A mere decade ago, Jindi had lived in a monastery on a mountain: a place where the earth met the edge of the sky, where the very air you breathed was a stranger passing briefly through you in the night. It was there that she had first learned to feel the sprawling energy of the world as it expanded around her, where she had first acknowledged herself as a part of it and learned to alchemize that energy within the vessel of her body. Attuning herself to it had unfurled her like a flower, bathing the shadowed human edges of herself in the infinite chorus of light that was the web of the entire world.

And then the war had come.

The world is still the same. War could not change it—was a part of it, as natural and inevitable as breathing. The energy of the world still flows in the same patterns, a river without end. But Jindi is different now: a fist clenched over a pearl, hardness in the dark. Ever since the war, the chorus of the world has modulated to a key beyond her understanding, a light that is a stranger. And ever since the war, she has only allowed herself to listen to one song within that strange new chorus—the single wailing note, the one only she is left to hear, the only one that is not changed beyond recognition or understanding. The same mournful cry, over and over: she's here.

Here. Here. Here.

It isn't faith that makes her stand after her knees have gone numb, that scrapes one foot over the still dust of another in a prison under the earth. Not hope or obligation or duty or expectation; pure inertia drives her forward, silt caught in the descending energy of a river-song with no other audience.

She is here.

It isn't sorrow or anger or vengeance or righteousness that lifts her eyes from the ground, that carries her feet through the darkness. It's that even though there's nothing left of her, Jindi's still here. That even though there's nothing left of her, a thousand voices are still here. That even though there's nothing left of her, she's here, here, here.

The simple truth of the matter is that a mere decade ago, Jindi had lived in a monastery on a mountain—and ever since, she has had nowhere else to go but here.

So she goes. What else is there?

—

The door is shuttered by a single ancient padlock, comically simple in comparison to the serpentine lock from before. Jindi pulls a final lockpick from the pack strapped over her chest, her grip heavy with grit as shining silver scrapes into the rusted metal.

She's here.

The pick snakes through the turning cylinders—the lock sighs, surrenders—the lockpick falls from her limp fingers as she pulls open the heavy granite doors, bouncing harmlessly into the dark. The stone grumbles under her touch, a gravelly rasp over the floor as the door opens on redolent waves of heavy darkness.

She's here.

Jindi steps through the empty archway as though hypnotized and the double door grinds shut behind her, leaving her swaying uncertainly in the dizzying void. Total darkness drops over her as gently and silently as a curtain, her senses snuffed out as it washes like a warm wave over her head. And flooding into that silence—nothing.

And then—

—nothing is here.

A force strong enough to be gravity, an instinct deep enough to be survival—blotted from her mind in an instant. It slips from Jindi without fanfare, without the blood and metal and baying carnage of war, cut from her as cleanly and painlessly and cruelly as a passing breath in the night, sand and water, sand and water—

And then nothing is here. And then there is nothing here. Nothing.

No thousand voices, no single note, not even an alien chorus of estranged energy. Not even someone to tell her she's here. The world is still somewhere out there, a phantom echo of the beating universe rattling subliminally through the sweet-smelling vacuum—but it is beyond her reach, far from where she is tucked away where nothing can touch her again. Not gravity or light, not inertia or pain, not acknowledgement, not indifference, not even herself.

The weight at her hip is just a weight, damning in its silence. She is not here. Nothing is here except Jindi, alone—and Jindi has nowhere to go, has nothing left, is nothing at all.

There is no landing. The energy of the universe flows and flows, and it washes her here.

Here she is. And like war, like blood and metal, the universe is cruel: after all this time she's finally here, and it turns out there is nothing here at all.

—

—

Nothing.

—

—

Nothing.

—

—

Nothing.

—

—

Through the darkness, a shaft of light falls on her—cold and alien, a stranger.

