She met Su Ling’s eyes, and a moment of silent communication passed between them. Ling Qi pulled her bow from within her storage ring with a tiny pop of displaced air, the firm grip wrapped around the slightly warm horn settling comfortably in her hand. Su Ling began to circle around the edge of the chamber, clearly meaning to flank the man and separate him from his ritual site and the child.

  Ling Qi drew an arrow from the quiver on her back and nocked it in one smooth motion, drawing the string back past her ear as she fixed her gaze on the silvery talisman dangling from the leather wraps on the shaman’s wrist. If that was the thing making him untraceable, then it had to go. Wind kicked up and electricity crackled along the length of the missile. The shaman’s eyes flicked toward her, but it was too late. She had already loosed her attack.

  At this range, her arrow needed less than a fraction of a second to cross the distance between them, and it struck the talisman with a booming gong, sounding more like she had shot a huge temple bell than a tiny piece of jewelry. For a brief moment, it seemed like her arrow was going to be deflected, the qi in the talisman pushing back against her own offensive qi, but then with a sharp report, it cracked and shattered to pieces, the shaman’s own qi flaring as the arrow tore through the leather wrap on his wrist.

  He spun toward her with a grimace of pain on his face and a flicker of alarm and anger in his cold eyes. He raised the implements in his hands, but she already had another arrow set and ready to fly, this time aimed at his chest. Her arrow met with resistance when the hazy smoke in the air condensed around him, forming shadowy pinions of air and dust that absorbed the qi of her attack as they wrapped protectively around him.

  Even as she began to move, circling for better position, her sense for qi returned, and she nearly stumbled, gagging as her gorge rose, eyes watering from the terrible feeling that assailed her. The closest comparison she could make was when she was very young, young enough that she had still been with her mother, plague had swept through one of the neighboring districts of the city. The district had been barricaded off and quarantined of course, but she could still remember the smells and the sounds of disease and suffering.

  Ling Qi quickly regained her concentration thankfully. As the shaman beat his baton against the drum of stretched hide in his other hand, the panic and anger in his gaze faded into absolute, unwavering determination. She felt the winds shift around her, and the moisture in the air gathering, the dark chamber growing even more cold and damp. Clouds began to form across the ceiling overhead, dark and crackling with electricity.

  It was almost enough to mask the dark and gangly shape that emerged from the muddy ceiling above, dropping down with its chipped and rusted spear extended.

  Even with her movements sped by the dark qi rushing through her channels, Ling Qi was not fast enough to fully dodge as the skeletal figure struck, spear cratering the ground where she had stood, and immediately lashed out with a mud-caked claw. Her qi prevented the raking skeletal fingers from finding purchase on her flesh.

  She felt Su Ling’s qi flare from across the room and saw the shaman’s expression twitch minutely as he shook his head like a bull being bothered by flies. It did not stop him from continuing to beat a steady and ominous rhythm on his drum. The shaman moved from his starting position, seeming to be looking to circle out from between the two of them. is unseen feet struck the ground in time with the steadily louder beats of his drum.

  Then, of course, things got worse. As the muddy skeleton, clad in the remains of a guardsman’s armor save for the crude birdlike mask on its head and the cloak of black feathers over its shoulders, rose from his crouch before her, the bone totem pulsed. A rippling ring of visible sickly green qi washed over them all.

  Ling Qi nearly wretched, stumbling as her stomach roiled and sweat broke out on her forehead. She blinked away the spots that had appeared in her vision and tried to steady suddenly shaking limbs. She felt ill and weak.

  “Incomplete though it might be, our vengeance will be felt, lowlanders.” Ling Qi stiffened as she heard words spoken in heavily accented imperial by the shaman. His hate-filled voice rang out loud over the steady, thunderous beats of his drum.

  Ling Qi wanted to throw up her mist, but storing her bow and drawing her flute from the ring would take precious seconds she didn’t have. Besides, between her and Su Ling, was she not the one more suited to dealing out damage? Such were her thoughts as she breathed out, channeling cleansing qi at the same time that she prepared a shot to disrupt the shaman’s defenses.

