Chapter 479 – Final Preparations (Patreon)

Whoo! I got sidetracked with my trip and the anxiety therein, but I have the chapter and now so do you! Enjoy, loves, and sorry for the delay.

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There are ever so many festivals in the world. It’s not a surprise, really. For however many tens of thousands of years people have been around, we’ve had a bit of a tough fucking time, and finding things to celebrate is one of the ways we’ve evolved to find joy. Because there is joy. There is so much joy in the world, if you know how to look for it, and people, in spite of what we like to say about ourselves, are very good at looking for it, finding it, and sharing it with each other. 

The birth of a child is a joy. The ascent from one realm of cultivation to another is a joy. The death of a family member can be a celebration of their life. The completion of a barnhouse is often accompanied by a whole goddamn party. All of this, of course, only if we’re talking about celebrations of dozens of people or more. And none of that gets into the real festivals, the proper ceremonial ones. 

The coldest night of the year, and the hottest day. The passing of one season to another. The founding day of a town, or, more likely, the founding days of an Empire and all its many saints and holy days. Religions and governments in particular love their festivals. 

It’s not hard to see why. When there’s not much joy to be found, we people are also very good at making some. It is, perhaps, one of the greatest privileges of my life to be in a world where celebration survives the advent of tragedies, and anchors us to each other and our kindness.

–Personal notes of Imperial Scholar Hao Fayin, notes on the human condition, quarantined for potential anti-Imperial sentiment.

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It’s amazing the sorts of things that can be made into paint. Berries, shells, types of rocks, all the more, mixed in the right quantities, with the right liquids, with the right surfaces to place them on, can provide an incredible array of the most dazzling sorts of colors. Add to that the properties of Qi, which can shape things in even the smallest of ways, and the smallest of changes can mean quite a bit of change indeed, and the many hues one can create from almost anything become exponentially more complex and varied. 

It reminds Raika of a sort of alkemy. It’s something she’s been learning a lot about since she came back together, but it’s one of the sorts of studies that, even with a hundred hundred minds, has taken quite some time. There’s alkemy in a body, the ways that different chemicals are made out of food and sun and water and air, mixed into new things besides, blended into all new shapes and forms and functions. There’s alkemy in fire, the conversion of materials to heat and light. There’s alkemy in people, she thinks, and the ways they can intermingle and create the most stunningly delightful new ideas and stories and machines and more. Maybe alkemy isn’t the right term for it, even. It goes beyond chemicals, after all, and the fascinating puzzles of it, the way that things work in the Will of Heaven and how they work so differently when one touches the Dao or their own personal Truths. 

She’s gotten good at playing with them. The patterns of it all. The ways thing touch each other and transform, changing into so many other things.

There are plenty of uses for it, of course. In the last few years, she hasn’t become less adept at building weapons, at shaping biology, at blending what is and what is not into combinations that cannot naturally be but are. 

She can feel them roiling inside her, sometimes. Distant, on the horizon of her being compared to where she is, but so large and so wild and so strange that the shape of their shadow inside of her is enough to make the world tremble. 

There are suns inside of her, suns of flame as alien as anything the stars might once have held. She can feel the heat and ever-CHANGE of them, roiling under layers of reality that are scaffolded with strange metals, made into machines so delicate and so large that they could devour this lake, and every other for a thousand thousand miles, and still hunger for more coolant and stranger fuel. 

And none of that even touches on their shadows. On the things built in the inverse of her, or their Deaths, which are beyond this current moment but crawl back through time to be real anyways. 

Yeah, maybe alkemy is too small of a word. 

But it goes up and down, all the way. Top to bottom. As Above, So Below. As the strangest and most complex magics are, so too are the simplest, and simplicity is, in and of itself, sort of a lie. 

Amazing, the sorts of things that can be made into paint. More amazing still, the paints that can be made. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she’s a big fan of red and orange.

Such a fan, in fact, that she’s got the first of her banners up more than a day early, flapping brightly in the wind and glowing in the midday sun. 

