This girl must be a halfling child of a human and a fox spirit.
Disgust coils in my stomach. A thing like that has no place in our realm. It’s said that the gods laid down a set of rules across all the realms before the beginning of time: the Heavenly Order, which governs the fates of humans and demons and immortals and all mythical beings. To separate the weak from the strong, the prey from the predator, the gods forbade love between mortals and mythical beings—even the monsters and spirits residing in our realm.
Still, halflings exist within the mortal realm. These creatures wander the fringes of this world, abominations under the Heavenly Order.
As I watch the creature struggle, however, I am unable to block out how its snarls turn into soft, desperate cries. Its fox form has fallen away, its body reverting to that of the willowygirl, terror widening her eyes as she fights for her life. And I find that I can’t stop thinking of Méi’zi. Of how they are similar in size and build. Of how, in spite of whatever else it is, the creature is half-human. Blood wells up from the gashes Áo’yin’s claws pierce in the halfling girl: red and glistening, just like mine.
If I let this yao’jing die…I can’t help but feel I am letting go of what makes me human.
I know it in my heart before I register that I am moving. I hoist myself onto the bank, my bare feet on the silvergrasses, my crescent blades in my palms.
I whistle at the hellbeast.
Áo’yin stops what it is doing. Those red pinpricks in its empty eye sockets come to focus on me. With another strange, chittering sound, it discards the yao’jing like an unwanted doll and turns to face me.
Bile rises in my throat, but I force my mind to steady. I’ve studied the notes of mortal practitioners—the handful of accounts from rare survivors of encounters with Áo’yin near the borders of the demonic realm. Qióng’qí prefers to devour victims smelling of fear, which is why Yù’chén found a way to ease my fear.
What is Áo’yin’s weakness?
There was a practitioner’s account of a boy who, in the face of certain death, chose to sing. He explained that he had sung of all the joys in his life, for those were the memories he had wished to carry with him beyond the Nine Fountains into the realm of death.
He lived to tell the tale.
Joy. Áo’yin is repelled by joy.
I do not think I have sung since my father died. As Áo’yinlumbers toward me, I think of my mother, of the way she hummed when she sewed. I hold on to a memory: a summer morning, sunlight pooling like honey through the fretwork shutters, spilling on Ma so that she appears like spun gold. She has a silk scarf in her hands, her needle flashing like a silver fish darting through iridescent blue waves, but to me, she might as well have been making magic.
I think that is the moment I fell in love with sewing—because, with nothing but my fingers and needles and thread, I could weave the world around me.
I blink and I’m holding knives instead of needles; my hands are coarse and callused, my palms a tapestry of mud and blood. Shadows wrap around me like living, breathing things; I feel hot puffs of breath in my face that smell like rotting flesh.
But when I look up, Áo’yin has stopped. It towers over me, arms as thick as tree trunks and capable of snapping my spine like a twig. Its jaw, all glistening bone and saliva, hangs open as it gapes at me. Strips of flesh dangle from those rows of teeth, and they clack together in that bizarre chittering sound as the beast lowers its face to mine—almost inquisitively.
It inhales deeply.
I conjure the thought of me defeating this hellbeast, of winning a spot in the trials and Ma taking the pill of immortality. Of that honey-sunshine afternoon, sitting by my mother’s lap and listening to her sing again.
Then I plunge Striker upward into Áo’yin’s maw.
I do not even know if mortal steel is capable of slaying mythological creatures from the Kingdom of Night—but if my crescent blades can defeat mó, then I reason they can at least maim a legendary hellbeast enough to slow it.
What happens next, I cannot explain.
Striker begins to glow. The glow comes from within the blade, growing sharper and brighter, as if it has drunk all the light of the stars in the skies and forged it into molten steel. As I watch, that light shoots into Áo’yin’s open jaw. Spirit energy sizzles in the air like lightning as the light begins fissuring Áo’yin’s form, as if it is cracking open from the inside out.
The beast’s scream of anguish rattles my teeth, reverberates in my skull. I cannot hear myself think, cannot feel anything but its pain in those moments—that and the crescent blade’s hilt, which has begun to burn in my hands. And when I look down…
Light shimmers beneath my skin, pouring from my flesh and veins into the blade. Striker is still aglow, but I cannot pinpoint the source of the light. I only know that the blade and I are connected, golden light fracturing from the cracks that have spread through Áo’yin.
Áo’yin howls as its form collapses, turning to smoke and ichor like the mó I have slain. Within heartbeats, the shadows are gone, and I am kneeling in the cathaya forest with my crescent blades in my palms and the ichor of a hellbeast on my fingers.
My head is spinning. I lift my hands, but they are normal now. The light writhing beneath my skin…I must have imagined that. When I lift Striker, there is no trace of light on the flat steel blade; I see only a sliver of my own reflection, eyes wide with fear, hair slicking the sides of my face.
The ichor on my skin is beginning to sting. Quickly, I wipe it off in the grass around me, but a burning sensation spreads through my fingers.
Movement in my peripheral vision pulls my attention. I tense, Striker out and Fleet in my other hand.
It’s the yao’jing. She’s back in her full human form, watching me from where Áo’yin had her in its clutches. She’s panting slightly, crouched in unnatural stillness reminiscent of a small animal—a little fox, perhaps. A deep gash on her cheek bleeds.