  She loosed her arrow, and it struck home. Her enemy was slow, almost ridiculously so to her eyes, but she supposed he relied on his defense. Unfortunately for him, her arrow cut through his shield of wind and dust, sending snakes of electricity crackling over his limbs. The arrow dug into his side, punching through his heavy robe, and his face twisted into a rictus of pain.

  Her concentration on the shaman cost her. The filthy skeleton proved unnervingly fast, crossing the distance she had put between them in only a few instants and thrusting its spear out, blindingly fast, to score a wound across Ling Qi’s thigh. Although the worst was absorbed by her qi, she could still feel blood beginning to flow down her leg.

  While she backpedaled, Ling Qi caught sight of Su Ling crouched low near the altar the boy was bound to, her tail waving freely behind her as a second ghostly flame appeared above her head. The shaman’s eyes grew unfocused, nearly causing him to stumble. Unfortunately, Su Ling’s technique didn’t stop the completion of his own technique. The clouds gathering across the ceiling grew dark and crackled with lightning, and actinic white bolts shot down from the ceiling. Although Ling Qi managed to throw herself out of the way, she saw Su Ling get struck with several bolts, protected only by the rapidly dimming flare of her qi, as she snatched the boy away from the altar and the strike zone.

  To make matters worse, Ling Qi could hear the sound of splintering wood and eerie cawing from the stairwell. It seemed that the shaman’s crow puppets would soon be arriving to aid their master, and the clouds overhead were only growing larger and darker with every beat of the shaman’s drum. She caught Su Ling’s eye. They needed to put down their enemy fast. She could see two glowing flames over Su Ling’s head. Ling Qi recognized those as the technique Su Ling had used to blow up the cliff side when they fought the sediment guardian at the vent. If Ling Qicould land another shot as well, she was sure the shaman would go down, either from lack of qi or from his wounds.

  For the third time today, her arrow flew true, striking the taller man dead center in the chest. His qi flared, but the arrow punched through. The shaman was flung back by the force of the hit, and he slammed into the totem with a pained grunt. Then, Ling Qi had to desperately roll to the side to avoid the skeletal guardian’s spear again and was forced to expend qi as the butt of the weapon smashed into her jaw, snapping her head to the side despite the qi cushioning.

  A chain of explosions boomed through the cellar as the faint sparks that had lingered around the shaman from Su Ling’s techniques exploded, setting the shaman’s robes aflame and leaving swathes of burned flesh.

  Despite the flames, the barbarian pushed himself up, leaving an ashen, bloody handprint on the eerily glowing bone of the totem. “Tch. Still this weak……” He bared his teeth in a bloody smile. “This one’s life will not complete things, but it will have to be enough. Let the black spirits and the Gnawing Ones curse your very bones.”


  “Will you just shut up and die already?” Su Ling snapped, weighed down by the unconscious child in her arms, but her complaint was shortly drowned out as Ling Qi felt the totem’s qi flare. The shaman’s eyes rolled back in his head, flesh visibly withering. The arrow she had just let fly struck nothing more than a corpse, and the disgusting qi in the totem surged upward, mingling with the river’s own energy. The man’s puppets clattered to the ground, lifeless.

  It was suddenly very cold, and Ling Qi shuddered as she heard a madness tinged wail that seemed to echo through the muddy walls from every direction at once.

  “Pretty sure the wards just broke,” Su Ling said dully as she staggered to her feet, palming and consuming her second wellspring pill. “We need to start running now.” The child under her arm still did not stir, although he was obviously breathing.

  Ling Qi followed her lead, taking a second wellspring pill as well to restore her qi, but she wasn’t sure she agreed. Wouldn’t fleeing only make them more vulnerable? This room was defensible, and she could fill it entirely with mist.

  On the other hand, her qi was low, and she could not restore it any further for some time and neither could Su Ling. Taking additional restoratives would just be like taking poison. Then again…… Surely whatever the barbarian shaman had done had been noticed by this point, right? An Elder had to have noticed something so large-scale. They might not need to hold out for long.

