When Jindi opens the door, she opens it to a desert sky.

As she steps over the threshold, the suspended air of the dungeon and the muted chill of stone fall away from her, their grasping tendrils giving way to the greedy embrace of dry heat and shifting sand. The pocket dimension she has materialized into is a creation of magic, one that belongs to neither Nuhan's blood and metal or the swirl of universal qi. It falls somewhere in between, a delicate creation of precarious beauty forged of glass and ether, a desert that is not constructed from memory or time or place; it is a dream, a desert that exists only in the mind of someone who has never seen one.

The sun in the sky, its searing glory, is a white sticker in blue lacquer. Jindi reaches for its warmth and finds no life in it, its heat carrying only the same vague throb of ambient energy that laces the entire false world. The air is still like held breath; the entire vast sweep of the horizonless wasteland is swathed in a still hum, Jindi merely caught in its endless folds.

In that silence, the pure note of another life rings as true as a silver bell.

It fills the deferential emptiness of the desert mirage the way light fills darkness, the way water fills an empty bowl. The glory of it bathes the darkness of Jindi's sand-smoothed edges, shines through the cracks of her closed fist; in the cloak of the desert mirage's silence the grand weight of a god's energy is the frothing churn of a columning stormcloud, the surging weight of a flood, apocalyptic and final. It blankets everything in its towering shadow, throwing the land into new contrast and blotting out the false sun even though it cannot be seen at all.

It's her.

Here. The bag at her hip thrums alongside the voice of that piercing pure voice, a forlorn harmony. She's here.

Here in the desert all along.

When Jindi had first stepped into the deserts of the south, she had entered a desert conjured as inexplicably and instantaneously as a thought, cities and societies dropped overnight into the chaos and confusion of a hostile environment without the resources to cope. As the days had been lost to the shifting sands, the chaos had eventually given way to shriveled wilderness, to the reality of sustaining life in heat: sparse shrubbery, scavengers, furtive animals scraping out existence in the night.

This desert is not the south: there are no cities, no people, no remnants to speak of. No animals. No water. Not even plants for shade; no shadows mar the pristine sand, as smooth and still as untouched snow. There is no breeze to break the silence. As Jindi walks there is only her own breath, painstakingly pressed through her lungs, and the soft sweep of sand under her trailing footsteps as she walks blindly towards a voice as nebulous and silent as light.

And then she meets a stranger.

There is no breeze or shade or structure for her to appear in, no dune to crest, no road to approach by; she simply appears between one moment and the next, as starkly painted into the world as the plastered sun. She holds no life or energy of her own, woven with the same foreign ambient hum as the rest of the desert—she might as well be built of the same sand.

Her features are ruddy and vague, muddled on her face as if through fog; she does not look to be from either Nuhan or the Jianghu. She is cloaked only in a white sheet—like her features, the shape of it slides from Jindi's mind the moment she looks away—and her hands and feet are bare, her fingers splayed slightly to feel the heat slide through her palms as she matches Jindi's footsteps. The most sure thing about her is her dark hair: it flows with her motions, floating through the air as if suspended in water.

Perhaps Jindi would be surprised if a person had appeared in the desert, slammed into existence. But this is merely part of the mirage, a construct of the same magic that builds the desert in the first place; encountering her is no more startling than any other image in the false world. She holds no more individuality than any other grain of sand below Jindi's feet.

She is woven through the world—and so when she speaks, Jindi is not surprised to feel her voice pulse through the fabric of the entire pocket dimension.

"You have caught me unawares."

Jindi dips her head in acknowledgement. She thinks as she walks, turning the words over in her mind like so much fine sand. Sifts through it, dissects it; for a moment there is merely heat and dust curving under her feet, amiable silence. It's a long time before a question worth asking occurs to her.

"Are you holding her?"

It had always seemed obvious that the barbarian king was the one trapping the dragon, that the apex of his greed had manifested in capturing the last of the gods he had slaughtered. The image had only sharpened when the call of the voices at her waist had drawn her into his kingdom, then his dungeon; it had appeared in a multitude of varieties at every turn, with every room holding another one of his nominally similar drakes. But the magic constructing this world— the world that holds her, the one where the voice calling to Jindi over the desert is hers and not the one at her hip—the magic of this world is not blood and metal but gossamer and glass, a delicate web and not an iron cage.

It is not the magic that killed the dragons, but she is here all the same.

The stranger considers this, the undulating curls of her hair pillowing her cheeks in their lazy sway.

"...Yes," she says. "In a more literal sense, though. Charles took her, and he put her here: the place where he puts all the great and monstrous things he wants to claim but does not know how else to keep. And here, where I am among those things, I in turn have built a prison of my own: a place to keep all the things I do not want him to have, even despite his having them."

The stranger's voice, carried by the weight of the entire desert, is more solid than the sight of her. There is a brief, thoughtful pause; when she speaks her words carry a rich luster hidden in the unfathomable darkness of her tone, her voice swaying past Jindi with a touch of human shyness. "I would like there to be no misunderstandings between us, you see. I knew he would come, by proxy or by force, and have prepared only for his people. In truth, I do not know what to do with you."

Jindi's footsteps slow in their place, whisper-soft over the sand as she turns toward the stranger. Trying to focus on the image of her is an impossibility, but each step through the shimmering illusion of her imagined world ripples outward like vibrations through a suspended web, revealing a glimpse of the mind at its source. Through this, Jindi forms the shape of the stranger in her mind's eye: someone who has lived enough to carry the barren, burned-out heat of an eternal wasteland inside her. Someone who constructs her will out of glass and gossamer, and who has enough of it to bind together a place of safety in the depths of blood and metal. Someone who takes what is precious and, to save it from what is already true, hides it in the darkness of a clenched fist.

Jindi bows slightly, a polite greeting and an apology. She is an uninvited guest—and she is about to ask her host for a favor.

"The one you are holding is a god of my land," Jindi says, lifting her eyes slightly over her clasped hands. Her host, cupping her in the impenetrable grasp of her vast imagined desert, reacts to her words; the energy of the dimension fluctuates slightly, an imperceptible twitch. "I have something of hers to return to her—to its rightful owner."

"You would like to make an offering." The stranger draws the conclusion on her own. Jindi isn't sure if she's right, but the distinction is harmless enough to let slide. "And what will you do afterwards?"

The question has occurred to Jindi before, in brief flashes in moments of silence: what happens after the only thing that is left, where she can go when she has finally reached the merciful end. Every other time before, though—asked in a desert in the south or a dungeon in the earth—it has come to her like a dream, a mirage, a question that trembles at the far edges of an intangible web and holds no meaning. This, asked through a stranger's mouth with the dragon's voice ringing clear and present in her ears, is the only time the question has carried enough weight to be real.

"I don't know." Jindi's eyes remain on her own laced fingers, the trembling seam where her hands meet, tenuously held together. Then she remembers her manners. "But whatever I do, I will not do it here."

Whoever this stranger is, she has been a gracious host. In return, Jindi will strive to be an unobtrusive guest. Whatever the stranger's motives, whatever she wants, whatever happens when the barbarian king comes through the entry carved of blood and metal—whatever form his sovereign will takes, in his soldiers or his own self or even in Sam's sword—Jindi will not interfere. She will make herself scarce, and she will not be here to see it.

The stranger considers this before nodding, turning away from Jindi and allowing her to straighten from her bow and stand. For a brief moment, Jindi thinks there isn't any point in walking any further when the world itself is an illusion—but the stranger motions outwards into the infinite vastness of the desert, gesturing aimlessly forward, and glides silently alongside Jindi as she resumes her trek.

The stranger doesn't respond until they've gone quite a bit further, their footsteps etched in tandem into a desert of her imagining. "Charles has wronged you, same as he has wronged me. Now, I set things right; I wrong him. Here in my world, I hold the part of him he thinks he needs." The stranger's voice is conversational and warm—warmed by an understanding they share, forged from bitterness so strong and unyielding that the sharing comes easy. "Will you not stay to see it slip from him?"

