Liao Hua was the eldest daughter of the Liao Patriarch. Hers was a great Cultivation Clan. Ask any in her Clan and they would name her a brilliant star of her generation, burning bright and promising a hopeful future for the clan. They would call her a great talent worthy of the long shadow that her heroic father cast. Great men had striven to lesser heights than she had casually achieved and then ascended beyond. One day her name would be spoken of in reverence.


    So, if she was to be a great woman of history, why could she not save one person?


    “Do you hear me, Liao Hua? You can’t follow after me,” said Qing, the dying daughter of a jade carver. “Promise me you’ll live.”


    “I will,” said Liao Hua, the great talent of her great Clan, because she could never deny Qing anything. “For you, I’ll do it.”


    It was on this day that Liao Hua watched her world fall apart.


    Not the world that was the stars in heaven and the great Yellow River that nourished and took with equal measure. Not the thunder rumbling in the distance that had always soothed her when she was little or the sweetness of plums and the tart bite of fresh lemons. Not cold winds and freshly cut grass on the breeze. Not ash, not fire. Not distant clouds or nearby ponds. Not snow in winter or painfully cold spring melt that left teeth chattering.


    That world was nothing.  A false thing that pretended to have meaning. Immaterial and unappealing. It mattered only because Qing existed in it. No, because through Qing, this thing of thunder and rivers and stars had its true meaning revealed.


    The world Hua knew was bleeding. Red blooming across her sodden dress, turning the pattern of green leaves to an autumn colour. Hua hated it profoundly, that colour red. Hated autumn, hated blood, hated life itself because that was lifeblood leaving Qing’s body.


    Qing lay impaled upon a stone spike. The very earth that defined her Qi had betrayed her. Betrayed Hua. Had punched through her abdomen and spilt precious lifeblood. Only the presence of the spike kept Qing alive, kept her going a bit longer. Removing it, moving her, that would kill her surer than slitting her throat.


    Why this? Why her? Qing has never hurt anyone!


    Hua was no healer. She wasn’t born of the Zhao Clan and so their healing scriptures were not hers to wield. She cursed the circumstances of her birth: her father who fed her lightning instead of selling her off to the Zhao to learn their medicine; her grandmother who kept her close and showed her the ways of thunder. The Elders, the Clan, her brother and sisters, she cursed any and all who had stopped her from learning to heal because it meant she could not save the world.


    Most especially, she cursed the heavens for their malice. Lightning and a breaking world. It could only be intentional. They had come after Qing personally. If not for Hua defying them at every turn, Qing would be long dead.


    And still, they came. Challenging Hua’s determination to save the world. Fury bloomed in her heart. She would defy the gods and keep the world alive. She had to.


    From her body, that strange light of Qi blossomed. It was no true light for it illuminated nothing, and no true colour for it was without the nature that imparted colour. But it was the force that bridged heaven and earth. It could do everything. Summon dragons, split the world, and raise mountains.


    Surely, it could heal one girl.


    Please, please, please! Give me this one thing and I will pay your kindness back a thousand-fold. I will forgive anything and everything.


    Her Qi seeped past the flickering barrier that shielded all Cultivators, Hua’s Qi known to Qing’s body. They melded and meshed, joined together and found harmony. It was because of this intimacy that Hua felt the truth she had refused to see.


    Qing was dying and there was nothing she could do.


    “This Liao Hua will be the most loyal servant of heaven if you give me this,” she bargained.


    The heavens stayed silent. Why should they answer? Their task was complete. There was no healer to save Qing. No miracle was awaiting. Hua drew upon every drop of Qi she could and tried to flood the injury. Her Qi dissipated, refusing to take. Lightning sparked and was instantly grounded, dissipating. Maybe if she had fire, she could cauterise the wound. Could stomach the idea of harming Qing to save her.


    “Keep this with you,” the true world said, raising a shaky hand that Hua grasped tenderly. Callouses Hua knew and had loved stained in red. That deep scar on an index finger that never healed right. The weak thrum of a heartbeat felt at the fingertips. The touch of the true world upon Hua.


    “You’re not allowed to leave me,” Hua begged, the world a blurry mess. It dug into Hua’s palm, the thing Qing forced into her hand. It could have left her bloody and Hua would be glad for it. “You said you’d follow me!”


    She stared at her, engraving the vision of Qing in her memory. The small nose. Long hair that Hua had braided time and time again. Wide eyes that always saw Hua with kindness and generosity. Even now, Qing smiled at her. Stayed strong for Hua.


