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Jiang stood up straight. The hand holding the shears dropped to his side. “This isn’t some fairy story where you wave your hand and ask the gods for three wishes. We are not fucking around here. These are forces that could break you.”
Rin had always felt like an outsider among her classmates, but as the year carried on, she began to feel as if she inhabited an entirely separate world from them. She was steadily growing further and further away from the world where things functioned as they should, where reality was not constantly in flux, where she thought she knew the shape and nature of things instead of being constantly reminded that really she knew nothing at all.
Realizing that reality is now what it seems
“That none of my beliefs about the world were true,” Rin answered dreamily. “That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”
On the fifteenth day she became convinced that her consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet—the germination of the smallest flower to the eventual death of the largest tree. She saw an endless process of energy transfer, growing and dying, and she was part of every stage of it. She saw bursts of color and animals that probably didn’t exist. She did not see visions, precisely, because visions would have been far more vivid and concrete. But nor were the apparitions merely thoughts. They were like dreams, an uncertain plane of realness somewhere in between, and
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It had taken a long time, but she finally had a vocabulary for what they were learning now. Shamans: those who communed with the gods. The gods: forces of nature, entities as real and yet ephemeral as wind and fire themselves, things inherent to the existence of the universe.
The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm . . . they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.
Yin and Yang
“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.” He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad.
Spiritual awakening
“Incredible,” she said. She felt more clearheaded than she had in months, as if all this time she’d been trying to peer through a fog and it had suddenly disappeared. She was ecstatic; she’d solved the puzzle, she knew the source of her power, and now all that remained was to learn to siphon it out at will. “So what now?”
To discover a new found power, and to learn to control that power
Sometimes martial artists who are particularly attuned to the world will find themselves overwhelmed by one of those forces. They suffer an imbalance—an affinity to one god over the others. This happened to you in the ring. But now you know where that flame came from, and when it happens to you again, you can journey to the Pantheon to find its balance. Now you’re cured.”
Then, as her prey was entranced, the Vipress slammed down into him with her fangs and flooded him with poison. The psychospiritual assault was devastating and immediate.
Tyr sought refuge in the shadows, but his goddess was nowhere, and those hypnotic eyes were everywhere. Everywhere he turned, the eyes looked upon him; the great Snake hissed, her gaze trained on him, boring into him, paralyzing him—
For although she was forbidden from calling the Phoenix, that did not stop the Phoenix from calling upon her. Soon, whispered the Phoenix in her sleep. Soon you will call on me for my power, and when the time comes, you will not be able to resist. Soon you will ignore the warnings of the Woman and the Gatekeeper and fall into my fiery embrace. I can make you great. I can make you a legend. She tried to resist. She tried to empty her mind, like Jiang had taught her; she tried to clear the anger and the fire from her head. She found that she couldn’t. She found that she didn’t want to.
Wow
“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
“The point of every lesson does not have to be to destroy,” he said. “I taught you Lore to help you find balance. I taught you so that you would understand how the universe is more than what we perceive. I didn’t teach you so that you could weaponize it.”
But humans will weaponize anything
They practiced shamanism for centuries! The power—” “The power would consume you,” Jiang said harshly. “That’s what fire does.
Consumed by the inner flame
Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.
At night, when she lay alone in the darkness, she heard over and over the call of the Phoenix. It plagued her dreams, whispered seductively to her from the other realm. The temptation was so great that it nearly drove her mad.
In his Principles of War, the great military theorist Sunzi had warned against attacking an enemy that occupied the higher ground. The target above held the advantage of surveillance and would not need to tire out their troops by climbing uphill. The Federation invasion strategy was a giant fuck you to Sunzi.
Rebels
From her vantage point high on the southern city wall, Rin watched the Federation force approach like a great fiery snake winding its way through the valley, encircling Sinegard to crush and swallow it. She saw it coming, and she trembled.
Fiery Snake
They were like a well-oiled machine. They were a spontaneously coordinated dance. They weren’t two parts of a whole, not quite, but they came close. If they hadn’t spent so much time hating each other, Rin thought, they might have trained together.
When Rin realized she hadn’t been cut in half or trampled to death, she opened her eyes. “What the fuck?” Nezha said. Jiang stood before them, his white hair hanging still in the air as if he had been struck by lightning. His feet did not touch the ground. Both his arms were flung out, blocking the tremendous force of the general’s halberd with his own iron staff. The general tried to force Jiang’s staff out of the way, and his arms trembled with a mighty pressure, but Jiang did not look like he was exerting any force at all. The air crackled unnaturally, like a prolonged rumble of thunder.
The shaman to the rescue
The air behind Jiang was warping, shimmering, turning darker than the night itself. Jiang’s eyes had rolled up into the back of his head. He chanted loudly, singing in that unfamiliar language that Rin had heard him use only once before.
Connection to the spirit realm
Jiang convulsed in the air before them, and then lost control altogether. The void burst outward, ripping the fabric of the world, collapsing the gated wall around them. He slammed his staff into the air. A wave of force emitted from the site of contact and exploded outward in a visible ring. For a moment everything was still. And then the east wall came down.
Rin struggled to her feet. Flames continued to pour out before her, flames she had no control over.
In her mind’s eye she saw the Phoenix, undulating from its plinth in the Pantheon.