"Maybe." Jindi's voice is soft, but she has forgotten how to be warm without it feeling like surrender. Even as she speaks, her words carry a doubtful note that rejects the idea before she has properly thought it through. "But I don't think so, no."

They continue walking; Jindi feels the world narrow in, a distant gaze scrutinizing her closely. The next time the stranger's words come they are gentle, apologetic; they've lost the conspiratorial smile of an equal, favoring something benignly pitying. "Your god is a strange one, traveler. Not like Charles' gods. Not even like mine, in the distant north."

Privately, Jindi thinks the gods of Nuhan are either cruel or neglectful; their worship is empty, their magic destructive. Then she remembers Sam, standing over Addy's body and telling her that if she has ever been decent, the gods she once worshiped must now be dead, leaving only a monster in their place.

Perhaps it is the gods of Nuhan that have been changed beyond recognition. Perhaps it is their people.

"Mn." Something she'll never know. But she spares a courtesy for her host, for the furthest reaches of the foreign north whose gods it does not hurt to know. "How so?"

"She is strange in that she is like you." The stranger lifts her face to the false sun and its empty, lifeless rays—and for a moment Jindi is sure this stranger can also feel the sound of the dragon's energy as it cascades down the flow of the universe, the only true thing in this strange and stagnant world. "She is a god, and you are merely her worshiper. But you feel the same, I think: you are both lonely, even though you are together. Even in the presence of each other you are alone—and, I think, afraid to see each other."

Jindi thinks there is something there, something she can barely allow herself to give thought to, can only allow herself to think about like a distant tremor in a fine web. Yes: she is afraid of what seeing her will mean, about the gulf between expectation and reality. The distance between what is and what she can still withstand. The safety that shields what she has constructed out of dust and glass, the mausoleum of her memory, and the force that can shatter it.

"It is not my place to keep you from your gods." In the absence of a desert breeze, the flow of the stranger's words is a cool balm in barren heat. It washes over Jindi like forgiveness, implicit permission to surrender. "But all the same, I cannot help but wonder if you must meet at all. It will not make things right. I suspect it will not even make either of you happy."

Happy.

"Happiness is something too simple for any god to give their worshipers." Jindi has been made happy by plenty of things: a smile from her teacher, her friend's face in her window, good food eaten on a warm day. These are things no god can give her; never has she knelt in her temple to find that simple joy. "But there are things to find among the fear and supplication, if you are willing. Peace in assurance. Forgiveness. Survival." Rain in the desert. These are things both more and less than joy. Jindi looks up into that painted sky and imagines it, the blessing of an end to obligation. "I am willing."

They walk on side-by-side, an aimless stroll through the purifying heat.

"You're strange too, traveler; another way in which you and your god are alike." The stranger smiles softly into the middle distance, a wistful and nostalgic longing that seems misplaced in relation to Jindi, who has never met her before. The words settle between them like so much dust before the stranger speaks again, a seemingly disconnected thought. "I have never been to the south, you know. I am sorry for the mess Charles has made of it."

Jindi jerks her head in response, although even she isn't sure what the motion is meant to convey.

"I have a favor to ask—and forgive me if it is a painful one. I would not ask, were you not about to willingly undertake a painful task anyway."

After walking through two deserts, descending through a dungeon—after a lifetime of falling, it seems silly to think one woman could spare Jindi from her share of pain anyway. The long road, the wrenching unmaking and remaking of herself, the calcification of her spirit in the heat and dust and stone: this, too, is the flow of the universe downward, as natural and inevitable as a force of nature. And this—what is natural, what is right—is not something to be spared from or rejected or ignored. Only embraced, and accepted, and mourned as it changes and chased when it's gone.

"By all means," Jindi says.

"Those strange lands with your strange gods," says the stranger. Her hair spills slowly through the desert air like ink bleeding through water, rippling and inexorable as she turns. "Will you tell me about them?"

---

A thousand years ago, the Jianghu was a desert.

A thousand years later, the Jianghu is a desert again.

But a hundred years ago the Jianghu was a kingdom: prosperous, thriving, its lush lands rich and bountiful under the watchful eye of its celestial patrons. A hundred years ago, there were dragons in the skies.

The skies are empty now. But even so—even changed beyond recognition and understanding—it is the same sky. There were dragons there, once: even now, even changed, even empty and barren, that fact remains. Even the emptiness of a desert sky can hold a memory.

Between a thousand years of desert sky, there is a truth worth saying. It is the type of truth that saves.

---

Xiyao was there, I'm telling you! Zhang Jindi joins her hands over the table in a haphazard motion reminiscent of a bow; beneath her sleeves her fingers wriggle, deftly extracting a handful of paper-wrapped dragon's beard candy from the deliberately-loosened hems of her sleeves. Xiyao, tell her: it was a huli jing for sure, wasn't it? Wasn't it?!

I believe you thought you saw one, Wu Xiyao murmurs doubtfully, his brow furrowing as he glares down at the paper on his desk like it's personally wronged him. I believe you wanted to see one.

Yeah, you believe that, do you? Jindi grasps his wrist as his hand snakes across the floor, stopping Xiyao before he can snag a sweet from her surreptitiously open palm. Xiyao snatches his fingers back as if burned, casting a panicked glance toward the front of the silent pavilion. How do you explain the shadow we saw, then? Way bigger than a single tail, A-Xuan, and—

—and it was very impressive, yes, so will you shhh! Xiyao casts another frantic look toward the open door. Gao-laoshi's going to be back any minute, and we're supposed to be copying lines—

It was a bush, wasn't it? Xuan Ziyi giggles, completely guileless as she sweeps her sleeve over Jindi's hand, plucking the remaining four candies from Jindi's palm. Her thin fingers make quick work of the packaging, her movements practiced and clever as she pops three into her mouth at once, cheeks bulging. Aiya, Zhang-meimei, no wonder we're here. How can you be trusted to go through the woods on your own if you can't even tell a shrub from a spiritual animal?

Ha! How can either of you be trusted to sneak out with me if you can't even tell a spiritual animal from a shrub?!

Ziyi molds the soft candy into the curve of her soft cheeks with her tongue, sinking her teeth cheerfully into the rich peanut filling. Her eyes crinkle over a childishly satisfied smile as she contemplates the last candy in her hand, turning it slightly before jutting her chin out. Yao-di, catch.

The candy sails over Jindi's outstretched fingers toward Xiyao, who ducks his head sinuously and catches it in his mouth. His face remains solemn even as he chews for just this side of too long, a rare theatrical indulgence as he pretends to think. ...It was the shadow of a cloud passing overhead, if anything—

So you did see it! Jindi rounds on her shidi, nearly upturning his inkstone onto his rigidly marshaled lines of calligraphy in her outrage; Xiyao's braid nearly comes undone as he dives to save it, glaring mutinously as he nudges the objects on his desk into place seemingly at random. See, A-Xuan? Next time you give up and go to bed early—

—and miss out on the shadow of a cloud? I'll survive, I'm sure. Ziyi tips backward to lie on the ground, her immaculate hair thumping heavily against the sweet-smelling wood floor. She wriggles in the sunlight that seeps through the paper window, angling for the best spot like a lazy cat. Though I might not survive this punishment. How much longer do we have?

Two hours. Xiyao picks up his brush and makes like he's about to continue copying lines instead of focusing on their chitchat, a trick which hasn't worked on the two of them since they were old enough to be punished for skipping classes and sneaking out after curfew at all. And then we have sparring and meditation. Then we have class. Can we please not skip it this time?

Pretty pretty please, Ziyi adds, twisting halfway and pillowing her chin on her hand to blink up at Jindi beseechingly. Even if I miraculously survive this one, I definitely won't be able to handle another.

We wouldn't have to if Yao-di were any better at lying. Jindi plucks a stray talisman from her desk, waving it around victoriously. But fine, if you want to miss out on seeing a celestial fox with your own eyes, who am I to—

Great, then let's go for a swim in the lake this afternoon. Xiyao nods ruthlessly, turning his nose up as Jindi tries and fails to wrestle a cajoling arm over his shoulder.