"Saints alive, kid, will you stop running off?! I would've gone straight past this door if I hadn't tripped over the damn pick—"

Stone grinds shut over the open doorway, sealing her back into nothingness—and then the nothingness shimmers, wavering uncertainly—and then the world bursts back into existence like water pouring into the desert, the sun slammed into the sky, awareness piercing through Jindi like a javelin.

—here! She's here! Here, not here, not—

The darkness shatters like glass, fine fragments swirling through the insistent press of heavy sour-sweet air coalescing into stone and light; a room materializes around her in rough shapes that sharpen slowly into focus, a vaulted cathedral with sealed stone doors bathed in opaque green light. Dust swirls like a flock of birds in flight before plunging to the ground and compressing into a crumpled bundle: fabric, dark tendrils of hair fanned out over the stone, a sunken figure.

The dark shape is completely unrecognizable to Jindi, but Samgar makes a noise, sharp and inhuman like a thorn extracted from his lungs.

The air is warm, living breath; sweet drafts surge over Jindi in sheets like the gentle lull of an ocean tide. The breeze sweeps over her with a maternal hush, carding through her hair and clothes like a soothing hand as it wraps around itself in glowing columns of glittering multifaceted powder. Dust falls in opaque layers over some translucent being, shimmering softly into form: blazing scales, an elegant whiskered head, curve and coil splaying whisper-silent over the vast expanse of the open room. A golden eye peels open the darkness of the room like a sun in the night sky, bright glory bursting through mottled green.

Jindi's mind swims, straining through the murky light towards awareness. "She's here."

At the same time, from across the room: "ADDY!"

The atmosphere undulates as Jindi and the great head of the dragon turn as one, swelling under the weight of the dragon's movement—Sam is careening toward the bundle on the ground, collapsing as he gathers it greedily into his arms. Jindi blinks as Sam maneuvers the limp body in his clumsy hands, her brain pulled away from each thought in the ebb of the waves of wind pulsing over her—when did Addy get here, how did Addy get here, when did she get here, could that really be—

That strange fragrant tide retreats, tugging gently at her mind the way a receding wave sucks at the shore.

—o, get out, this isn't—

Addy slips like sand through Sam's arms as he stands, stilted and slow. In an incongruously smooth motion that slides through the heavy air like a ripple through water, he draws his greatsword; it holds no light in the green darkness. Soundless, he turns to face the—dragon?

The strange creature turns to face him as Jindi's thoughts tumble, pitching like a boat in a storm on the acrid seas of stinking sweet perfume. Great scales and eyes, its whiskered plumes and the impossible knots of its endless length. It looks right—must be right—but no. Something is wrong: the way it fits in the confines of the room, the way she can hold the image of it in her mind like any other thought—

—ot here!—

The dragon watches impassively as Sam approaches it, the blazing column of his metal armor an avenging flame in the dark. Within the lazy sway of a perfumed breeze, assurance grips Jindi like a cold vice, a strangling riptide: the sudden assurance that she is about to watch a man from Nuhan strike down a dragon in a frenzy of blood and metal, that she is about to watch something slip through her fingers. That she is too late, that she is always too late—

But something is wrong. The silence. The fear is too small, too insignificant to pierce her; it doesn't echo through her in a way that feels real, the way a loss should feel, the way loss resonates down through the web of the universe as it flows through time. The fear from before Sam had entered had been real—had come from her, a fear she carried clenched in the darkness of her furled petals across two countries. In contrast, this fear holds a foreign note; its song holds no power over Jindi, whose soft parts have long since crystallized in the dark pressure of her fists, whose armor has been sanded smooth by a pilgrimage through the desert. Somehow, even as Sam charges recklessly into a wild sprint of sparks and scraped steel, she feels as though this isn't—

—ere!—

—this is not a fear that can paralyze her. She moves on instinct—the sudden displacement of air around her as she darts through empty space douses her with a flash of cold clarity—

The sword swings through the air again with the thunderous, clamoring weight of a church bell; Jindi's boots grind gravel into dust as she lands in front of him, her seam of a sword gnashing against the brute brunt of his in a heavy clang! The full weight of Sam's broadsword reverberates through Jindi as he slams into her, the ringing note of it shivering through her as the endless plane of his great blade vibrates to a stop inches from her face. Behind the heavy blade, Sam's eyes are thrashing, agonized color in the swimming current of restless air around them; his voice is wet and guttural and wrenched from his throat like a bloody limb.