    It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.


    “We will dance again,” Qing promised with a weak smile. “You and me, we were always meant to dance together. Even if I must take the long way, I will see you again.”


    Liao Hua held her hand even if she did not believe that promise. Time would not be so kind as to reunite them. But the time they had, this she could cherish. There was blood on Qing’s lips. Hua leaned down and kissed away that imperfection, unable to help her tears. Earth and jade, iron warmth and gentle memory. That was what Hua tasted, those things that made Qing. Tasted them and hoped against hope.


    “Qing,” she breathed out shakily. “Qing don’t leave me here. Damn you, you’re not supposed to leave me. Just say it and I’ll take you anywhere you ask. Tell me the flowers you love most, and I’ll plant you a whole garden. Please. If you say something, I’ll do it. Just please say something.”


    There was no answer.


    There would never be an answer from those lifeless lips turning blue. Earth Qi was seeping away from the world. No. You don’t get to take that from me.


    Hua breathed in Earth Qi, surrounding herself with anything and everything that was Qing. Stone and jade, the feel of mud squelching between your toes and sand seeping through the gaps of your fingers. Laughter that was just joy, a thousand smiles beneath the sun and rain and moon. The smell of petrichor before the storm, the way ozone clung to the earth after a thunderstorm. A warmth that seeped into every crevice of her broken body, threading its way through Hua’s battered spirit. Thoughts and feelings, moments never said aloud. Most importantly, that imperceptible thread that had connected them since the moment they first touched, wrapping around her core.


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    Earth Qi found a home in her bones and liver. It settled in her dantian that had only known lightning and from it, Hua built a new bedrock that would always and forever be the very essence of Qing.


    A great snap echoed through the tunnels. Like a whip cracking next to her ear but so much further away. Hua ignored it. Such an unimportant thing, the rest of this false world. Everything it did was a distraction.


    If circumstances had been kinder, and Hua braver, there were words she would have said. She hoped those words were known anyway, hoped that final bloody kiss imparted every feeling she had.


    “I will bury you beneath the tallest tree on our mountain,” Hua promised, “and visit you each day.”


    Beneath that tree, she would compose a song for Qing; a melody that began with I, Hua, was changed by you, and scream a lament to haunt the false world. Her words would be carried in an unbroken chain by each songbird, and found in the space between lightning’s announcement and thunder''s retort. In the roar of wise dragons, and each snarl from furious tigers marking their territory, the crackling and snap of the serene phoenix’s feathers turning woodland to ash, and the great turtle’s ponderous steps shaking the mountain range, in them that song would be sung, and a different aspect of Qing would be remembered: fearsome, brave, determined, caring.


    It would be a song so beautiful that the gods above would quake in fear because how could you hear of such profound adoration and think yourself safe from consequence?


    There were but three words in that song and they were the most important words she had never said. An oath, a promise, and if she needed to find a way to endure a thousand years, Hua would, just so she could say—


    “I lo—"


    A great wave of water consumed the confession she meant to make. A tidal wave crashing over her, erupting from above and behind her. Air was replaced by water and this land she thought a darkness hell became a drowned one as well.


    The gods hated her. They made it known with nothing short of ruthless cruelty. This could be nothing other than intentional malice. The world was not this cruel. It did not go out of its way to inflict suffering. Only the heavens could be so cruel.


    Damn you all to the lowest depths, she screamed futilely in the water, grabbing Qing’s hand before she was swept away. The wave pushed against her so strongly it was a full-body punch. But Qing was stuck, impaled on stone. Grounded so deeply nothing could move her. Not Hua and not a tidal wave. Just let me have her body. Please.


    Though she held on desperately, the force of the wave tore her from that hand which she knew so well and adored. The wave carried her onward, through the tunnels and past crevices. At such speed she could not hold on to the walls, she was dragged by the force of water.


    The narrow passages opened up into the vastness of a great river. High above her, she saw shafts of sunlight shimmering with the turbulence of the waves. If she swam, she might reach the surface and save herself. Emerge unto the sunlight and live again.


    A great shadow stole the sun away. It drew nearer and nearer as Hua drifted helplessly. If she had anything left but shattered dreams and broken faith, she might have cared.


    The shadow revealed itself to be a boulder of such roundness it could not be natural. Geometric shapes were carved into it, forming a lotus fractal. It reminded her of the engraved ball the guardian lion in front of a temple would keep under her paw. As she realised that, it came to weigh down on her.


