Sun blushed as it slipped out of the night's clutches and hid behind gray clouds. Its disk paled, even though it did not know what it was shining upon. The anemic light could not burn away the nauseating smell that lingered in the air overnight. Death wasn't always swift, alas. The silence would only settle over the battlefield after the last of the dying drew in their last breath, and the last crow left. The faery song could not get rid of the dreadful chorus of pain and despair.

Smoke and rot made Sayewa's gut clench so tightly that she had to pause to ease it off with magic. She did not think the scent of jasmine she summoned to cover up the decay lessened her impulse to vomit next to the other bodily fluids and dead tissue under her feet. It was about as potent in hiding the ugly smells as the song was at covering sounds.

The faery fire though worked well enough to get rid of the unsightly demon corpses. If only there were more of the faeries, and less of the demons... and there was going to be one less faery on the burning duty.

Breaking away from her kin, Sayewa abandoned her task of annihilating the enemy's dead. The victory was too narrow to rejoice at, and she did not for a moment believe that the defeated did not thirst for revenge.

I should be with my sisters. But I am not.

For too long she lived away from the monastery, guided only by her own will. The faery song drifted over the battlefield, urging her to join in. She closed her every eye to fight the compulsion. Only one eye, the inner one that looked into the memories, remained open.

She had passed the Emperor at the edge of the sea of the dead. His youthful face pinched in concentration, the-no-longer boy squeezed his eyes shut to say his prayers. Next to him, Deserving Du and Zhenshi the Younger searched the mourners with their tiger's glares, ready to tear into anyone who'd endanger the last sprout of the Dynasty of Wise Temperance. Rustam Bei circled close to the Emperor as well, a black menace suspecting treachery. Her sisters sang and sorted through the dead methodically, burning the demons, dead or alive.

They were there. She did not have to be.

Sayewa opened her eyes and waded in deeper into the waves of the dead. She charged herself with a task that did not matter to the other sisters, the other humans, or anyone else in the world.

It was something that mattered only to her, Sayewa.

She did sing as she went to offer those who might yet be recovered some hope, and to ease the fears of those who would not be. She sang, but she never stopped her trekking to heal or to finish off a foe.

Particularly one kind of a foe.

The first time she spotted a red shock of hair over a stiff human face in the piles of humans and demons, horses and faeries, lizards and birds, she sobbed away a few words of the lament before coming back to her senses. Wincing with pain, she ripped the red flower she felt growing out of her hair, breaking off the living stems, crushing the scarlet petals in her fist.

The dead redhead was not Yu, and Yu had been the only bloom produced by the poisonous brambles.

The Empire did not accept surrender from the redheads, the younger Blood as the demons called them, equating them with the demons themselves in wickedness. She did not doubt the wisdom of the verdict, yet the irrational need to save one of those who could not be saved coiled in her breast. The peculiar anomaly where her kin's greatest hatred intersected its greatest love was nothing new. The moment she met Yu, she was captivated by the youngest Blood, the children born to a human and a demon. She wanted to comprehend one of them more than she had wanted any human. It was both embarrassing and fascinating, her secret to keep when every new thought must be shared among the sisters.

As flawed as she was, Sayewa was not trodding on corpses to break faith for delusions. She ignored the human-like redheads. There was another way to honour Yu and she disobeyed her calling to search among the dead for it... there.

There!

The demon's body lay on its back, rib cage arching in the frozen attempt to take another breath. His copper-red hair was shorn off crudely, spiking out in all direction, giving the corpse a look of someone trying to wake up after a night of hard partying, except that his skin turned a bluish-purple shade. Even death, he was a magnificent example of the Blood, though not the biggest Sayewa had ever seen. His hair should not have looked like this. The scavengers must have gotten here before her to cut off his braids for the red gold that used to bind them.

Scavengers! She panicked, searching this way and that through the corpses surrounding the fallen demon. Did they also take what she came here for?

Sayewa spotted the body she came for, and yes, they had robbed it too. She forced herself to calm down and reached for the forbidden magic. They should still be near here, because that's how greed worked.

There!

The inner eye of the memories now seeing qi, showed her two crouching living forms among the dead. She advanced on them, rising the petals in the air, twisting them into coils of fragrant rope.

"You have what I want. Give it to me."

The grave-robbers shook in the hidden hollow between the rotting bodies. Their faces were covered with scarves against the corpse-poison, their clothes threadbare, their arms - little more than skin stretched over bone. It is funny how humans could be both brave and cowardly at the same time.

