one, they turned to look at the weapon with its bells a few metres away.

-Is it my imagination or is there a bloody handprint on the copper bell?

Taking another breath, she stood up shakily and considered the Buddhist-style staff with its blade and the man again. This close, it was clear that the shadowy, freezing intent was somehow fixated firmly on him. It was subtle, but the draw of everything around him towards a fixed point somewhere within his body was palpable in a way it hadn’t really been below.

They both looked again at the scene of devastation around them.

“This isn’t right,” she found herself saying, staring at the bodies. “Even if we can’t move them, it is because of them in a way that we have even made it this far, not to mention this is not right.”

Hopping off the platform, she decisively walked over to one of the flowerbeds in the plaza. Somewhat surprisingly, many of the herbaceous plants here were in bloom, not that she had a mind to question it now. Without comment, she swept up a handful of golden and white flowers and stalked back to the line of fallen bodies. She placed a single flower of each colour on each one and then scattered the petals in the air. Sana, having grasped her intention, got a few more from another bed and came back to do others. At the end, they placed the remainder before Marcella, on the platform. Yellow for Good Fortune, White for Truth, Honour and Filial Piety, and a simple ritual to remember and honour the dead in circumstances where other means were either inopportune or unavailable. Closing her eyes, she offered a simple, unspoken hope that the woman and all those who had died here in this dreadful place had found a better fate in their next lives. After that, they repeated the ritual on the piles of corpses. Finally, they turned and bowed three times to the different directions of heaven and earth, clapping their hands to ward off evil. As a final gesture to good fortune in future lifetimes, she turned to the sun in the sky and bowed three times in the direction of the gate of heaven.

Neither spoke as, with as much self-control as they could muster, they swiftly made their way out of the plaza on the far side, heading towards the inner city.