  Ling Qi chewed her lip in thought for a moment but then nodded, quickly striding over to where the shaman’s body lay. “Alright, we run. Nothing to gain by staying here,” she said, even as she crouched down, quickly scanning over the corpse for anything useful. Her stomach squirmed at the sight of his mummified face, but it was only a barbarian, no matter how much it looked like a person.

  Su Ling stared at her briefly and then started toward the door. “Please don’t get too distracted trying to loot the bastard,” she said, sounding exasperated. “We don’t have a lot of time here.” Su Ling began mounting the stairs at a hurried pace.

  “Not going to,” Ling Qi replied hurriedly. She had no idea what was valuable so she simply tore off his belt with all of the pouches wholesale, slinging it over her shoulder. Her ring wouldn’t store the belt so there was probably several things of value in the pouches.

  That done, Ling Qi rose to her feet and dashed after her companion, storing away her bow and drawing her flute. As she played the first haunting notes of her melody, she was careful to extend the protection over both Su Ling and the unconscious boy. Her feet crunched on the fallen crow skulls even as mist spilled from her flute and filled the stairway, shadows in the mist coalescing into dangerous constructs.

  She quickly caught up with Su Ling as they burst out of the shattered cellar doors. Ling Qi followed the other girl’s lead when Su Ling dashed off away from the river where ominous fog was rising, spilling through the streets like the pale fingers of a giant. Another terrible wail of pain, hunger and rage, echoed through the ruined village, the eerie sound chilling her to the bone.

  The spirits were rising.

  Threads 69: Foreshock 6

  Chaos awaited her return.

  In the flight south, she had seen the first signs. Great flocks of birds had been rising from the forest, raptors and songbirds flying side by side to escape the growing weight in the air. Beneath the canopy, beasts howled and yowled in fright as the earth shook and the wind gusted, and the pounding of a multitude of paws and hooves against the dirt added to the cacophony. As she flew further, she began to sense the disturbance in the trees themselves. Heavy branches swayed without wind and roots moved with ponderous but unstoppable strength as the tallest and most ancient trees seemed to gird themselves to endure the coming storm while their younger brethren shook and cowered.

  It was nothing compared to the scene that awaited her at the village itself. She had left behind a peaceful farming village huddled on the shores of the river with beautiful green fields extending far upstream. What she found on return seemed more like an embattled fortress. The rolling fields had been trampled to ruin, homes, barns and other structures sagging where walls had been blown out in the rampage of some beast. Even now, spirits streamed through the trampled fields, fleeing in all directions.

  At the center, things were even more dire. Ling Qi’s eyes watered at the fetid heat that radiated out from the battlefield she saw there, sickly and familiar. She remembered clearing out that nest of disease spirits just a few days ago, but it seemed there had been more pockets further south. Many more pockets. They churned from the southern forest like a moving river of chitin; centipedes, locusts, worms, and crawling and flying things that she could not name all flooded out from the southern hills, their buzzing and chittering seeming to shake the air.

  At the top of the ridge that overlooked the river, a massive wall had sprung up. Formed of twisted bulging branches and boughs of vital green wood, it rose over ten meters high and stretched on for hundreds, a shield braced against the ground against the oncoming beasts. The Sect’s soldiers stood atop the twitching, living wall, four first realms to every second. The lesser cultivators rained crossbow bolts that left contrails of boiling steam down upon the advancing tide in a continuous rain, their hands blurring with the speed at which they reloaded the devices. Their captains swept the sky with fire, wind, water, and lightning while the wall itself crushed, impaled, and destroyed the things that crawled upon it with grasping branches and creepers.

  She saw Xiulan standing at the center of it all, a burning brand under the darkened sky. Heat radiated from her form, distorting the very air and rendering her a miragelike appearance. Her gown seemed like a thing of liquid fire, and her hair rose, smoking on drafts of superheated air. Heavenly energies crackled near the surface of her skin, shining through the faded scars of her tribulation as if her friend were merely a damaged container for an ocean of living lightning.