Start with the dragons before you go flying off in search of celestial foxes, meimei. Ziyi's robes crease beneath her as she frowns, melting into a supine puddle on the floor of the pavilion in search of a comfortable napping angle. Maybe they'd let you get a little closer already if you studied a little harder.

Or maybe we'd all be able to see them up close if you'd help us sneak into the courtyard. Jindi gives up on maneuvering Xiyao into a headlock and throws herself onto the floor alongside Ziyi, propping her chin up in her hands to peer beseechingly at her fellow disciple. Ziyi opens one lazy eye and stares up at her, benignly amused and thoroughly unimpressed. I don't suppose you have any tips for talking to a celestial being, da-jie?

Piss off, Ziyi snorts, stifling a laugh at the transparently deferential mode of address. For a brief moment her lax demeanor stiffens slightly, her laconic stance gaining an edge of meditative contemplation that always seems to accompany the disciples who have seen the dragons up close. And besides, we don't talk to them—they don't talk to anyone, okay? They just float a little closer to us up on our mountaintop than the people down in the world below, that's all.

But we hear some of the things they say, Xiyao says mulishly, preoccupied as ever with the prospect of gaining entrance to the courtyard where the elders and more accomplished disciples are permitted to approach the dragons as they pass by in their winding path over the Jianghu. If we didn't, we wouldn't hear news of the outside world from them.

Yeah, yeah! Jindi's chin bobs painfully against the floor as she nods fervently. Besides, how else would we know so many things about them? Their intentions, their sentience, even their pearls—

I'm surrounded by greedy children. Ziyi whines over her distinctive yawn, nose twitching like a bunny rabbit as she waves a hand lazily over her mouth. Of course we hear them, Yao-di; you don't have to worry about that, so don't go over-thinking yourself into a million questions like last time. They just don't talk to us the way you and I are talking right now. She rolls over and thinks for a moment, her fingers drumming over her cheek as her eyelids droop. It's more like they think to themselves as they pass us: there is the monastery again, they should send disciples to the town in the east, they should know of the bad omen brewing in the north, that sort of thing. And we can hear them think those things because they're far too big to ignore, you know?

Jindi has really only seen the dragons from a distance as they descend through the skies, the atmosphere torn open around them as they wind through the air down towards the courtyard and pavilions on the other side of the mountain. They're big enough to bend the trees in the forests as far as the the disciple's quarters, but it's not their physical size that Ziyi is referencing; the ocean of their celestial energy is so vast it holds its own gravity. Even on the other side of the mountain—even though Jindi has never seen them except from a distance, a riotous vortex of color and wind too primal and powerful to look at for more than a few moments—the voice of their qi pierces through the world like a siren call, unintentional compulsion.

Does that mean we can't speak to them? Xiyao's face is getting that little crease between the eyebrows he gets when he's about to lose a game or fail at something he's gotten invested in; when they were chubby children, that face usually heralded an uncharacteristically petulant bout of tears. Ziyi sits up to thump him affectionately on the skull, stopping him at the pass. Unfortunately, Jindi punches him simultaneously in the arm with the similar goal of distracting him; he yelps, swatting at them before they can accidentally injure him with their brusque affection.

Well, they can hear us the same way we hear them; they'll think something about us, we'll think about what we heard from them—unintentionally, usually, the way you can't really control your thoughts when you learn something new—and they'll have a new thought about our reaction, and so on until they've flown too far to hear. Ziyi picks up Xiyao's inkstone to grind him some new ink, her own way of apologetically soothing him. The line of his shoulders slumps in acceptance as he turns his permanently tense expression back to his paper. But I don't think I'd call that talking, no...ah, but I guess that's the closest anyone gets to 'talking' to a celestial spirit. I don't think anyone's ever really talked to a dragon, not since Han Xiu at the very beginning..

So don't go getting any ideas about foxes or shrubs, Zhang-jie. Wu Xiyao finishes one final character with a lofty flourish of his hand before sighing, rubbing irritably at the bridge of his nose as he places one complete page of copied lines onto each of their desks with a vaguely aggrieved air of generalized reluctance. Ziyi nudges him on the shoulder in thanks before tumbling gracelessly back into a patch of sunlight; Jindi offers him the last of the dragon's beard candy she squirreled away. He takes it, tucking it into his own sleeve before standing and stretching with a satisfied grunt. There's no way to talk to them, and I don't want to get punished purely for chasing ghosts. If—if—you're sneaking into the woods again tomorrow, I'm not going at all unless we actually make it to the hot springs this time, okay?

---

There is a story that the grandmothers in the Jianghu told their grandchildren when their eyes turned to the dusky shadows that once drifted aimlessly over the land, burnishing their homes in the muted sunlight of a warm rain. It is a story cobbled together from what common people can salvage from a memory in the sky; it is the type of story that flows like a river from a distant truth, the type of truth so precious it must be preserved even if it changes beyond recognition or understanding. It is the sort of legend that grows, inevitably and organically, from the heart of a truth that saves.

And the story said: a thousand years ago, the Jianghu was a desert.

It said: a thousand years ago the Jianghu was a desert, a wasteland so vast and barren there was no cloud, no ruin, not even the hazy shadow of a desert plant to mar the sands as soft and silken as a fresh coat of snow. A thousand years ago the lands of the south could not even have held a lake, let alone the prosperous cities and rural villages and dense forests of our times.

In those days only nomadic travelers and bandits dared venture into the dense desert of the south. The story is about the day that changed.

The story is about a different kind of man: a man of diligence and humility who had dedicated his life to cultivating the energy of the universe, who traveled the earth refining the song of it in himself as rigorously as he fostered it in the world around him. He followed the song of the universe as it called him, never settling, moving from one place to the next and helping the people he encountered however he could—until one day he followed it as it called him like a dream over the deserts of the south, a place with so little life that even the song of the universe could not reach it except on the fringes of his awareness.

The man had learned to harness the energy of the world around him, to acknowledge himself as a part of it and refine himself within the river-song of it; he did not starve the way most people did. But he had not yet ascended—he was still a mere mortal, and slowly but surely the endless prison of the desert overtook him. When he finally fell to his knees the sand parted to receive him at the very moment of his death, the river of the universe depositing him to his final resting place.

And it was there—in the desert south, in a place that called him like a dream, at the end of the world—that a monk asked for a favor from the great gods.

He asked for rain.

The story the grandmothers tell their grandchildren says that the celestial dragons heard him. That they filled the empty skies of an endless desert with so much mercy that the memory of them fills their skies to this day; that the celestial dragons descended upon the Jianghu, and brought their life-giving rains with them, and that they have never left since. That those rains filled the desert like water fills an empty bowl, the way light fills darkness—the sands became earth and stone, and that earth bore fruit and life and sons for the monk and his followers that eventually became the mighty country they live in today. That the dragons have filled their skies ever since, great and impassive as they float aimlessly over the skies of the Jianghu; that their path is inexplicable and seemingly random, that the dragons might come in a few weeks or a many moons, but that they are always somewhere in the Jianghu. And wherever they go, they bring rain.

They do not talk to us, says the story. They never even descend. They are gods; they do not look our way. But they give us rain. They guard our skies like a memory. And so long as the gods have mercy, rain will fall in a desert—so long as there are dragons in our skies, the Jianghu will always endure.

It is the story grandmothers told grandchildren—a story told by people who live under the shadow of the gods, under a memory of mercy. It is a story told by people who live in what used to be a desert.

But Jindi lived in a monastery on a mountain, in a place where the earth met the edge of the sky.

In the story Jindi's grandmother told her, there was nothing as uncomplicated as a miracle. In the story Jindi knows—in the story Jindi tells—there is a traveling monk called over the desert like a dream, brought to the edge of his enhanced survival by a void so vast and barren that there is nothing at all.

But when he falls to his knees, it is not a favor the monk asks for. Instead, alone in the desert, a monk makes a promise to the great gods.