"Turn out your satchels," Sayewa commanded, whirling the flower nooses over them. They would snap their skinny necks as surely as the hemp ropes. For a moment she enjoyed a fantasy of squeezing the life out of the two perverts. Killing them would have been an act of justice, but she was not here to perform the burial rights with her sisters. She was here for the purpose that only mattered to her, with no right to judge other perpetrators.

The scavengers piled their loot on the ground: jewelry of every kind, still attached to the bits of flesh that it used to decorate, the swathes of cloth-of-gold fabric, the demons' braids. Red flooded her vision when her fingers went through a length of a gold-thread bound hair, exactly the same shade as Yu's where it was not caked with dried blood. Underneath that awful relic, Sayewa found what she had come here for.

She removed the artifact from the revolting treasure horde, a pistol whose muzzle opened up in a roaring dragon's maw. It came to life in her hand, glowing crimson, urging her to shoot the rogues.

"This is cursed," she told the two wretches hoarsely, waving the weapon under their noses so they could see its ominous aura. She wrapped it in the length of silk that was not bloodstained and hid it in the breast of her tunic.

The scavengers watched her with rounded eyes, knives staying hidden in their sleeves, afraid of faeries like most commoners. Good thing that something still put fear in their hearts. "Burn the flesh of the dead with reverence. And pray for forgiveness every day until you die."

She trusted their fear more than their piety, but she tied off her flower ropes to loom over them. The pistol had powers, and they had touched it. Who knows what it might have whispered into their weak minds already.

The pistol tapped her heart every step she took. The faster she walked, the more urgent grew its knocking. This last part of Yu, she could have run away with it. She could keep it. She could—

Sayewa pushed the voice from her mind and knelt in front of Tien Lyn's body instead. She wrapped the other woman's unfeeling hands around the weapon and closed the eyes staring into the sky.

Yu is dead, his lover is dead.

It was an ending, or at least some sort of an ending.

Sayewa never was a consummate healer, but out of habit, she scanned the body for the cause of death. The damage was massive, but it was inflicted after death, in vengeance. Not by the demons, they would not lay a finger on Yu's property, living or dead.

The humans, who served them, did. It was the terrible miscalculation on the Empire's part, something that was not foreseen in the elation of having a dragon and a fenghuang soaring in the skies. It did not happen at the battle of Tarkan either.

We got too cocky, too sure of our victory.

The Righteous Judgment and the Brother's Bequest fired their shots from the well-defended enclosures from the moment the battle was joined, taking out one enemy officer after another, leaving the Horde leaderless. Left without the commanders, their charge at Tien Lyn, the wielder of the Righteous Judgment and Deserving Du with the Brother's Bequest was chaotic. But it could not be countered in time by the spells and swords, not even by the dragon's powers and the fenghuang's talons. The fury that human despair could unleash made demons's wrath pale in comparison.

Cornered, herded, with her defenders failing, Tien Lyn poured everything in the killing shot at the Blood Leader, and collapsed.

Overhead, the dragon screamed in agony.

Du fought on, trading in the pistol for the halberd.

The hordesmen carried Tien Lyn's body away with them, maybe thinking that power slept within, maybe for vengeance or for a dark ritual.

Sayewa thought that this was their doom. However, by the incredible turn of fates, the incredible achievement did not get what the Horde the triumph they wanted - the body was an empty vessel. None of them connected the pistol, the artifact, to the power Tien Lyn wielded.

They did not fire it.

How and why they did not fire it at the dragon, and the fenghuang, at the Emperor - Sayewa did not know. The frenzy that could have won the day simply prolonged the terrible slaughter on both sides.

Luck... after all the misfortunes, we were saved by luck.

She did not have permission to bury a human, but she had stopped asking. This was but a drop in the Jade Sea of her blasphemy. She started the faery dirge, filling her cupped hands with cold fire. As fast as they'd filled, she poured it over the woman's body, some of it splashing next to Tien Lyn. Sayewa let the dirge fuel the flames over Tien Lyn until the body was consumed without a trace, and stomped out the rest. The last thing she needed was to be caught before she could complete her task by sending up a signal fire to her sisters. At the moment, they were her adversaries.

The pistol glowed red at the body-shaped empty spot of the battlefield. Sayewa stashed it away again. It felt warm against her skin. She shifted it, before realizing it was only her imagination playing tricks. Tien Lyn was dead and she had nothing more to give.