  Even as Ling Qi poured on further speed, blurring into a bolt of shadow in the sky, she saw Xiulan sweep her bandage-wrapped hand out, and a river of blue-white flame followed, a searing beam that carved through the advancing spirits, hundreds incinerated or boiled in their own exoskeletons until they exploded in a shower of miasma. Where the beam passed, it left a molten trench in the earth, liquid glass and stone snapping and hissing in the suddenly cooling air. With her other hand, Xiulan wielded a many tailed lash of red flames. It snapped and coiled through the air, snatching a locust the size of a large dog from the air and flung it away from the wall.

  The tumbling bug was then snatched from the air by a pair of gigantic serpentine jaws, vanishing with a crunch down Zhen’s throat as Gui stomped through the tide, uncaring of the insects that swarmed up his legs, biting and gnashing futilely at his scales. With every rumbling step, roots speared out from the earth, impaling scores of spirits before withdrawing back into the churned earth. Yet Zhengui was not unharmed. Ling Qi’s eyes fell upon the patches of torn scales along Zhen’s body and the glowing crack that spiderwebbed across Gui’s shell.

  The one that had inflicted the wounds was obvious. Hanging over the field like a macabre banner, she saw the body of a truly massive insect, a centipede over twenty meters long impaled upon three sharp wooden stakes the size of small trees, its grey-brown shell pitted and burned through by fires and its head a charred ruin. Its legs still twitched and writhed feebly, and fetid gore that stunk of sickness and rot dripped from its perforated body, leaving bubbling pools in the dirt below.

  As Ling Qi swept over the village, Zhen opened his jaws, baring his fangs to the sky, and a little spark of fire perched like a crown atop his head flared brighter. A sheet of hissing, bubbling venom shot from his mouth over a far wider range than he was normally able, melting and burning the flying vermin trying to pass him.

  However, despite all the firepower, the diseased things streaming from the southern forest were still numerous beyond counting. Ling Qi curved her flight to the side least supported and raised her flute to her lips. The dark Melody of the Forgotten Vale poured forth with an unusual energy, and as mist began to billow out, heavy with hungry phantoms, a ragged cheer rose from the wall. It came first from a handful, presences Ling Qi vaguely recognized from patrols and training runs, only to quickly be taken up by others as her mist engulfed the mass of flying spirits and their shredded remains began to rain down on the earth below. Some were hardier than others, their chitin resisting phantasmal claws, but Hanyi’s song, rising in counterpoint to hers, allowed that to be taken care of while conserving Ling Qi’s own dwindling qi.

  With her help, sweeping across the battlefield in a bank of deadly mist, the tide at last receded, leaving a field of twisted, miasmic sludge of insectoid bodies dissolving into diseased pools.

  “Arriving at the last moment to steal the glory, I see,” the living conflagration that was Xiulan called to her.

  Ling Qi ascended to the top of the wall, heat and cold clashing where their auras met, violent winds rustling the cloaks of the soldiers nearest by. Beyond the base physical interaction, she felt Xiulan’s domain. It was a hungry ambitious thing, lightning stabbing down from the heavens, a wildfire raging through dry brush, but it did not reject hers. If anything, the flames roared higher and the lightning flashed more brightly when Ling Qi’s own melody washed over them.

  “I just can’t help myself,” Ling Qi jested, keeping the relief out of her voice as she alighted on the wall beside Xiulan. Shadow still trailed from her limbs and lines of green glimmered in the folds of her gown from her activated techniques, but she had left her mist below, maintained by the echoes of her flute. Here, with Zhengui and Xiulan, Ling Qi felt her fatigue fade and her worries lessen. This was where she was supposed to be.

  “I’ll forgive it just this once,” Xiulan said haughtily, her smirk shifting the lines of lightning that burned beneath her scars. “If only because I was growing sick of cooking these rancid creatures.”