"LET ME KILL IT, JIN—"

"No." Her own voice is star-bright, a sharp flash that flickers through the air like a spark—she grinds the razor edge of her sword against the flat steel of his as he bears down on her, shifting her weight so his blade sits between her eyes. He will have to cleave her in two before she moves—he looks ready to, but Jindi is hard pearl in a fist. The alien screech of metal on metal—always foreign, always a stranger to her—does not ring the way metal should, muffled as though behind a door. Something is wrong—but this is also wrong, is wrong in the truest way Jindi knows. Behind her, the dragon is preternaturally still, but Jindi can feel its eyes on her like a warm breath, like a sweeping curtain. "You can't."

Sam just growls, an inorganic noise of pressure and pain that reverberates the way war-metal should, the seething weight of his will tearing forcefully against her own. Against that solid mass Jindi is dust in wind, feather-light, unmoored without the weight of a thousand voices threading through her. Still she tears her own bloody truth from inside her, salvaging it from the silvery powder of herself and pressing it through the metal of Sam's fury with her gaze alone; her eyes burn in their sockets, unblinking as they meet his, the dry heat of a desert against the raw wound of an open flame. "This is mine."

"AND ADDY IS MINE!" Sam jerks his sword back so suddenly Jindi pitches forward, throwing his entire weight as he swings savagely, blindly, once—twice—Jindi tumbles away, dodges back—metal howls through thick air, inhuman grief ripping through the atmosphere and tearing it jagged and raw like a wound in the earth. Sword metal and armor clang against stone as Sam convulses under the weight of himself; his chest jumps under his jerking breaths as he stumbles. His movements are crude like an automaton, blood made metal as his anger streams from him like a pot boiling over. "A MONSTER, JIN—YOU'D SAVE A MONSTER—"

"It's not—!"

"IT IS!" The last word slams into her alongside his sword as he swings for her again, the mass of him seething as his anger pours from his throat like a column of fire; Jindi crosses her sword and sheath in a wide X and traps his blade in the divot on his brutal downswing, a symbolic rejection made solid in the shape of her weaponry. Sam snarls at her, spit and screams billowing like ash from his mouth. "Whatever you think it is it's a monster now, and if it ever wasn't, if you've ever had an ounce of decency, then whatever you think is yours is dead—so let me bury it, Jin, let me kill it, GOD DAMN YOU!"

A thought wavers through Jindi's mind like a haze: that this is wrong.

—g—

But Sam is wrong too: because even if everything that makes the dragon worth saving is gone, it's still here. Even corrupted, even changed beyond recognition and understanding, even a mindless creature of blood and acid—even a mad monster of metal and savagery—she's here.

—N—

Even if nothing that made her who she was is left, she is here—and that is a truth, the type that resonates through the universe and flows through time. Whether it's the dragon or Jindi herself, both or neither; no matter which is the one that is wrong, no matter how wrong it is, she is here and it means something. Means enough for Jindi to stand, to put her sheath in her belt by the silent pouch at her hip and level her sword at Sam.

It's the type of truth that saves, that sends someone through a desert; it is still fear, but it is a fear that cannot drown her the way the other could. Jindi has buried enough of her dead to know there is no burying the living; that they come back as a ghost, as a traveler, as a vision in the haze. Burying the living only makes them cross deserts to haunt you.