She’s not the only one who’s “early”, though. Dozens of other homes along West Laketown have got their own banners up, many of them decorated with the names of ancestors or family members, many painted in children’s handprints right alongside parent’s brush-strokes. The paints have been refreshed, all but the rarest of dyes, and many of those faded banners are here with her now, in her home. 

There’s a surprising amount of overlap between being a witch with herbs and being a bitch who can make paints. 

The banner she’s working on refreshing now is of dark blue, though she’s being a bit extra with it. Blue is nice and all, but since she has the option, she’s been tinting it rather generously with slight droplets of purple, deepening the color further. 

It’s going to turn out brighter and lovelier than it ever was. She’s sure the family will love it.

A sound draws her back out of the work, and she turns, looking over her shoulder back towards her cabin. She sits in the sunlight, enjoying its heat as the wooden basin she’s mixing dyes with warms in her hand (and smelling just deliciously terrible). 

“Tea?” comes the polite voice of her son. 

“What kind?” she asks, mostly just to fuck with him. The kid doesn’t know how to make a bad cup of tea.

“The kind that’s good,” he says, walking over to her with the little cup and placing it on the ground beside her. Her focus drifts towards it, even as she lets it expand back out from the simple act of making the dye and refreshing the banner, and the smell of it is lovely. A fragrant mix of oolong tea, mingled with something floral in origin she can’t quite identify. Pretty impressive already, that, but the hint of honey, the choice of water for the boiler, it’s all rich and blended into something almost artful, steeped to perfection. 

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she says, instead of complimenting the fuck out of it like it deserves. “You know I prefer my teas a certain way.”

Rai Jin snorts, sitting on the grass beside her. “You mean you like your teas terrible. I found what you call your kettle, mother, and what you’ve done to the poor thing is a crime. The level of burnt filth at the bottom of it was just…”

“That’s accumulated flavor, kid. When you have a palate as refined as mine, you get to enjoy all the little nuances.”

“All the little nuances of burnt garbage aren't exactly what I would call delectable, master.”

“Only because you have no taste, kid! As your elder and master, my wisdom is undeniable.”

“Just try the tea, master.”

Raika rolls her eyes, but does as he asks, not minding the blue-purple stains she leaves on the cup as she lifts it to her lips. 

Yeah. Surprising literally no one at all, it’s delicious. 

“Ugh. How the hell did any son of mine end up so prissy?”

“Big sis Li Shu is almost as good a mentor as you are.”

“Oh please, she couldn’t tell good tea from boiled fish water unless it was medicinal and you know it.”

“That… may be true, master, but it’s a bit rude to say.”

Raika shrugs, smiling wide. “I’m a bit rude, kid. It’s part of my charm.”

“Of course, master. Perhaps I simply grew my strengths to match your deficiencies.”

“Ah yes, the deficiency of being a young master. Truly the one aspect of my character that was missing.”

“Does it not fit my form, master?” Jin asks, holding his knees as he sits on the hillside, overlooking the village and the bright, colorful banners that flutter in the wind, reflecting off of the lake in the distance. “I am, after all, your son, and you are very rich.”

She snorts. “I’m not sure that’s quite how I’d describe myself, kid.”

He smiles, and she notes the thrill of soft joy that runs through him as she, as ever, does not deny his connection to her. Her son. She’s known him nearly half his life, and he has been her son for most of that time. Part of her is ashamed that he would doubt her commitment to that truth, and another part of her knows that he just enjoys the affirmation. 

Almost seven years of parenthood do not erase eleven, maybe twelve, years of solitude. Of being alone, half-abandoned, unloved. She is happy to offer him every bit of confirmation he asks of her.

“Well, like it or not, master, that’s what you are. If it was for sale, you could buy up half the Empire. How many spirit stones do you think you could make in a day?”

“Enough to fill up that lake a couple times over,” she admits, shrugging. 

“And how many cultivators follow you now? Cultivators and Beasts?”

She laughs. “It varies. A few hundred? Maybe a few thousand?”

“A faction all your own, bigger than your average sect. And if you were talking about natural treasures, or pills, or medicines, or weapons? How much do you think you could make and trade?”

“...Alright. A lot.”