In the story Jindi's grandmother told her grandchild, the monk promises the gods his gratitude. He promises them that he will raise a temple where he kneels, right there in the heart of the desert; that he will raise his sons to worship them, to care for those temples and make offerings to those gods and dedicate themselves to the diligent arts of nobility and virtue in service of the new life brought into the desert by that promise. He will raise his sons, and his sons will raise theirs, and theirs will raise a land that lives under a memory of mercy too vast and boundless to forget, so that everyone who lives under the desert sky will remember the grace woven into it and give it the honor it is due.

In this story, his request rings through the song of the universe like a call over the desert. In this story the dragons rouse in their celestial kingdoms; they descend from the jade palaces of the heavenly realm, rise from the distant oceans in the four corners of the earth. In this story, the dragons rend open the desert with the power of their promise, scarring it into the skies with their primordial strength; the energy of the universe is laced into the monk's vow, his sincere conviction sealing it into truth as it winds down through the natural cascade of energy through time. It is this power that flows through the conduit of the dragons in their celestial glory, the finality of it that fills the desert with clouds the way water fills an empty bowl.

With the power of this promise freely offered and accepted, the dragons fill the skies so completely they will always hold the memory of their vow, even long after the dragons themselves have disappeared. With this power the sands give way to dirt, to rain; the flatlands of the desert become the mountains and forests of the Jianghu, a lush land created out of a harmony that rejects the asynchrony of their northern counterparts and their magics of blood and metal.

With that power they raise a mountain where the monk kneels, coaxing it into the sky.

And it is there that the monk raises his temple.

In this story the temple in the sky sits among the dragons, separated from earthly affairs in a place that is not quite the celestial planes of the nine heavens but not quite the quaint toil of the rest of the mortal world. In this story the monk, true to his word, raises his sons, who raise their own sons and the sons of their willing disciples to honor a promise that sings down through the flow of time in the universe. In their temple they spend their days training in the noble arts and meditating on virtue, attuning themselves to the energy of the universe so it opens them like a flower. In doing so they strain toward ascension, slowing their age and allowing them more time to fulfill their promise.

They do not interfere with shifts in the social dynamics of the mortal world, the power play that is as much a part of the song of the universe as a breath taken in the night. Instead, up in the sky, they hear the voices of the dragons as they pass by the mountain at a height where the people far below can only consider them a shadow. They are there to see the dragons stay, to greet and bid farewell to them a thousand times over a thousand years as they traverse the boundless expanse of the great skies. They are there to see them fill those empty skies with the memory of their vow, leaving great sheets of rain and crashing thunderstorms and gentle drizzles in their wake, ever-present in the skies as they uphold their promise. They leave only to fulfill theirs, to serve the new life their vow brought into the desert by serving the people who live in the shadow of the dragons, of their mountain; to protect against the resentful spirits of the natural world, and to nurture life in the desert as they were granted their own.

They speak to us, this story says. They guard our skies like a promise, like they have done for a thousand years, since Han Xiu first made his vow. We carry it with us in our blood; we hear it in the river of energy, the way truth echoes down through time as a memory. It is held here at the edge of the sky. As long as we are here, they will remain. And as long as they remain, there will be rain in the desert.

---

"So you see, I have to ask—why a desert?"

The stranger turns briefly backwards, gazing out over the soft divots of their footsteps in the sand—then upward, to the vacant boundary of the empty sky.

"Oh, I don't know," she says. A crooked, tranquil smile crosses her face. Her hair billows, gentle and supine in the dry heat. "But it's warm. And there's nothing here—nothing else. Just the warmth, and that's not nearly hot enough to hurt us."

---

But we need to do something. Jindi's blade sings as it meets her opponent's over and over, an ever-modulating note. She leaps in tandem with her senior, their steps clinking musically over the cobblestones of the cloud-rimmed training grounds, the two of them dancing past each other to the tune of their strange song. Their skills are balanced, a push-and-pull drawn naturally towards equilibrium; Zhao Libing leaps for her and she twists past him, letting her momentum drag her in a graceful arc away and back, slung inexorably back into his orbit. A-Xuan won't say it, but she doesn't like it either—first we're leaving more and more as more and more people need help, and suddenly we're locking down altogether?

What can you do, Jindi? Libing's sword threads through the air with an expert hand, sleek and gentle; Jindi's own sword barely manages to meet it with a playfully admonishing flick, swerving it dangerously away. You've barely been to the next town, and you still haven't been allowed into the courtyard—

—yeah, you'd think they'd let more of us in, if things have gotten so bad. Jindi pounces on Libing while he steadies his blade again, unleashing a quick flurry of sharp strikes that bear down mercilessly—Libing leaps back, his long hair falling briefly into his face at the sudden change in direction, meeting her blow for blow. Her breath is coming harshly now, the two of them finally beginning to feel the effects of their battle on their superhuman stamina; she punctuates each word with a forceful swing, her frustration channeled effortlessly through her sword. What did the dragons say to change the elders' mind, anyway? Has the war really gotten so awful? A-Xuan won't tell me anything about it, she just makes faces and goes limp on me whenever I ask.

Libing's stance shifts; he pitches suddenly, some complicated flip that tangles her sword hopelessly in his, sending it careening out of her hand with a sharp jerk so it skitters over the training ground. His eyes study her for a moment, luminous and wavering like still pools of water, his presence always a cool balm.

Don't get too involved in worldly affairs, Jindi, he says. There's a faint wrinkle framing his placid smile, a telltale sign of stress. As dashixiong, Libing has responsibilities and hears things Jindi doesn't get to; if he wants to dissuade her, he's going about it the wrong way. The dragons stay in the skies for a reason. There will always inevitably be war; we cannot enter this one unless we are prepared to immerse ourselves in all of them.

Well, we're not dragons. Jindi glares without heat, stomping stubbornly over to her blade and sheathing it with a noisy clatter. And I don't know much about the barbarian north or what they're doing here, but I do know that we're supposed to help people with the things they can't save themselves from, and just because it's an army and not a yao—

People are resilient. Libing closes his eyes, his voice radiating the sort of unbothered calm that makes Jindi want to fight him all over again just to draw a tangible emotion out of him. Not individuals, perhaps, but people. They will be alright—as long as the dragons are here to bring rain, they'll be alright. That's what we need to focus on right now.

Something about his last statement tremors through Jindi, a disturbance at the edges of a carefully-constructed web.

Zhao-ge, she says, her voice sharp like a blade. What aren't you telling me?

I don't know, Jindi. His smile quirks briefly—a change in stance—and he parries. Truly. Having more information just makes things more vague, sometimes. But I know that this is what has to be done for now.

You and A-Xuan, both of you—stubborn like rocks. And Gao-laoshi will only say it's nothing to worry about. The elders don't seem concerned, but there is an edge to the monastery, a faint echo of ringing metal through the air like the aftermath of a sparring session. Her grandmother, at least, is just as annoyed as her, even if she also remains tight-lipped. If I could just be allowed into the courtyard, none of you would have to keep secrets from me and I would know.

Libing shakes his head slowly, stepping forward. He places one hand on her hair; Jindi ducks her head obligingly, scowling up at him through the strands that fall into her eyes. That edged smile is back, laced with that faint furrow of unease.

If hearing the dragons gave me a satisfactory answer, he says gently, I would pass it along to you in a heartbeat. If it made this easy, or put us at ease, or wrapped everything up, I would tell you that it did and tell you what they said.

Jindi smirks at him defiantly, eyes narrowing suspiciously. Promise, da-ge?

Easily, he says, his response so simple and plain she can't help but believe him. He removes his hand, tilting his head helplessly at her. But it doesn't. Sometimes, it just makes things worse. The dragons are celestial, Jin-mei—but they're bound here by the same promise we are. And just like us, being here doesn't mean they can fix everything—sometimes, like us, they can't really do anything. But we're keeping the promises we can, okay? That's what I can guarantee you.

As with all their sparring, he wins comprehensively.

