Sky Pride

Epilogue III- Two Birds of a Feather

Burning Heaven drifted out of the false sun, falling on the hive below. She didn’t know what to call the monsters that lived there- neither insect nor leech, yet somehow both, and they numbered in the millions. Individually, they were nothing. Barely in the Earthly Realm. Collectively, they were far more powerful than her. It looked like a million wriggling, toothy horrors, but in truth, there was only one. Endlessly hungry. Endlessly strong.

Her teacher had sent her in to clear out this secret realm and make it habitable once more. So no matter how many millions of them there were, no matter their endless unnatural strength, they had to die. Burning Heaven spread her wide wings. Hazy light gathered along the tips of them. The false sun seemed to grow stronger, its rays concentrating over the hive. Ignorable to start with, but the heat kept rising. The things writhing and vomiting their cement-like secretions liked to be cool. They couldn’t ignore the heat for long, and they didn’t.

The creatures wove their wormlike legs together, segmented yet fleshy body to body. Star shaped mouths filled with teeth opened and spread like flowers, then interlocked. Groups of ten formed into a single being, which launched beams of grey light at Burning Heaven. She ignored the beams, focusing on intensifying the sunlight.

When the groups of ten merged into groups of thousands, she started dodging. The bolts of grey light had turned into pillars of light, the grey feeling corrosive, simple proximity becoming enough to erode and destroy the stone structures it passed over.

They had caught her with a beam like that once before. She wasn’t going to let them do it a second time. Instead, she turned and flew over another section of the hive. The concentrated sunlight followed her, riling up the creatures infesting that section too. A second gigantic abomination emerged, then a third. Then they combined, and now the thing was tall enough that its obscene, star shaped mouth could bite her out of the sky. The grey beams were as thick around as a river, and where they landed, rock turned to fine dust.

The sun narrowed its oppressive light and heat into a beam of its own, searing a line of stinking, burning flesh along the abomination’s back. It didn’t scream. Instead, it opened a hundred thousand pores, ejecting a blue secretion that sealed the wound and kept it from worsening.

It’s light-sensitive patches of skin, the networks of nerves that could sense electrical fields and taste the minerals in stone, and feel the vibrations in the ground and air from miles away, and other, far more strange and obscure senses fixated on Burning Heaven. Multitudinous limbs writhed across the stone floor of the secret land, propelling the beast far quicker than something of its bulk should be able to move. The grey beam was never far from Burning Heaven’s talons, and while a Snow Grace Crane could fly for a very long time, she had never been the quickest.

She didn’t have to be. She didn’t fly alone.

The beast rushed into a stretch of stone much like any other, save that it was jet black. The endless limbs touched the black stone, and stuck. Jets of pale acid poured out of the abomination, reeking, melting any ordinary stone it reached. It sank into nothingness when it touched the black stone. And soon, the beast was sinking too. Long whips of flesh covered in mucilaginous excretions lashed out, grasping for pieces of the hive, any sort of rocky outcropping it could use to pull itself free.

Burning Heaven curved back through the air, making a high, tight arch to rise into the sun again. The sunlight narrowed into a cutting beam once again, burning through the reaching flesh whips before they could rescue the monster. It was an enormous aberration, and the ground could only absorb so much. It slowed its sink, then reached equilibrium. There was a dreadful moment, as new mouths opened along the thing’s back, and new beams of grey light coalesced.

From out of the black stone, a darker blackness emerged, near invisible beneath the horror. It rose with a quiet inevitability, landing softly on the belly of the creature they had come to kill. What it touched, rotted. Decaying meat dripped onto the black stone below, and vanished. The black form, darker than ink, darker than the night, seeped into the monster, and began to move about. As it passed, the region of rot spread. The rate of disintegration, the range of it, increased. More and more foul liquid poured from the wound and vanished into the stone below.

The abomination couldn’t stand that sort of abuse. Not for long. It tried to separate again, the individual segments sacrificing the dead and damaged to escape the killing field, but it was all too late. Burning Heaven spread her wings wide. Brilliant light coalesced around her, as the air started to burn. The soft insectile horrors couldn’t withstand it. Refined between yin and yang, they returned to nothingness.

Once the battlefield was empty and all traces of the creatures obliterated, the darkness coalesced into a crow. Unreasonably large for a crow, he was no smaller than Burning Heaven. Precisely the same height, in fact. To a feather’s-width.

“Brother Brightheart worked hard.” Burning Heaven nodded at the crow, folding her long legs beneath her as she settled on the stone floor. “Once again, the unpleasant work was done by you.”

“It’s nothing. Truthfully, I benefitted.”

Burning Heaven nodded contentedly. “I envy you, really. Already so clear on your dao.”

Brightheart laughed, soft and self deprecating. “I wonder. Some days, it feels less like a path and more an absurd dream. ‘From extreme yin, yang is born.’ Can the darkest crow be reborn into the light of the sun? Must we always chase the external, neglecting what already accompanies us?” Brightheart dipped his beak and started straightening his feathers.

Burning Heaven thought it over, then sighed.

“I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it seems I must come out and say it plain. I’m not interested in taking a dao companion at this time, and am completely unwilling to even discuss a more casual relationship.”

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There was a pause. Then a longer pause. Brightheart looked over at the brilliantly glowing Burning Heaven and blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“A good start, yes, but forgiveness is earned by deeds, not words alone. You know perfectly well that cranes are monogamous, and even though we have awoken our spiritual wisdom, I have no interest in many partners. To say nothing of how I was raised! Or do you seek to add me to your harem? To join an army of sisters building bunkbeds?”

“I’m single. Bunkbeds?” Brightheart’s smooth voice descended into a croak.