“And seeing as I have found myself in the position of acting as your martial son–”

“Of being my son,” she interrupts, enjoying the little thrill that runs through him at her insistence.

 “–then perhaps it would be reasonable to consider the idea that acting as a sort of young master is, in fact, the appropriate behavior for one such as myself.”

Raika laughs, shaking her head.

“I live in a little village by the lake, dyeing banners by hand. Everything else is for other places and other times.” 

“But you’re there too, aren’t you?” her son asks. “Those other places and other times. I know that you’re not all you all the time, but I know that you’re there.”

“I am,” she says, her voice quiet and contemplative. “I’m also them. But I’m also not either. Myself and them at once. Or maybe we’re all myself. Hands and legs and guts, all knowing we are not the same thing and knowing we are all the same.”

“I’m not sure it’s so seamless, master.”

“Hah! Yeah. Still a work in progress. But close enough for metaphor. I already know, I guess, but I hope that…”

“Yes, master. You have always treated me well. Even at your worst.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Kai Ra my worst.”

“No, master, I agree. Pillar, though, is… a bit harder to get a good feel for.”

“Yeah. Not the warmest sort, even if it tries its best.”

Jin nods. “I could tell. I don’t think it feels like the rest of you does. Like… maybe a spinal column doesn’t feel the way a brain does. A bit uncharitable, perhaps, and I apologize if it offers you any disrespect, master.”

“If anything, kid, you could stand to be a little more disrespectful. I’ve never really minded it.”

He laughs at that, and it is a soft sound. Even after all the years, even after all her thunder and light of his master, he is still so very quiet a soul, in all the kindest ways. 

“Well then, I suppose that the best I can say for the Pillars emotions is that it tries its best to pretend to have them, sometimes. When it thinks it should, which is not always when I think it actually should.”

“We have that in common. Every part of me does, I think. All of us. We try our best.”

“Except when making tea, huh?”

She snorts, enjoying another sip of the heavenly concoction he’s made for her, the little bastard. “Well… maybe not then. But I do genuinely enjoy it, you know. It’s hard to explain, but I think that most of what people think of as “bad tastes” are just flavors that our bodies developed warnings about. Telling us not to eat something that may be poisoned or toxic or just rotted. I don’t really have that issue. Maybe something with a Dao of Poison could be able to affect me in that sort of way, but when it comes to eating, there’s not really anything I need to worry about. So why dislike it when I don’t have to?”

“While I suppose that may be true, master, that doesn’t mean that you should magically just start liking things.”

“No, but it comes with practice. And besides, I’m weird. Maybe I always like the taste of burnt, gross, bad and weird things, and was just waiting to not be weirded out about it because of some flimsy little flesh. And the combinations! What a joy! Such strange and terrible delights. Cyanide, rotten leaves, and a hint of burnt sugar? Genuinely delightful.”

Jin rolls his eyes, but doesn’t refute her. She’s pretty sure that he knows that if he pushes her on it, she will happily make a sample batch for him to enjoy. 

She finishes another sip of tea, sighing, and then returns her hand to the basin, mixing more of the goops and herbs together that she’s going to have to strain out into a proper dye later. She has the materials, luckily, or if she doesn’t, she can trade for them in town. She’s pretty sure at least one of the banners she’s volunteered to work on has a family that would want it to be colored properly, and a thin cloth to strain with isn’t that rare. 

It’s going to be lovely. She can already see it. 

She just hopes her kids will see it too.

“Got any plans for the festival tomorrow?” she asks, voicing her concern in a more careful way. 

“Should I?” he asks instead of answering.

“Maybe you should. There are some people in the village that are your age. And there’ll be plenty of drinks, and food. Time to dance. Maybe someone pretty you could talk to.”

He doesn’t blush, which is a little annoying. They grow up so damn fast.

“I’m not sure it would be appropriate, master,” he says instead. “Considering… me.”

She raises an eyebrow at that, but doesn’t press him on it. She lets him sit with it instead, gives him the space to choose to say more or not. 

Eventually, he sighs.