You're getting older, Jindi, Libing says. He tilts his head to contemplate her; Jindi straightens imperceptibly, drawing herself to her full height on the golden training ground of her childhood. Your heart is in the right place. You feel the life of things strongly; goodness knows Gao-laoshi is in hysterics daily over the strays you keep bringing in from the woods. A little discipline and patience, that's all—you need to learn how to live with disappointment. Once you know how to accept the things you can't handle or won't know instead of becoming agitated about them, then you'll be prepared to hear from the gods.

I'm disappointed every time you guys tell me I'm not ready, Jindi argues back. I've had enough disappointments for a lifetime, don't you think?

And look how well you're dealing with it. No, I mean a real one. Libing doesn't look happy about it. Once you've had that, you'll be ready.

---

They come to a stop here, in the middle of the desert.

"Disappointment." The stranger tilts her head. Her eyes are vacant and inquisitive; they are entirely devoid of intent, both ill or otherwise. They instead have the blank, non-judgemental curiosity of a mildly bemused animal; she reminds Jindi of an owl. "Do you think that's the right word?"

Under the bright sun of a desert, it's easy to imagine for a second that she's back in the Jianghu—back in that strange land of sand, wandering in a daze through the half-living remains of cities killed too suddenly and inexplicably to truly be considered dead. The blur and burn of sand in her nose, on her hands; the barren sky that held no shadow; the heat, always that same dry heat. It sat on her skin and it flayed her until she was dry, and still she walked—and she walked—and she is still to this day walking through desert sand.

"No," she says. Disappointment is not the right word for it. No one word is enough. "But, well—Libing is human. He makes mistakes. I've made enough for a lifetime."

"Perhaps this might be one of them." The stranger's suggestion holds no weight, insubstantial as glass; her voice floats like a feather down from every direction, the voice of the desert.

Even now, the desert comes up with new ways of wearing her down. This time, it speaks. It says that perhaps this—perhaps all of this—is a mistake. Walking through desert and dungeon, fighting at the behest of the barbarian king who cleaved the cord of her birthright from the universe, killing the remnants of her legacy in blood and metal and remaking them slowly beyond recognition or understanding in the gauntlet of his making, all to follow the voice of a dead god here to the center of a conjured illusion. All to be here, to hear a voice she has always known cannot speak to her. Something that will not give her closure or comfort or even happiness.

"No," Jindi decides, her voice a blade. It flashes in the glare of the desert sun, piercing through the illusion with a steel that can only come from something real. "This one isn't."

Energy flows like a river down through time, the cascade of the universe coaxed by gravity toward its rightful place. Those places, like the course of time, cannot always be kind—like war, like death, like an endless trek through a desert with no recourse and no safety. But they land where they land. Sometimes, they land in disappointment, in erasure—and other times, they end with rain pouring impossibly into the desert.

Regardless of which this is—regardless of what is next—it is that same river that brought her here. No matter how it ends, it is no mistake.

"...I like you, traveler." The stranger smiles, turning out briefly towards the great endless sprawls of rich gold and deep blue. "I chose this desert for myself, you know—it seemed like a change of pace in the middle of Charles' cold stone prison."

Jindi nods. She'd thought, at first, that she'd be thoroughly done with deserts after that horrific trek through a homeland changed beyond recognition or understanding.

She knows better now—that even emptied, that sky is still the sky that remembers the memory of water. That there is always something worth salvaging, even in the unrecognizable.

"I chose to answer the call of this dream, and I have been here for longer than I care to remember." The stranger's voice is faraway and wistful, caught in a waking memory. "I don't regret it; I would never dishonor it by calling it a mistake, same as you. But I am grateful, all the same, to know that it is possible for..."

The stranger cuts off abruptly, her sentence hanging uncertain and half-finished in the air. When she continues, she continues with a seeming non-sequitur.

"Will you make me a promise, traveler?"

The significance is not lost on Jindi: that she is being asked this here, in the middle of the desert, at the end of a journey that led her to the end of the world.

"When this is over, don't stay here." The stranger turns to Jindi with a smile. Her hand comes up for a second, as if she's going to reach for her; there isn't time for Jindi to flinch away or accept her touch before the stranger shakes her head, taking a slight step back. "No matter how your offering is met, no matter what your god chooses—no matter what it is like to speak to a dragon, disappointment or otherwise. Don't stay: not in Nuhan, not in this dungeon, not even in my world to see Charles in his moment of defeat." She tilts her head, her gaze listing upward to the empty sky. "I would let you stay if you asked. It might even make you happy for a while. But you were right, when you said you didn't think you would do so. You shouldn't."

The stranger's features are still a haze, her dark hair expanding as it rolls out in hypnotic waves like a deep sleep. The strange silhouette speaking to her is as lifeless as ever; instead, Jindi looks out to the desert, spreading her fingers slightly to feel the air as it hangs heavy in her palms. The distant ambient energy of the stranger lingers at the edge of the horizon, the far reaches of her web still weaving itself on the edges of Jindi's consciousness. She reaches for it with her mind, rooting gently through the flavor of the stranger's magic to find the human at its source, the bare flicker of another person.

The stranger, whoever she is, is far from this place. Jindi is still alone.

But her magic wraps around her, dry heat like a heavy blanket, a weight as solid as sand.

"I promise," Jindi says quietly.

"Good." The stranger pauses—and then, with that same uncharacteristic shyness from the very beginning, sighs. "It will be good to know, when I am finished, that one can still find a way out of the desert and toward rain."

Jindi raises her head to look up at the empty blue sky, clasping the new promise made under it solemnly into her heart. No clouds herald it, no rain in any literal sense; it's a promise made in a dream, a promise that does not hold any weight in this false world where the only energy is that of a single stranger. There is no real sky to remember, no clouds to fill a dream.

But it was true when Jindi said it. Perhaps, even if it means nothing to her, it will be the type of truth that saves.

Removing the bag on her waist for a second time is physically unsettling; she has gotten used to its constant presence to her side, accommodating for the weight of a thousand voices pressed fiercely to her body. There is a moment of vertigo and loss, a shift in the center of her universe; she is forced to re-balance herself, stumbling in an unmoored moment of displacement.

The pure call of the dragon's energy is a slipstream around her, a single current that engulfs her completely. She bathes her furled edges in the light of it, the torrential force of a single note, the landing place she has been promised. This is her, all around them; this is her, after so long.

Inside the bag, a thousand voices falter, wholly immersed in the presence they have been crying out for. After so long asking only for her, their sheer magnetic affinity finding the note of this voice across two kingdoms and leagues of sand and stone, even they are struck silent at finally being allowed the presence of her—at finding rain, after years of baying in the desert.

The bag in her hand trembles for a single suspended moment—the leather wavers and surrenders to the force of the universe, slipping away in the inexorable gravitation of twinned energies to their rightful place as it dissipates harmlessly to dust.

In a false world with a false sun, the dragon's pearl inside swallows the colors of the world in a light so blinding it rends a hole into illusion.

The dry heat of the desert swells around the bright gap in the universe, the condensed heat of a white star held in Jindi's hands; the atmosphere flickers into living warmth, waves of heavy air settling over her skin and sluicing sand in whipping sheets. The false world is built of glass, woven together in a translucent web of fine thread; the infinite light of the pearl refracts through every delicate facet of every dimension, swallowing the canvases of gold and blue in a wild swirl of fierce color so hopelessly entangled it shatters the world into kaleidoscopic geometry.

Deep in the heart of the star, on the other side of the hole ripped through the universe, there are a thousand voices spilling out from a vast sea of celestial power like so much light. The pearl fills the false desert, water in a bowl, a torrent of echoes from a thousand dragons who once had the same overpowering force of presence as the dragon whose energy they stand in now. They spill out in a tumult, each one a screaming song strong enough to sway the flow of the universe: the voices of dragons taken by blood and metal, the voices of dragons lost to the torpor and tragedies of fate, the voices of dragons who went peacefully to their eternal rest, of dragons who long ago descended from the heavens and rose from the seas to answer the call of a single monk in a barren wasteland. Once, each of them had been a force of nature in their own right, their celestial energy a river rushing to the ocean. Now, even gone, the evidence of them remains—canyons etched into the world, memories held in the sky.