The dragon purrs lazily as her blade steadies straight and true, a warm noise of sweet breath that hangs suspended over them like a cloud. Sam stares, his eyes and snarl alike gaping in a way that warps his features with disbelieving fury.

She could try to explain it to him, but they have never been able to explain themselves to each other. The only words worth sinking in the gulf between them is truth.

"If you want to fight the dragon," she says, "you'll have to fight me first. And you'll have to kill me."

Sam stares at her for a moment before he moves, his metal a rumbling roll like a peal of thunder. He steps toward her; his eyes and mouth are still gnarled open beneath the grate of his helmet, gravity and inertia. Jindi watches him, his sword and the brute muscle of him, a creature of blood and metal, a movement primal and rough like the inevitability of war as time flows down through the universe—

Steel clangs. The sound of it expands as it soaks through the inexorable wash of heavy air, rising like a tide to fill the heavy ocean of herb-scent and mallow. Sam's inhuman hands clamp around her limbs like shackles, their swords screaming as they're tossed aside, lost to the churning waves—Jindi is tossed in the current as he lifts her through the air, his feral face still yawning open with unfurling rage—he snarls with a metal sound as he hurtles them toward the door, slamming them open—

—ot her, not here, get out!

Green glow gives way to a bland torchlight so stark and yellow it freezes them in its washed-out glare. For a few watery minutes they stand suspended in the still air, Sam's hands still frozen on Jindi's arm and neck; purple columns of heavy haze billow up around them in massive, drifting walls of opaque smog.

Clouds of acrid smoke roil on the fringes of their view, a heavy bog that smells of sweet incense and shimmers like an oil slick as it empties from the room behind them and dissipates into the stagnant air. It streams slowly past them in lazy waves; it isn't long until it's merely a thin film of heat-like haze clinging to the stone floor, ticking their ankles as it seeps away and trickles down the gentle slope of the dungeon hallways.

She's here.

Sam's metal fingers uncurl with a sound like rattling coins; Jindi bounces on her heels as she drops to the ground. When she jerks her head to look at him his eyes are still stretched wide and unfocused, his face flexing erratically over harsh breaths.

For a long moment, he says nothing, merely working his jaw as if practicing how to speak again. His dazed expression coalesces into a vague and unfocused anger, a hastily-constructed cover thrown haphazardly over the emotions he'd rather not display.

"...Heard of this before." His throat is raw and rough from their earlier confrontation, syllables still curled on the edges over a murderous snarl. He scowls as he turns to look behind himself, anger trained on the wavering haze still seeping from the room. "Some kinda magic: enchanted herbs from the north, I think. Fog constructs sensory illusions—shows people their worst fears." Sam turns to Jindi again, his eyes harsh even as his mouth softens, smothering any sign of weakness under gruff words and a sharp jerk of his head. "Guess with the two of us it sorta split the difference—"

"You didn't fight it."

"Yeah." Sam shrugs even as he turns his trembling scowl down the hall to stare after the haze as it leeches away, a silent refusal to discuss the subject matter. "Good thing, too, or we probably would've died in there fighting ghosts."

"Or each other," Jindi says before she can second guess herself; the line of Sam's shoulders jump, hackles rising instinctively. She presses on, aiming her words at the back of his head. "You didn't fight me. Or kill me, I mean—or it, or—" Jindi pauses to press both thumbs into the bridge of her nose, pulling as much dead air as she can into her lungs. Even so, that sickly sweetness still lingers in her nostrils; she exhales noisily, a frustrated sigh as she struggles to marshal her words. "—you could've. You could've fought me, but you didn't. I was ready to, but you didn't even try."

"Yeah, I could've." His back is still turned to her, a tense seam. His head shifts as he tilts it cautiously, the knotted tangle of his hair swaying slightly to expose a sliver of his face. "...I was gonna throw you out and go back for it."

But she would have come back in and fought him. She knows it in her bones: that if it had been real it could only have ended with the dragon alive or Jindi dead. For a single moment, even if that moment was a moment shrouded in fog from the rest of the world, it had been real—and Sam had made his choice.