“Please, stop.” The fire roared louder and louder. She couldn’t hear; she couldn’t breathe through the heat. She sank to her knees, eyes squeezed shut, grabbing her face with her hands.
Can't control the flame
“Runin,” the Empress repeated. Her voice was like a plucked string on a table harp, sharp and penetrating and beautiful all at once.
Hypnotic
“It’s obvious,” the Empress said. “She’s another Altan.”
Kitay, who was so convinced of his own rationality? Kitay was the paragon of the modernist thought that Jiang despised. Kitay was an atheist, a skeptic, who couldn’t accept challenges to his worldview. He would think her mad. And she was too exhausted to argue.
The uncosncious people
“Hey. Hey.” Cool fingers wrapped around her wrists. Gently, Altan pulled her hands away from her face. She looked up and met his eyes. They were a shade of crimson brighter than poppy petals. “It’s okay,” he said. “I know. I know what it’s like. I’m going to help you.”
That's so sweet
Training with Altan was like training with an older brother. It was so bizarre for someone to tell her that they were the same—that his joints hyperextended like hers did, so she should turn out her foot in such a way. To have similarities with someone else, similarities that lay deep in their genes, was an overwhelmingly wonderful sensation.
“No, we can’t just get high,” Altan said. He poked her again. “Lazy. That kind of thinking is a rookie mistake. Anyone can swallow some seeds and reach the Pantheon. That part’s easy. But forming a link with the god, channeling its power to your will and calling it back down—that takes discipline. Unless you’ve had practice honing your mind, it’s too easy for you to lose control. Think of it as a dam. The gods are sources of potential energy, like water flowing downhill. The drug is like the gate—it opens the way to let the gods through. But if your gate is too large, or flimsily constructed,
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Message to me
They were so much the opposite of Altan. Altan fought with the practiced grace of a martial artist. Altan moved like a ribbon of smoke, like a dancer. But Baji and Suni were a study in brutality, paragons of sheer and untempered force.
Precisely calculated style through years of discipline vs sheed force lol
His god had given him no apparent transformations, but he fought with a berserker’s rage, truly a wild boar in a bloodthirsty frenzy.
Three sets of countervailing orders competed for priority in her mind—Jiang’s mandate to empty her mind, Altan’s insistence that she hone her anger as a razor blade, and her own fear of letting the fire rip through her again, because once it began she didn’t know how to stop it.
I continue to experience this
What a marvel the Speerly army must have been. A full regiment of warriors who burned with the same glory as Altan . . . how had anyone ever killed that race off? One Speerly was a terror; a thousand should have been unstoppable. They should have been able to burn down the world.
Altan’s plan had been brilliant in conception. Under normal circumstances, a squad of eight could not hope to stand a chance against such massive odds. But Altan had chosen a battlefield where every single one of the Federation advantages was negated by their surroundings, and the Cike’s advantages were amplified. What it came down to was that the smallest division of the Militia had brought down an entire fleet.
Successful strategist
Altan was so solemnly competent, so casually brilliant, that all she wanted was to please him. He was strict in his command, sparing with his praise, but when he gave it, it felt wonderful. She wanted it, craved it like something tangible.
Good leadership
Next time. Next time she wouldn’t be deadweight. She would learn to channel that anger at will, even if she risked losing herself to it.
He seemed to always be in that state of rage he wanted Rin to cultivate. And yet he never lost control. He gave an incredible illusion of sanity and stability, whatever was going on below his dispassionate mask.
“I don’t understand,” Altan said. “You’ve done this before. You did this at Sinegard. What’s stopping you?” Rin knew what the problem was, though she couldn’t admit it. She was afraid. Afraid that the power would consume her. Afraid she might rip a hole into the void, like Jiang had, and that she would disappear into the very power that she had called.
“I was the war orphan from the south, and you were the rich kid from Sinegard, and you tormented me. You made Sinegard a living hell, Nezha.” It felt good to say it out loud. It felt good to see Nezha’s stricken expression.
Nezha stretched his arms out to her. “We’re humans through and through,” he said gently. The girl leaned into his arms, and her sobs subsided. Rin watched Nezha in amazement. He seemed to know exactly how to act around the child, adjusting his tone and his body language to be as comforting as possible.
Maybe that was the kind of anger it took to call the Phoenix easily and regularly the way Altan did. Not just rage, not just fear, but a deep, burning resentment, fanned by a particularly cruel kind of abuse.
She stood up, even as she reached somewhere inside herself—somewhere spiteful and dark and horrible—and opened the channel to the entity she already knew was waiting for her summons. The room pitched forward as if viewed through a long scarlet prism. The familiar burn was back in her veins, the burn that demanded blood and ashes.
Qara was grounded, material, fully made of earth. To call them anchor twins was a misnomer—she alone was the anchor to her ethereal brother, who belonged more in the realm of spirit than he did in a world of flesh and blood.
you Nikara are so primitive,” said Chaghan. “You still think there’s a strict binary between the material world and the Pantheon.
“It can tell me the future?” “No one can divine the future,” said Chaghan. “It is always shifting, always dependent on individual choices.
Rin was beginning to see the reason why Chaghan commanded the fear that he did. He was just like Jiang—unthreatening and eccentric, until one understood what deep power lay behind his frail facade.
“These lines are patterns written into the universe. They are ancient combinations, descriptions of shapes that were long before either of us was born.