The echoing remnants of their consciousness flows always, inexorably, towards their rightful place down through time—toward the very last of them.

They strain for her, for what remains of them; for some real, living thing in the flow of a world that rushes past them, an energy they can no longer call to them. Every dragon has a pearl, and every pearl connects them to the echoing remnants of their kin, what remains of them in the flow of time when their source has long since gone dry. The distant clamor of their voices follows their blood, passed on like an ancient promise in a desert: to their sons, then theirs, all the way down to the landing place. To here and now, where there is only one of them left.

After so long separated from their rightful place by her side, being bathed in her presence sweeps them like sand out into the sea. They surrender to her presence, voices spreading many-limbed through the rush of her energy, reaching for her like a man for rain.

The shape of their longing has meaning in the world of a single stranger's mind; her human magic bends to the shape of a god's will, even a dead one. As their voices surge, the threaded fragments of the false world weave into the shape of their desire, a tessellated amalgamation of alien architecture coalescing into a suspended staircase funneled upward into the sky.

The note of the living dragon's energy, sweet and true and surrounding, wavers briefly.

A hundred years ago, in a monastery on top of a mountain, Jindi remembers being desperate to talk to a god—of being young and brash and too large for her own body, needing beyond need to commune with something larger than herself. She remembers sneaking over the wards of the monastery with her friends, fording her way through the forests and footpaths of her willowy mountain home and pressing her hands to the earthen walls of the courtyard where land met sky, feeling the distant echo of the dragons in their flight through the arrays she could not slip through. The way the dragons had looked up close, had looked from a distance: the world broken in half, their power rewriting the sky, their maelstroms of color too much for her mind to hold even from afar.

There would have been a ceremony. She would have recited prayers; would have been dressed in formal robes, would have been purified and filled with the energy of her elders and teachers and disciples, of her home. In a world where the river of the universe flowed smoothly, she would have carried their voices with her when she met them the way blood carries memory. She would have entered into those earthen gates with the living. Instead, all she has is the memory of the dead written in her blood; the only god to meet is one who has the same.

But the river of the universe has brought her here, instead—brought Jindi alone, a lone traveler in a wasteland at the end of the world. And here—just like Han Xiu at the very beginning, promising the only world Jindi has ever known into existence—in the middle of the desert, as she raises her head to the sky, Jindi can feel the celestial draw of a god waiting for her in the great blue.

The song of its power flows with the voice of a thousand dead gods, molding around the pearl in Jindi's hands. It washes her clean like rain.

It is the unmistakable sound of a dragon in the desert.

---

Someday you will meet them. Jindi's grandmother's paper-thin skin cups her cheek. Jindi is young, barely fifty-five, and desperate to see the face of a god. It doesn't matter when, my girl. It doesn't matter. Do you understand? Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now...even if you never see them in this lifetime, you will find your way to them in the end. It is the promise we hold in our blood. Because that is why we're still here, even after Han Xiu is long gone. Time flows like water through us—blood flows like water through time—and this is how we keep the things that are important alive. This is how we keep our history alive, even after everything we know is forgotten. The river of time does not flow backwards. Nothing can be undone. But that is a blessing, Jindi, the biggest blessing we have—because it means that no matter where it washes us, no matter if we forget, we cannot change the source of our stream. Even when the memory is gone, even when the mind is changed beyond recognition or understanding, there is the part of your blood that once knew the face of a dragon. It would know it even at the end of the world.

We are not gods, my girl. But we do not need to be, to carve our legacy into the river of the world. It does not matter what we have become or what is left: as long as dragons are in our skies, we will remain. And as long as we are here to remember, there will be dragons.

---

The staircase is gossamer and glass, an abstract and architecturally impossible structure of shattered color and wispy light given form by pure determination. A thousand voices buoy it into the air in a rising chorus, soaring sound; they rend the fabric of the false world open with the trapped echo of a thousand gods, the afterimage of their desperation trembling to this moment in the universe, here, dancing along the tenuous thread of a broken web. A mirage of their celestial energy would not be enough to give their words form in reality, but here in a sorceress' dream it is enough to raise a staircase under Jindi's feet, coaxing it into the sky.

Like walking through a desert, like descending into a dungeon: Jindi climbs, drawn by a force that is more than gravity. Energy flows, buoyed upward by the rising chorus of a thousand dead echoes. She's here. She's here. She's here. At the end of the world, in a place that does not exist, they speak it into existence.

Past the dome of the sky, past the gold and blue, right into the heart of that pale white sun—Jindi walks through the bright glory and crisp light of a perfectly frozen afternoon. On each floating step, every fragile inch—

—in the heart of the sky that still holds a memory—

—she is here.

---

The clay of the courtyard walls cannot hold the memory of power the way the sky does, the way a dragon's pearl carries the echo of their dead. The courtyard is merely stone and clay, earth without memory.

There is only Jindi, at a place where the earth meets the sky, in a pavilion where gods once touched stone. The gaping wound of their absence rends the universe here, settling stark and raw over stone and dust, a moment as final as a promise etched into the sky.

And here—in blood and metal, in the sterile suspension of a world with no sound, in silence like a scream, Jindi finds it.

With the skies barren, the dragons wiped from the Jianghu, the river of the universe is flowing back to its natural state. Even now the winds are bringing back the greedy embrace of a lightless sand, the return of a desert after a thousand years in exile. Even now Jindi's mountain is being claimed by the sinking dunes, drawn gently under a dust that takes like bitter ash.

Without a god to change the course of the river of the universe, there is no more rain; the sky can hold only memory.

But here—where the earth meets the sky, even if only does so for a moment longer, even if it can only do so for the memory of a promise—Jindi is alive, the echo of a promise older than herself still folded in her blood.

The universe flows in balance, in tandem; there is no bargain broken, not when memory keeps the bargains alive long after reason and recognition have buried them in the shadows of time. Eventually, at the end of the world, everything is set right.

Here, in a mountain at the end of everything, Jindi finds the other end of her forefathers' promise upheld. In a courtyard built to commune with the celestial, she finds the voice of a thousand dead gods. And those voices—the very reality of a dragon's pearl, still spilling light in the darkness when it should have been cut down with every other—say: the gods are still alive.

She is still alive, they say, a light that fills the darkness like an empty bowl. It is so bright in her hands she cannot look at it. It is so bright in her hands that it consumes her fingers, consumes everything, filling the courtyard with a thousand echoes even as its walls shudder into dust. She is a part of the flow of the universe, somewhere we can no longer follow; she is cleaved from us, from memory and history, from the parts of herself that flowed through time to reach here before she was born. She is unmoored, a god without self, without place or past.

In the ruins of her own place, of her own past, Jindi—who has nothing of herself left save what little memory she can unspool from her blood and trace backwards through a river that only flows forwards—is dust in an endless drought.

But she is here. The pearl is light and fire, the crisp froth of a river in a dry heat. She is still here.

And in the dead heart of blood and metal, Jindi says the first words she will ever say to her dead gods.

"Where?"

Somewhere, it says. Somewhere in this great green world. Somewhere across the desert, somewhere under the earth—but Jindi doesn't know that yet, not until the river of time runs a little further. Somewhere.

The universe shakes apart around her. Her dead are swept away in the flow of time, of energy as it slips endlessly away towards its rightful resting place, silt carried downstream in dark water; what little of it Jindi can grasp in her mind seeps unerringly from her fingers no matter how hard she reaches. What is left is barely enough find herself, barely enough to push her to her feet—barely enough to construct conviction out of the scant remnants of dust.

Alone in the desert, a monk makes a promise to the great gods.

"I will find her," she says, her hands gripped white around the pearl. The earth shivers, old stone cracked open to hold the memory of her vow. "I will find her, and I will return you to her."