Sam still isn't looking at her, muttering to himself with a determined anger that seems almost self-soothing—but Jindi is looking at him, and for a brief moment of blazing armor-sheened clarity, blood and metal are just blood and metal.

When the fog lifts from her eyes she can see him for what he is: a man. One whose people have hurt her; one who does not know her or understand her or even respect her, and whose lack of understanding allowed him to carry Jindi through the things she could not understand in turn. A man who, by being monstrous, saved Jindi from being monstrous herself—one who does not even know what he's done and would not care if he did, but who carried her and her gods here anyway.

The river of the world flows through him the same way it flows through her, the same way it flows through everything, and they are both just voices in the chorus of it: a chorus that includes war and pain and a thousand men like him that cut her people down piece by piece as thoughtlessly as he helped her. But this one didn't. His voice is still alien, still a stranger, still even occasionally a monster—but she heard it anyway. It buoyed her own in the river-rush of the universe, however briefly, and in a world like theirs—a world of men who have taken from her, a world of blood and metal—for that one brief moment, it was enough to carry her here.

He's here.

He is here—and Jindi is still alone. Even with a thousand voices, even with a single note, even with another person standing at her side. Even when he carried her through the dungeon, even when he carries her now, she's alone. She is beginning to understand now that no matter who is here, she will always be alone now. No river flows backwards.

But for now, for once, even alone, here, here, here demands nothing. And even without understanding or recognition or respect, here is enough: to call her through the desert, to promise her a landing. To stand.

"...Thank you," she says. She braces herself instinctively for resentment and reluctance and is shocked to find none, the space for it hollow like the empty pit of a fruit. "For saving me. More than once, at that."

The slow, careful inflection of her words hold the purposeful shape of an outstretched hand, empty space for his response to slot in. Sam, as men are wont to do, refuses to face the splayed honesty of it head-on; he merely sighs down the hall before shaking his head with a grunted exhale.

"Don't mention it," he says, words edged with something like relief. His feet clank against the ground as he shuffles back toward her, turning to fix her with that same bewildered look from the blood dragon: trying to figure her out. "...What'd you see in there before I got to you, anyway?"

Her mouth twists into a helpless, apologetic grimace as she slowly shakes her head. There are parts of herself shattered by war that she is still trying to piece together, things that have been so broken by hostility that they can no longer withstand carelessness. Samgar may be fond of her, but it is a rough fondness that exists in spite of the undeniably vast gulf between them. There are things that she can afford to sacrifice to their lack of mutual understanding and respect in the name of that care, willing offerings she can make to these unfamiliar forces the way he inadvertently did for her gods. The parts of herself that are still too fragile to speak into existence are not among them.

Instead, she offers him a truth.

"Nothing," she says. "I saw nothing."

She doesn't wait to see what he makes of it, instead turning to look back into the room. The haze has all but dissipated, bare tendrils of herbal incense blanketing the floor. Now that the room stands newly-emptied they can see it for what it is: an airtight enclosure of solid stone and clay with two sets of doors embedded in opposite walls, both rigged to close automatically unless physically held open. A spherical brazier in the center of the room smolders, the fire inside feeding on that strange hallucination-inducing grass with a glazed flicker reminiscent of moving water. Grasping wisps of shimmering smoke seep between the complex pattern of woven metal bands encircling the brazier's flame.

Through one of the larger gaps, Jindi spies a strange shape: two scrolls in the very heart of the fire, smoldering along the edges unnaturally slowly (but nevertheless unmistakably) as the flame begins to eat into the heart of its source.

Sam curses, swiping his sword from where their blades lie crossed by their feet at the entrance of the room and fumbling towards the strange brazier with the clumsy clank of his heavy armor. As Jindi readjusts herself to hold both doors, she comes to the same realization he's no doubt reaching himself: he's going to get to it too late, or burn himself trying to reach his armored hands into the flames.

