The Mistress of Rats stashed Celestial Lion's samples in the depths of her hideyhole. Squealing with glee once in a while, she took them to a gleaming tower spiralling into the azure sky. Inside the magnificent building looked almost like any other library Xi had visited, except on an unimaginable scale.

"Follow the Mistress, and distract her with conversation," Sayewa whispered to Xi, and disappeared down the gap between the shelves before he could argue. Fortunately, he did not have to come up with the light banter to amuse the Celestial.

The Mistress of Rats padded from one shelf to the next, enlarging herself to reach the topmost cubbies, shrinking to search the lowest, and piling scrolls into a wheeled cart. Between these feats of magic gymnastics and inspecting the texts, she talked about transitions, installations, and sacrifices, perfectly content with him putting a brief 'aha' into the edgewise.

There was a pattern in her discourse, but he could not follow any of the threads to their conclusion, except that their dragon would come at a cost of sacrifice. A terrible sacrifice even.

"All instruments of power demand blood to be forged," Xi murmured.

The Celestial stopped and eyed him in a peculiar manner. "Too true. Where is that faery scholar?"

"Ah..." Xi twisted his head around. "Ah, she is... was... just here."

He felt like a student who had a week to prepare his lesson and was still caught unprepared when the teacher asked to recite it.

To his relief, Sayewa glided from the aisle to his right. "I took a wrong turn. Forgive me, Your Illustrious Grace. I was lost in thought." Her hands were demurely clasped at her soft waist, but the sleeves bulged suspiciously.

The Mistress of Rats either did not notice or did not care. Her focus disconcertingly remained on Xi. "Are there living females of your bloodline?"

"My mother and my grandmother are alive, Your Illustrious Grace," he replied, bowing, wondering what that might have to do with anything.

The Mistress of Rats seemed pleased. "Good. I understand that most mages outlive their kin."

She took the bundle of scrolls out of her cart and whistled to one of the glowing spheres that hovered throughout the library, a source of unintrusive light. The orb approached and split into disks. On the lowest one, the Mistress piled up her stash and waved at the orb, "Make one... no two writs. Better you have an extra copy, given Tiandi's recent instability."

That done, the Celestial's attention turned back to Xi. "Is the survivor your maternal grandmother or paternal?"

Xi found it hard to focus on the conversation, because the orb reassembled itself in front of his very eyes. The scrolls remained visible as dark patches against light inside its semi-transparent innards, swirling, multiplying and re-stacking.

"It is my mother's mother, Your Illumined Grace." The Mistress of Rats, the Mother of Sorrow, his memory supplied the Celestial's title, unbidden.

Sayewa re-knitted her fingers - he was not imagining the strange undercurrent in the Celestial's simple question. She sensed it too. Or, perhaps, it was her signing him that he should be the one to kneel and accept the scrolls from the Celestial, since Sayewa's sleeves, as wide as they were, neared their carrying capacity.

Feeling once more like a schoolboy, Xi stepped forward and kneeled preemptively, extending his hands to receive the Celestial's gift of scrolls.

The faery made no move to help him when he accepted the two great bundles. Her face remained serene. He kept his mouth shut.

The Mistress of Rats shooed the orb away. It dashed to replace the scrolls in their cubbies.

"What are you standing there for? Quickly, quickly, we need to get you out. The library will open soon, and the last thing I need is for someone reporting a sighting of Tiandi specimens on the Nexus," the Mistress grumbled and caught them into some sort of a floating bubble.

For the second time this day, Xi was imprisoned in close quarters with Sayewa. This prison did not prevent the flow of air but had opaque walls. He feared that it allowed the sound through just like the previous one, and stayed quiet. The faery did not initiate the conversation either as the sphere moved, presumably following the Mistress. The minutes passed with him watching the flowers slide down her hair and land by his feet.

The bubble dissolved setting their feet gently on the floor facing the familiar portal. With all the novelties and troubles of the Celestial Realm, Xi had forgotten all about the problems awaiting him on Tiandi.

A sick memory of the ghostly form reaching for him from the other side caused Xi's knees to buckle under him. There could be guards on the other side, waiting to arrest Sayewa and him for murdering the Emperor. The disgusting taste of bile burned his throat at the thought of being torn piece by piece by steel hooks. The one consolation was that he would go mad the moment the agony of torture stole his consciousness.

The Mistress took his swaying the wrong way. "No bowing, off with you!" said she in farewell, her tail twitching impatiently.

Xi whipped his head to look at her, then back at the portal, then back at her, and hit his shoulder on the rim. Something wet and insistent touched his palm. Five rats the size of dogs, with matching steely coats, prodded him with their pink noses to get going. He did not like the size of their teeth, scaled up as much as the rodents themselves, this close to his flesh.

Sayewa stood by the portal's threshold, half-turned, not leaving yet, not staying either, watching him hesitate.

Xi clutched the bundle closer to his chest, stepped forward and together they crossed through the light into the shadows of home. Safely on Tiandi, Xi dashed around the cavern temple looking behind the statues and in the corners that the silver light from the portal could not reach.

"I don't see the body, Sayewa! Where did it go?"

The faery emptied her sleeves on the floor and started re-rolling the resulting mound of papers into neater bundles.

Half-awed, half-scandalized words tumbled from Xi's lips. "You stole from the Celestials!"

He managed to pull some air into his lungs before more pent up worries forced their way out. "We've killed the Emperor! No! We've killed a child, Sayewa. A stupid boy! Sayewa! Will you listen...!"

She lifted one eye on him. "Chong Xi, we are innocent, and these papers are but one copy of ten thousand copies."

He knelt by her side to help, and whenever his trembling fingers bumped into hers, he believed every word she said.

He needed to believe. Ancestors help him, how he needed to believe her! She smiled when he covered her hand with his. Her calm spread through his body, a thick pleasant blend of oblivion and self-possession. Ah, if he could have that in the monastery, he wanted to stay with the faeries forever... A phantom needle stitched right through his chest on the heels of this realization, in and out, in and out again. And forget Minh?

Xi let go of the faery's fingers, of all the pleasant things not meant for him. They had to climb out of the cave through the narrow tunnel, he could not go on clutching her hand anyway... he would feel better outside, removed from the company of rats. Yes, he just needed to get out, outside, into the light of day.

He crawled away from the portal, away from the ancient temple with its mocking statues, away from the Celestial Realm, scraping his elbows bloody.

Released into the daylight, Xi lifted his face to the warmth of the afternoon sun gulping in the fragrant air. The smell of new leaves freshly washed by the rain touched his nostrils. It took him a moment to understand just what he felt, the impossibility of it.

"Is it... is it spring already? How?!"

"The more important question is how many winters had passed since we had left," Sayewa corrected him in a perfectly level tone.