Somewhere in the desert there is the memory of a promise a monk has made to the great gods, to the shattering memory of celestial power. It is the type of memory that echoes down through the universe, that is carved into the world even when the story of it has changed beyond recognition or understanding. It is the type of promise that speaks to a truth—the type of truth that calls someone over wastelands, that brings rain into the sky. It is the type of truth that saves, even as the mountains crumble and the pavilions of old gods become dead stone. The type of truth that saves, despite everything, even at the end of the world.

It says: I will find her, and I will return her to you.

And it says: I will find her, and you will be returned to me.

---

There is no magic in the world—no cursed fog or blood-deep memory, no conjured desert or ancient echo—that could ever have held the presence of a god.

The energy of the universe in Jindi's body is captured light, her position in the universe purified and refined into a humming note in the chorus of the world, as pure and clear as silver and glass. Even here, even without history or memory, even without the part of her carried forth by blood through time, the celestial power of a dragon is the end of everything. Complete culmination: the world is dust in a supernova, swallowed by light and sound and color and the roar of a power that sweeps storms into wastelands. Even the echoes of a thousand gods are swept away like a cobweb, the glass and ether of a single sorceress' imagined world unraveled into atoms. Holding the sight of the dragon in her mind is both impossible and inevitable, the individual aspects seared into Jindi's body: antlers in arcing parabolas to cradle the curve of the world, gold beyond gold and green beyond green in the primordial haze of its carp-bright scales. It bleeds boundlessly through the universe, its mane and whiskers a yawning universe of stars and skies. The celestial energy of it has gravity enough to change the flow of the universe, to erase a desert in thunder. Sound and color, breaking and remaking beyond comprehension or recognition or understanding.

She stirs, an entire ocean condensed into the violent and roiling white of her frothing eyes.

"Little one."

The people of Jindi's monastery only ever touched the fringes of a dragon's thoughts with the edges of their energy, an ambient awareness of their being as it passed from a distance. In comparison, the voice of a living god as it descends into Jindi's mind is a cataclysm, the end of the world in radiant white. It floods Jindi in arcs of fire and glory, drowning her furled edges in the apocalyptic force of a god.

"You came to bring me something," she says.

A dungeon ago—a desert ago, a hundred years ago—Jindi might have said yes. The pearl at her hip sighs, a sweet rhythm flowing in the undercurrent of the dragon's presence: yes, yes, yes.

"No." Her voice is soundless in the presence of the gods, the faintest curl of awareness on the edge of the dragon's great song.

Jindi steps forward, placing the pearl at the dragon's clawed feet. Even here, even in comparison to the dragon itself, the pearl is the brightest thing in the room—as talons sharp enough to rend rain through a desert sky curl over it it pulses, thrumming to life with the delayed pulse of an exploding star. As it returns to its rightful place something twists, some small part of the universe snapping into place, the eternal force of endless gravity satiated at last.

This is not a place where the earth meets the sky. This is not the courtyard of the gods. There is no promise in the false desert to enshrine this place into the universe, to carve for it a memory that can withstand even blood and metal. This is no home: not for either of them.

But like those places, there is no burden or debt here. Like a temple, like a mountain—like a place where a promise is made and upheld, even in the wake of blood and metal, even if it must be through the voices of the dead—there is no gift given that is not a gift itself. There is no promised rain without devoted worship and no worship without rain. It was as her grandmother said, the assurance of balance in the universe: as long as Jindi is here, the blood of a monk who made a promise in the desert to the celestial dragons in the sky, there are still dragons somewhere on the great green earth. And as long as there is a dragon, there will be the blood of a monk who promised to honor them at the end of the world—there will be monks to cross the desert.

As long as the dragon is here, Jindi will be too.

"No," she says again, sinking to her knees in the desert. This is the true miracle of the promise her progenitor offered to the gods a thousand years ago, the miracle the dragons ripped into the sky for him with their claws. Just as a god cannot survive without being remembered in human blood, just as a human cannot survive without rain, the promise seals them both permanently into existence, binding them to this place in time. In this act, there is something for everyone. Even with nothing, even at the end of the world, there is enough to share.

The dragon watches her, the weight of the ocean in one inexorable eye. Jindi's mind trembles, balking as it struggles to comprehend the full attention of a god.

"I am thankful," she says. The weight of her thanks is a starburst that shakes the earth, a gratitude too terrible to bear. "But I am alone, little one, and alone I am nothing. There is nothing here for you.."

"Even so," Jindi says, her lips moving even though no sound reaches her ears. She presses her forehead to the ground in supplication, in deference: a monk in the desert, a disciple to the gods. She has been alone, has been nothing; would perhaps be in a warm place in the desert rejecting the memory of a promise in her blood in favor of the nothingness that cannot burn, had it not been for the voices of a dead god calling her over the desert. "Even so, I have something to ask of you anyway."

"Are you going to make me a promise? I have nothing to give you in return."

"No." This time the word breaches the universe, rending it with claws of Jindi's own; the flicker of Jindi's light cracks the soaring stream of the dragon's energy, etching itself into memory and blood. It breaks the false sky; hairline cracks form in the glass of the world, fine powder falling like rain as the gossamer web of foreign sorcery trembles. "No promise. I have come, great dragon, to ask you for a favor."

---

Laoshi, she says. How will I know when I am ready to speak to the gods?

You won't, her teacher says. There is a pause, one too long for the boundaries of her adolescent patience—and then there is an answer, one so forgiving and apologetic she does not recognize it as such until too long afterward. His words echo down through the years like water falling, like the remnant of a dead god—Jindi carries it in her blood, even when the source of it is long dead and buried. She had forgotten it, but it surfaces now, woven inexorably into the river of her energy.

There are some things you can never be ready for, Jindi, he says. There are things in the river of time that cannot be borne, that we were never supposed to withstand. A journey through a desert. The voice of a god. Blood and metal, cutting down the gods. And she is still here. To be heard by a god is an impossibility we could only have manifested by a miracle.

There is no possible way to prepare, he says. You will never be ready.

But that is okay, he says. You carry the memory of it in you always. You have known how since before you were born. When the time comes, you will speak anyway.

---

When the sorcerers of Nuhan wove their unnatural calamity of blood and metal—when they brought it to the crest of a mountain, when they used it to slaughter the gods—they wiped a chorus from the river of the universe, stopping it suddenly at what was always meant to be and would always ever be its end. As time flowed on past that end, only one voice emerged from that broken song to rejoin the world: Jindi, alone.

And the same is true for the dragon. Both of them, abandoned and unmoored without any hope of relief. Both of them, alone in the desert, forever.

Even in the presence of each other, you are alone, said the stranger. And, I think, afraid.

She had looked into Sam's steady face, his glove on the door, and thought: it hurts less to be alone in earnest than to be alone with someone beside you.

She was meant to hear the voice of her gods in a courtyard, on the edges of their consciousness in the safe harbor of an immutable memory. She was meant to know the gods as easily and simply as a passing thought, minds exchanged in tandem—to speak to the gods as they swept past in their trek through the skies, a fleeting and total understanding. To hold the awareness of them within herself, the way she holds the energy of the world, until they passed the boundaries of her awareness out of sight; to know them the way she knew the air she breathed, a stranger passing briefly through her in the night.

"I cannot know you the way I was meant to," Jindi says. Above her bowed head she can hear the sky breaking open with the lilting crack of broken glass, pure and true as silver; she can feel the stranger's energy strain to keep the rest of the world intact under the weight of her request, her magic the churn of silt swirling in a river. "You have been changed, beyond recognition and understanding."

Once, Jindi was a disciple and the dragon was a god. And now: they are both alone, and afraid.

"But so have I," she says.

In a false desert, a monk asks for a favor from the last of the gods.

It is a difficult favor, a painful one; but time is already painful. There is something to be found within pain, if one is willing.

"I made a promise to leave this place," she says. The sky creaks above, their memory etched into their exit. "And for my favor, I ask you to come with me."

---

There is a lost memory buried deep in Jindi's blood that knows what it is like to kneel in a desert at the edge of death, in a moment when you are alone and you are nothing, and beg for absolution from any god who will hear you.