Her sword flashes as she kicks it up with one foot, sends it flying with a swipe of her fingers; it glides through the air with the precision of an arrow, threading the gaps between the brazier's grate in a spray of sparks and a bisected plume of displaced smoke as it skewers both scrolls on its blade and pins them to the opposite wall.

Sam stops short in his clamoring jog, blinking as the sword vibrates from the impact of plunging into the unyielding stone on the far end of the room. He turns just enough to glance at Jindi from the corner of his eye.

"You didn't h—" He stops. Opens his mouth, starts again; his words have that same open quality as Jindi's, a cautious concession settling paper-thin over the chasm of their differences. "...I don't need them."

"No, you don't." Jindi leaps forward, letting the doors close behind her as she descends gracefully beside her sword in the wall. She slides it cleanly from the seam, removing the scrolls from her blade with the care reserved for something precious, before sheathing her sword and striding over to a skeptical Sam. She shoves her outstretched hand forward brusquely, the two scrolls clenched tightly in her fingers. "But they're important to you."

It's almost comical to see how his stare is so bemused, how he still can't figure her out. Well, fair enough; she doesn't really get him either. In the end, he merely shrugs, plucking them from her palm with a wry nod.

"Thanks," he says as he pockets them. "For getting them for me. More than one, at that."

Jindi grins.

Between the two of them, they make short work of the brazier; Jindi cleaves it from the stand bolting it to the floor and Sam descends on it with a grim sort of fury, smashing the metal bands with his armored boots until they warp open like a cracked egg. With the burning contents strewn over the ground and the grass stamped to cinders beneath them the remaining fog settles harmlessly, a smog that swamps their ankles in an ethereal violet veil.

Jindi wades through the shimmering mist as it laps around her feet, the atmosphere hypnotically sweet and pillow-soft around her; she comes to a stop next to Sam, his golden armor in the dim shimmer of smoldering embers, and stares up alongside him at the only other door in the room. This one is rigged similarly to the entrance: a simple set of levers are set up to close the heavy granite doors behind them the moment they pass through, but there's an additional smattering of gears to lock them into place with apparent permanence. The archway itself conveys a sense of finality, laden in its columns and contraptions of twining steel: bright metal rimmed with gold, something that compels with all the metallic magic of Nuhan to stay.

There's no question it goes only one way.

Sam draws his sword, shifting his head to look askance at Jindi; the dying light cascades over the planes of his face as he turns, shimmering fog glazing the harsh curves of his armor. He inclines his head as Jindi's eyes meet his across the expansive width of the double doors—over the gulf between them. "We doing this, kid?"

There is a part of Jindi that thinks she wants to say: yes.

But there is another part that knows better: that knows being alone will hurt more if he is here, that it hurts less to be alone in earnest than alone with someone beside you.

And then there is the other part: the part that has called her over the desert like a dream, the part that is constructed as much from wild hope as it is from yawning, herb-sweet fear. The part that is still so shattered that she has to construct it from shimmering fragments of glass dust to hold it in her mind, the part slips through her fingers so quickly she will never be able to put it back together. The part that swirls like silt down through the flow of time, through the river of the universe, that threads through her chest and pulls her like gravity downstream to its natural landing place. It says it in a thousand voices: she's here.

She's here, says the bag at her hip.

It says it in a voice that only Jindi can hear.

"I think," she says slowly, "that this is where we part ways, Sam xiansheng."

She is surprised by the wistfulness in her voice even as Sam nods, quick and sure as if he had expected it from the start. For a second, Jindi thinks he's going to say something else, something important. Instead, he merely steps forward and puts one armored hand on the door, pausing only briefly.

"Are you gonna be okay on your own?"

A part of her says: yes. A part of her says: I have been alone long before you joined me.

And another part of her says: yes. A part that says: I am not alone, because she is here.