“I… the last time I was in a village like this was right after I met you. Like, right after. The time before that, I was sneaking into it to try and find something to eat, so I wouldn’t starve to death out in the woods. And I was cursed, and people threw rocks at me, and I got chased by a bunch of other kids my age. And since then, I’ve seen…”

He looks out over the village, but he’s not seeing it. Not really. His eyes are distant. 

“I’ve seen so much, master. I’ve seen death unmade, I’ve seen the Wall, taller than the mountains. I’ve seen forests so deep they’re like oceans, and oceans so deep they’re like whole worlds, all dark and strange and beyond the reach of the sun. I’ve seen the kinds of Beasts that the stories never warned me about, and met things that no one here would understand no matter how well I’ve described it. And I’m strong. It made me stronger than any of them. I could…”

There it is. The thing she knew was coming, and was afraid of.

“If I made a mistake, I could really hurt them.”

She lets that sit with them for a while, her hand moving about in her basin and drawing the colors together into a darker blend. Eventually, once the colors have started to settle, she lets them sit for a moment, reaching her painted hand back over to the teacup beside her and taking a small, gentle sip of it. 

“Takes a lot of care to make a flavor like this,” she tells him. “A lot of control.”

He surprises her by actually snorting for once. It sounds just like hers and it makes her so proud. 

“It’s not the same thing at all, master.”

“No, it’s not. Metaphor’s shitty like that. But it’s also the same thing entirely. You’re not careless. I truly and genuinely believe you wouldn’t hurt someone without intending to, and that if you did, you would understand it, and apologize, and do your best to rectify it. Am I wrong?”

“I… yes, master.”

She rolls her eyes. “No. Not like that. If you don’t believe it, don’t say it.”

He sighs, long and slow and annoyed, like the damn teenager he is. Like the young man he’s grown up to be, annoyed at being poked. 

“I’m not like them. I don’t see what they see. Our experiences are so… so different.”

And he’s right. Even before he became a cultivator, he was different from them. Touched by death, alone, starved and isolated all his life before her. 

And still, she sits beside him, waiting for him to open that door and start to understand. 

It may take a while. It might take years. But the whole point of having him here beside her is to offer him something to help with that.

“You keep looking at the ground,” she tells him. “Look out ahead of you.”

His gaze comes up, and she sees the lake reflected in his eyes. The colors of the banners, decorated and designed by families over generations, spread out over the homes bustling with activity, catching the light of the sun reflected off the calm waters. 

“You’ve seen things they haven’t. You’re different than they are. Stronger, faster, stranger. You can do things they can’t. But that doesn’t just go one way.”

He looks at her, confused. She meets his eyes, still holding the steaming cup of tea he made.

“You couldn’t have made those banners. You don’t know what it’s like, to be alongside people your age and who want to just spend time with you, or dance with you, or ask you to help them sneak some booze out into the fields to get wasted together. You’ve been alone, surrounded by demigods and monsters, a long time, kid. And if that’s who you want to be, what you want from life, then that’s fine. Beautiful, even. But being different doesn’t mean you don’t also have things in common. It doesn’t mean that you can’t connect. And it doesn’t mean that there’s no value in trying.”

She takes a sip, letting the fragrant steam drift up to her face and warm her. Her eyes close, enjoying the sensation, and only open again once she feels that Jin has had a moment to breathe.

“You don’t have to, kid. If you try it, try it for you, not for me. But you have a chance to experience something you never have, sincerely, meaningfully, openly. That’s not nothing. That can mean a lot. And I won’t order it, but I do ask that you think about approaching it a little differently.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just turns away, his gaze going back out and straight ahead, catching the light of the sun on the water.

Eventually, her tea runs out. He takes her cup, bowing to her as he rises, and leaves her to her paint.

She’s pretty sure he didn’t notice how fucking terrified she was the whole time. Having kids is… it’s an exercise in the horror of knowing you might hurt them. If you say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, give the wrong idea. If you are the wrong thing. 

And she’s got four of them, and all of them need very different things. 

She’s glad she’s the Raika just doing dye-jobs and making herbs. Doing this and breaking the world would be fucking exhausting.