“Oh heavens, you don’t make them share nests do you? I like a good nest, but that’s my nest. The smell must be incredible, unless they are replacing the grass daily. Brother Brightheart, I thought better of you!”

“I… I don’t have a harem. I don’t want you to join my harem. I don’t want to join your harem. That you don’t have and I don’t have. What… how did we get here?”

“Through the portal Teacher opened. Oh dear, were you hurt? I don’t want to dual cultivate with you, but I do consider you a good brother. I know a treatment for sick brains that might help, hold still.” Burning Heaven hopped to her feet. Brightheart backpedaled, flapping his wings.

“I don’t want to dual cultivate with you! I never said I wanted to dual cultivate with you! I’m not a virgin, but I’m not some sort of laviscous person. Where does this madness come from?!”

“You were plainly using metaphors to try to seduce me. Don’t play innocent, Brother, it doesn’t suit you.”

“I did no such thing!”

“Hrmph! You think I haven’t been studying metaphors since we reached the holy land? Birth of yang from extreme yin, neglecting the close while chasing the distant, a crow reborn in the light of the sun, and what is the sun if not the burning heavens? HMMM?” She transformed, growing dozens of feet tall, leaning over the crow and glaring at him with a single enormous, yellow eyeball.

“HMMMMMM?”

Not for the first time, Brightheart thought the contrast between her red face and white feathers were quite striking. One hundred percent out of his zone of interest. But striking.

“You weren’t the only one hoping things wouldn’t reach this point, but it seems that I, too, must say some things plainly. Burning Heaven, you are an adult. How can you not understand proper language? We deal in metaphors all day. Our manuals and scriptures are all written in metaphor and allusion.”

“And they are nearly all incomprehensible trash. Don’t try to sneak out of this, you aren’t a loach, and I haven’t yet let a loach escape me either.”

“Oh no you don’t!” Brightheart transformed so he could see Burning Heaven giant eyeball to giant eyeball. “I’m not standing a minute more of this slander. Are you even a decade old?”

“Naturally!” There was, Brightheart thought, entirely too much conviction in her voice.

Well, I’m four hundred and eight! I realized long ago what I desired. It’s women strictly over the age of two hundred, fully awakened, with a cultivation practice and dao path that is well developed and interesting.”

“Nonsense. Birds mature-”

“I don’t give a damn!” Brightheart hopped with agitation. “Do you have the faintest idea how boring most people are? Even the ones that can make conversation don’t have anything worth saying. I developed a real reputation for dignity and silent reserve after my second girlfriend. Silent cultivation was the only way to get the twittering to stop!”

Burning Heaven gave him a dubious look. “Conversation. Sure.”

“Oh, stow a brain in that hole in your head, won’t you? You live with a pair of dao companions. What percentage of their time is spent mating, and how much is spent talking? Or cultivating, or practicing their martial arts, skills, working, all that?”

“One hundred percent!”

“Must say I’m impressed Disciple Tian can work in a hospital while mating! Truly, a hidden dragon amongst juniors.”

“No, he’s probably human. I mean it’s one hundred percent talking and working.” Burning Heaven shook her head, clearly confused about where all this was going. “I don’t think they are mature yet.”

“Sometimes I wonder just who is.” Brightheart’s voice dropped to a growl. “You spend, at most, a few days or weeks out of the year mating, but what about the whole rest of the time? If a person is boring to be around, if they tax you, drain you, for most of your time, why be with them? And damnit, below a certain age and degree of cultivation, there just isn’t anything worth talking about, and nothing much interesting to do together.”

“But… Hmm. What was all that yin-yang nonsense, then?”

This time it was Brightheart who made himself loom over Burning Heaven, glaring down at her with a giant eyeball. “MY LITERAL DAO PATH, YOU DITZ!” The booming echoes made the ruins of the hive shudder. Brightheart shrank, matching Burning Heaven’s size.

“I pursue extreme yin to be reborn into extreme yang. You know my lineage goes back to the Three Legged Crows. Literal sun gods. Yet here we are, inky black and eating carrion. Creatures of yin. There is so plainly a path there, and a mystery worth solving. I have dedicated my entire self to walking that path. An upright, honorable descent into absolute darkness, that I might be reborn in the light.”

“Because yin isn’t evil, any more than yang is good. It’s just that there are things associated with both that humans ascribe to evil and good.” Burning Heaven nodded. “I really do envy your clarity about your path. See how much better it is to just speak plainly? We understand each other better, and once again, we are good brother and sister. Shall we let Teacher know we are done here?”

Brightheart stood with his beak open for a long moment, then collapsed back into a crow of ordinary size. “Yes. For the love of all that is good and true in the world, yes. Escape. I must escape.”

“Besides, I need to report to Big Sis’ Dawnlight that I accomplished her mission.” Burning Heaven muttered.

“Eh?”

“Oh, she said something about taking you in, letting you experience the sweetness of being kept by an older woman, so long as you didn’t have a dao companion or something. Well, I’m pretty sure that’s what she meant. Her metaphors were a bit tricky to figure out. She was saying something about Mourning Cry carving her bones with constellations. I’m connecting the literary references here, though I don’t think I have read a literary book. I’m quite sure she was hinting to me that she wanted me to see if you were single, and since you were hitting on me, I thought ‘Now’s the time to find out!’”

Burning Heaven nodded sagaciously, her boat-sized head bobbing up and down in a blur of red. “It seems she is just your type, too. I am an excellent matchmaker. Another thing I have learned here. I have learned a lot in the Holy Land. Teacher says I am never boring. Come along, Brother Brightheart. Let’s get you safely nested while you study. You must be ready to join me when the mountain opens. Stick with me, and we shall dominate the world!”