  “You kept them all out of the village then?” Ling Qi asked. She knew it was only due to their fortitude as cultivators that they could stand the miasma rising from below. Even so, she had felt her skin crawl with sickly heat when making a pass through the worst of it.

  “Of course,” Xiulan sniffed. “But it was thanks to that spirit of yours.”


  “I protected everyone!” Gui boomed proudly, his voice echoing across the ruined field as he stomped back toward the wall. “It was really hard, but I did it!”


  “Even foolish Gui can accomplish something in a pinch, but it was only due to I, Zhen, that things went so well,” Zhen hissed proudly. “It was my fangs that finished the beast!” Atop his head, the tiny flame, which Ling Qi now recognized as Linhuo, let out a crackling laugh.

  “I’ve no idea where he learned such bragging,” Xiulan murmured before raising her voice. “Soldiers! You have fought well and with great bravery! It pleases me to have been able to lead such a fine force this day! I am certain we need only hold a short time more.”


  Her words brought a tired cheer from the men and women on the wall, though they kept their eyes and their crossbows trained on the south.

  More quietly and masked by the crackling heat, her friend’s expression grew more serious as she continued, “It is well that you returned. I am already down a half dozen men; the disease was too much for them. I have ordered a temporary camp set up for the wounded since we cannot bring them into town. I am feeling a bit winded as well.”


  Ling Qi’s eyebrows climbed at the frank admission from her proud friend. “I am not at my best either,” she said quietly. “The other villages – they’re holding but there won’t be any help coming from them. Have there been any other messengers?”


  Xiulan grimaced, sparks spitting from her fingertips. “Only one, warning us to keep away from the south. Sect forces are inbound, but it seems this was not the only plague brewing in Sect lands nor the only instance of higher raiding.”


  Ling Qi breathed deeply, putting the new fears that brought to mind away for now. It just confirmed the thoughts she had earlier. Something was terribly wrong.

  The earth suddenly rocked violently beneath her feet, nearly throwing several soldiers from the wall, and her eyes snapped up. From the silhouette of Icebreaker Peak, she saw a long, sinuous limb, a titanic tendril of some unknown thing, rise from the massive dust cloud where it had impacted the earth.

  Ling Qi stared, unable to comprehend the sheer size of the thing, which was visible from many kilometers away. Stupefied, she continued staring while something far too small to see smashed the thrashing tendril aside with enough force to tear a chunk of flesh that must have been the size of a house free. She watched the arc it drew through the air toward them, a lumpy, squirming mass of runny black ooze studded with mouths and eyes of innumerable shapes, already rotting in fast motion before it slammed into and flattened a grove of trees out in the killing field before the wall. She raised her arm to shield her eyes from the wind of that impact buffeting her, sending her hair and dress flapping.

  “.……There is also that,” Xiulan said dully.

  “We just have to hope that Commander Guan can win.” The admission tasted bitter in her mouth, but there was nothing that she could do about the two titanic powers in the south. Perhaps in a couple of years, but until then……

  Xiulan shot her a sour look, as if detecting the thrust of her thoughts, and then turned away to address the shaken soldiers. At that moment, a great cacophony arose from the diseased grove to the south, and the sound of wood splintering echoed as a massive red and brown form rose from the trees. Meters-wide mandibles snapped and hundreds of legs churned the earth as another grotesque titan of a centipede emerged from the earth. Below her, Zhengui bellowed a challenge, turning with surprising speed to face the new foe and the resurgence of the diseased spirits that came pouring out with it.

  “Ling Qi!” Xiulan’s shout drew her attention, even as Sixiang let out a wordless cry of alarm in her head. The girl stared at her with eyes wild with alarm, her bandaged hand outstretched, fires already blooming from her fingertips.

  Ling Qi saw the gleam of metal beneath her chin, the curved and serrated blade just a hair’s breadth from her throat, and the slim grey skinned hand, digits just slightly too long and thin for a human’s, holding it. Even now, she felt no presence. There was no qi nor even a breath across the back of her neck despite the shine of deep purple venom practically dripping from the blade’s edge.