    Funny that a guardian should punish her. Only the male associated with yang, with heavenly Qi, carried the ball.


    Did the Heavens have to so needlessly punish her?


    Hua sank with the weight of heaven’s judgement. For what? The sins of her past lives just to drag her down the riverbed. Never. Hua would not accept that weight. It could only be her failings in this life, to this world. The greatest was failing to protect Qing. The next was every second she wasted without saying the words that mattered the most. Those made up the great mass. They had to. Those she had killed were less than chaff. Whoever she hurt in life couldn’t matter enough to be an impossibly heavy weight. What crime had she committed to deserve this?


    Cursing the gods? Damn them and let the boulder grow heavier.


    Saving Qing from their lightning? Fuck them and their heavens.


    She did not know how long she sank, contemplating her sin of losing the world, and she did not care. With her eyes closed and her heart cold, the embrace of dark waters was calming. On and on she was dragged by the currents. If this was one of the hells, Hua knew she could endure. In time, she could forget what had happened. If all she was, the sum of her experiences and memory, was scoured down to bedrock, then she could endure. It would mean she did not have to live a life without Qing.


    Finally, eventually, even her Qi-enhanced body could not sustain her maudlin, and she began to truly drown. It lit a fire in her, awakened the kind of fury they spoke of in legends. Her eyes snapped open. It was murky, the water. She saw debris and darting fish, lost bodies and scrolls of paper. Pick one of everything and you could decipher the lives of dozens.


    Not one of them was Qing so they did not matter. Chest burning, heart aching, Hua laid her hands on the guardian’s stone sphere and channelled her Qi through it. The trigram she knew best was born in the darkness and with it, she shattered the malice of heaven.


    Unburdened, all that remained was to rise. The distorted starburst of the sun beckoned her onward, tempted her with that siren’s thing called revenge, and with hate in her heart, Hua began her ascent. With lungs aching, burning, heart thumping, shaking, Hua swam and she swam and she kept swimming even as darkness encroached her vision and the smeared sun became smaller and smaller.


    A moment, a year, an eternity, that was how long it took her to swim to the surface. Hua emerged from the river, born again in hate and fury and a loss most profound.


    She choked out muddy waters, gasping, desperately reaching out to any piece of debris around. Everything hurt and it hurt more as she hacked her lungs out, vomiting whatever water had found a way into her lungs. Finally, she found something to latch onto—a door, perhaps, never to seal shut the warmth and laughter and complicated arguments that was family. Hua flopped onto it and just breathed as she was carried onward and eventually, through luck or circumstance, she found land instead of being dragged to open ocean miles away.


    The banks of the Liao River welcomed her. Greeted her with mud and disregard, leaving the marks of its ill intent upon her robes. Well, fuck the earth too. It and the river could get fucked together.


    Hua was learning this false world was one she hated because it was one Qing could disappear into. The earth should mourn her. The songbirds should sing Qing’s name and the sky should weep enough to flood the continent. It should not have taken away every sign of Qing and left Hua with the hollowness of memory.


    Not even blood remained on her hands. The red that had stained her lips, stolen away. Qing, wiped away so easily. She had truly vanished into this false world and left Hua behind to walk on, forever knowing the true world was missing from her side, no longer walking beside her or laughing with her.


    All Hua had left of Qing was the jade pendant she forced Hua to take.


    “I’ll wait for you to return. No matter how many rebirths you go through, I will wait for you, and I will find you,” she vowed, holding tight to the pendant. “We will meet again and dance for every day we were apart.”


    She regretted. She loathed. Everything unsaid that could not be spoken.


    I loved you. I love you. I will always love you. I will say it in every bolt of lighting and every drop of rain. Every epic sung will be my epic. Every dream for love will be my love. I’ll be every poet. I’ll kill them and take their place so that I may write you into their words.


    I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. If I had been faster, stronger, greater. If, if, every fucking if.


    Hua gazed up at the smoke-filled sky. It hid those who had done this from her. It hid her in turn from their gaze. And so, she made a second promise, one borne for every word of love she knew.


    “I’ll kill every bastard up there who took you from me! I’ll murder them all until their blood fills the oceans!”


    No matter what, she would do it. She would Cultivate until she could break the heavens over her knees, find the fool who dared write Qing’s name in the Book of the Dead, and burn the book itself.


    “The gods will die for this!”