There is a voice in the heart of a blinding star clenched in a dragon's claw that knows what it is like to hear that voice—to let it call you across the desert to a place with no rain, to let it make you a gentle promise in exchange for absolution—and listen.

---

"Where will we go?"

"Where we are needed."

The dragon turns. The great weight of her mind is inexorable, gravitational; Jindi can read the stream of her energy, allowing it to mingle with the flow of her own. What more could the world need from us, the dragon's mind whispers, the sentiment poured fourth like bile from a lanced wound, bitter darkness tainting the empty warmth drawn tight around its scars like a cloak. Jindi opens her hands, lets the desert air slide hot and dry through her fingers in explanation. Wherever the flow of the world leads them, wherever their landing place is; wherever the universe needs them to go, leads them in its rushing current, they will follow.

The ocean roils in the dragon's eyes, tidal movement. "What will we do?"

"Nothing," Jindi says. There are no more voices to call her. There is nothing more to be done. "We will do nothing. But we will be here."

Wherever they go they will be here, somewhere in this world—and in blood and metal and glass, that is miracle enough.

I will not ask anything else of you, Jindi thinks, her thoughts pouring into the vast chasm of the dragon's infinite mind like granules of sand into an eternal ocean. She drops the broken pieces of herself salvaged from dust and glass, sacrifices them to those waves. It was like her teachers, her seniors, her friends all said: they flow through her into the dragon like a river to its natural end, like a breath passing through her in the night, fleeting and involuntary with no space for any preparation or planning to mask their raw truth. I cannot know you the way I was meant to, not when you could no longer know me—not when I barely know myself—but the shape of our loneliness is the same. I know it the same as you do and I carry it the same as you do and I fear it as much as I fear losing it, the same—the same—is it the same? Maybe it isn't. Maybe it is, but that isn't enough. But maybe it is. Maybe I know it the same as you do and maybe I am the only one who can, and maybe that is enough.

A stranger in the desert with the power to weave a world from her mind had said she thought it might be.

The current of the dragon's energy shifts, sweeping Jindi helplessly along with its whims, catching her in its gentle lull. Our loneliness has the same source, the dragon is thinking—and it is afraid. Jindi can feel it here, in that same thoughtless flow. But you cannot tell it to me the way I hear it. Even together, we will still be alone—and I will remember, and it will hurt.

I know, Jindi says. The thought is unbearably and unspeakably bleak, a mournful cry like the desperate, hopeless wail of a thousand gods long dead crying for the blessing of peace through the desert. There is a peace in warmth, in being nothing. But now that she is here, they have lost that chance. But I can tell it to you just the same. And when it hurts most—when what I want more than anything is to forget, you can tell it to me too, so that I always remember. So that I I never forget why I must remember it anyway.

Shards of glass plummet from the ceiling, the world splitting at its threadbare seams. The sky peels open in earnest, broken beneath the anticipation of a promise that brings rain into the desert, under the weight of memory, under the root of a truth that saves.

The favor is as much of a burden for Jindi as it is for the dragon. It is not light or easy, no longer as simple as god joining man in a courtyard on a mountain, no longer the solemn satisfaction found in fulfilling a promise that lives as much in the sky as it does in the truth of your own blood. Together here, together out there, together anywhere in the world, they will still be alone, broken from their blood and the flow of their past—and it will still hurt more to be alone together than it will to be alone in earnest.

Being together hurts because it means knowing that you are never enough—that fundamentally you are not enough, will never be enough, can never be enough. It means knowing that there will never be enough again, not anywhere in the world, not even in the mind of something that you once thought might be, that once was supposed to be; it means carrying that knowledge with you everywhere you go, written as surely in your blood as a promise. It means reaching desperately backwards through the river of passing time even as it moves further from you—means grasping some remnant of it and realizing even while it is within your grasp that it cannot live up to what it might have been, and that you are that remnant for someone else.

It would hurt less to forget. Remembering is painful, is pain; remembering what you are means reconciling what you are not with what you desperately want to be with what you should be. It would be—a relief, almost—to forget and be forgiven for forgetting. To be freed from memory and history, from the promises in the blood that can only bring pain, from the voices of a thousand dead gods calling you across the desert; to stay in the darkness of a clenched fist, somewhere warm where you are no one and nothing, and let the river of time sweep you gently away from the remnants of the past.

But grasping for those remnants means something.

It is why the favor is as much a favor as it is a curse, as much a blessing for Jindi as it is for her god, as much a gift as it is a burden. Because even if reaching deep into the parts of yourself that are folded into your blood only proves that it is not enough, even if extracting them and examining them only proves that too much is lost, it means something to find it there at all. To reach out in the darkness and touch a memory is a gift. For the sky to hold the memory at all—for Jindi to look at the sky and know that there were once dragons, know where they came from and what they meant, is still something precious. The miracle that cuts like a knife is still—impossibly, blessedly—a miracle, and it is still hers.

Jindi cannot forget, can never forget. She wouldn't even if she could, because remembering means something: that the river of time exists. It means that you came from somewhere that meant something. It means knowing where you come from. It means you carry something with you, that you carry the weight of a thousand years and a thousand voices at your hip, in your mind, in the way you carry a sword and address your elders and eat your meals and bow before your gods.

Remembering means something. Remembering the forefathers and traditions and gods of her past means something. Even if they are changed beyond recognition and understanding. Even if there are no longer gods.

It means that they were here.

She is strange in that she is like you, the stranger said.

Jindi reaches for her, for the mind of the last of her gods, for the vain hope of an answering promise in a desert at the end of the world.

The dragon's mind is rain and water, a song in the river-rush of the endless universe—and Jindi is swept up in it like silt in a tide, like a promise folded into blood as it flows down through time to the end of everything—caught in the joy and acceptance and pain and inevitability of a promise that was always meant to be here as the universe carries them both towards what is ever inevitable.

The memory of it sears into the river of the universe like the sky of a false world as it cracks open to something terrible and cold and undeniably real, like the sky of a desert as it gives way to the rending and apocalyptic absolution of a truth that somehow, miraculously, still saves.

---

---

The vassal state of the desert south was once a proud country known as the Jianghu, overtaken in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war that decimated their gods and transformed them from a temperate and vibrant empire to an arid wasteland seemingly overnight. Their skies, once filled with the mercy and majesty of their gods, are now empty; as time flows ever-forward down through the universe and even the legends of their faded glory brings only pain and bitterness, the legends of the gods have dried alongside the lands, reduced quickly to a memory held only by their empty skies.

But even now—even reduced to a handful of outposts and villages scattered through the desert, even under the passive control of a Nuhan-controlled puppet state, even changed beyond recognition and understanding—there are some things that survive. There are still remnants worth reaching for. Even with the shape of the land changed, people find happiness in the same places: a smile from a teacher, a friend's face in the window, good food eaten on a warm day. Even in a new world, their blood remembers the memories it hurts too much to reach for. Even as the song of their energy changes, the same voices still sing them.

And even though they no longer tell the old stories of their dragons, they tell new ones in their stead. Even now, beyond recognition or understanding in the middle of a desert, there are still stories worth telling. Still new stories to be told.

In taverns and inns and by fireplaces in the wilderness, they tell the story of a woman who wanders the lands of the Jianghu, walking aimlessly and endlessly over the vast desert. They say she travels by herself—orders only one meal, asks for only one room. She travels with no one. No matter where she goes or who she meets, she is always invariably alone.

Even so, they say, she is haunted.

They say she is stalked by a monster. They say her shadow is alive. They say her spirit takes the shape of a giant in the sky, a cloud that darkens the earth wherever her feet fall so she can never walk in the sun. They say that wherever she goes, she is followed by the ghost of a serpentine beast in the heavens—that she cannot escape it no matter where she goes in this great land, no matter how many times she circles the Jianghu. They say that no matter how far she walks, even though she travels by herself, she is never alone. That no matter how far she runs, a lone figure isolated in the desert, she will never be alone again.

They say that wherever she goes, she brings rain.