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The hair stuck to his neck is cold and damp.
Shi Qingxuan sits on a street strewn with charred stone and bits of blackened wood, a little bewildered, a little empty. Feet patter across the street, back and forth and around him. The murmurs of awe and disbelief and triumph are swathed in cotton, soft and mild. His left knee aches a little. He peers down and sees torn skin there.
Another dull ache from his lower back has him reach behind himself and pick up some debris that bit into his skin there. As he narrows his left eye at it, he thinks it might be golden fragment of a palace statue, a hand or a spearhead melted and distorted beyond recognition.
Heaven has fallen. The throne has been broken; the courts are no more. Under the black skies, the embers of past vainglory burned and fell like astral rain; ablaze in ancient wrath and unearthed secrets too black for mortal hearts. And before the conflagration of a fallen deity’s resentment, amidst the torrents of hunger and anguish of thousands of ancient souls long forgotten, His Highness shone like a white star.
The very skies will tremble when the mightiest fall. But all that is of little concern for Shi Qingxuan’s small and mortal mind, and so he scratches his scalp and wonders, woeful, if the promise of chicken will ever be fulfilled. His stomach tells him it is empty, but he knows no hunger and no thirst.
In the mellow aftermath, the skies have softened to the light of a waning moon. Bright lanterns shine over a city still asleep, and even the shadows in the narrow alley are silken. Qingxuan pats himself down; fishes out the broken fan from his inner shirt, runs a thumb over the painted rosewood. The shredded silk will never again shimmer with the vivacious spirits of the winds; the gales will never heed it.
It lies dead in his hand, a cheap and worthless relic.
‘Oh,’ says Shi Qingxuan.
His breath hitches a little, then mellows, as soft and forlorn as the night.
Laughter reverberates under the lilac skies of spring; blends with raucous banter, sweetens the scent of mulberry. Shi Qingxuan rides the wave of merriment, one arm thrown over the broad back of a fellow starver. They come with well-wishes and dirtied feet and empty stomachs, thick-faced before narrowed eyes and wrinkled noses and high crowns and embroidered hanfus. But the master of the festivities receives them all with a benevolent bow.
His Highness is radiant on this day, as he should be, and Qingxuan rejoices. He banters with the beggars, his laughter a bright trill. His mouth waters at the promise of chicken and broth. When he starves, he is light as air, and he laughs and capers with the highborn and lowborn, cheers as two esteemed generals spar with their brooms; offends both and laughs them in their faces. He teases the sour-faced daozhang, bows before a Devastation, and eats to his heart’s delight.
Later, when the merriment has died down to warm and mellow embers, when paper lanterns shine over silvered grass and the ghost king and his beloved are nowhere in sight, he sits under a mulberry tree and stares at the skies. They’re black as pitch, deep as the fathomless sea where no light ever shines.
The broken fan rests within his ragged tunic, hidden in the inner folds, a sharp edge against his ribs, a brand against his flea-bitten skin. Shi Qingxuan feels the wood and swallows. Heaves once, then hides his mouth with his hand. Rests the other on his stomach to keep the chicken down.
Shi Qingxuan is older.
Old enough to have sons in their prime, a fair daughter, a wife. But Qingxuan has no sons, no wife, no roof over his head, no shoes to his feet.
A decade has passed. His teeth decay. His skin is tan and coarse. His crippled bones mended poorly; they ache on wet days and damp nights. This night is dark and dry. Summer blankets the distant city below, but the skies are barren and inked black.
On the crest of the hill, the beggars have lit a fire. On nights such as these, the banter is blunted down to a faint simmer. The younger children sleep, swathed in their threadbare cloaks. Old men bend their heads; murmur about their fleas, grouse about some law enforcer. A jar of cheap rice wine passes from hand to hand. Winds whisper in tall grasses, spread the gentle fragrances of lavender and the sharper scents of burnt wood.
Qingxuan turns the broken fan over in his hands. Scratches a blunt and torn nail over the furrows. Coated in arid smoke, his breaths clog his chest, and his tongue lies swollen in his mouth. If he closes his eyes, he can taste the copper of decade-old blood at the back of his throat.
His own blood, fresh from a tongue mangled by his own teeth, and his brother’s blood, still hot as it spatters across his face.
He dries his chin with his sleeve. Rubs and rubs and rubs —
‘Ol’ Feng,’ jibes a voice, rough with forced gaiety. ‘Where have your thoughts hopped off to this night, Ol’ Feng?’ A hand claps his back.
He waves his own, laughs a bit, shakes his unkempt mane, murmurs gibberish in return. By and by, they leave him be; leave him to silence and an addled man’s reminiscences. Who knows where a wine-soaked mind shall wander?
Shi Qingxuan does not know. The broken fan rests in his damp hand; hot coal against blistered skin.
He hunches his back and feeds it to the fire, watches the flames lick at faded silk. The rosewood is lacquered, but the varnish is old and much, much too worn. Soon the wood smolders and chars. Agony spears through him like a ghost’s chilled breath from the grave. His hand trembles; he tears the fan out of the fire, blows at the embers, rubs at the soot with his thumb. His mouth still stammers some drivel, but what it says, he does not know.
To his left, across the firepit, a pair of youths stare at him with saucer-eyes.
Shi Qingxuan smiles a water-laden smile at them, shakes his head at himself, hides his face in his elbow and weeps.
Hands hold him down. They have broken his bowl and taken his last coppers, his loaf of mantou, his cloak.
He is no stranger to the cruelty of the streets; knows better than to fight back, but the hands do not relent. They paw and tear, pat him down, shake his sleeves, steal his one boot, delve into every fold. A foot spatters grime onto his chest. Wet mud lies thick upon the trampled streets; stinks of rot and winter and foul waters.
The hands find the battered remains of his fan and Shi Qingxuan arches his back, bites into a tanned wrist, tears skin and writhes and claws. A face bends over him and his broken nail nicks the thief in the eye. The man tears back and raises his fist.
A holler cuts through the fog, and the hands halt. A few fall away from his rags. One still fists his hair. Shi Qingxuan hears some threat or other, hears a spit-laden curse shouted and a blade leave its sheath. The fist in his hair loosens and he tears his head away and claws for the fan. At the corner of his eye, he sees it lie in a puddle of water.
He is too late. A sword-calloused hand picks it up. Shi Qingxuan bats grime-soaked hair from his face and hunches his shoulders. His chest rises and falls with sharp, stuttered breaths, but still he holds out his hand.
The man’s boots is of better make than his own. Shi Qingxuan dares not raise his eyes until he is spoken to.
‘Is this yours?’
Shi Qingxuan makes a hapless gesture with his hands. Bites his lip. He thinks he smiles; a half-wit’s nervous, too-wide smile.
The man above him is a traveler garbed in the attire of a martial sect, his face sculpted for aloof chivalry, his mouth stern. There is no warmth in him, but Shi Qingxuan needs no warmth. He needs the fan in his savior’s hand.
‘This is what you clamored for?’ asks the traveler. He disregards the beggar’s outstretched hand; throws the fan at Qingxuan’s chest.
‘You addled old wretch,’ he chides, when Qingxuan neither kowtows his gratitude nor wrests some words of sense from his mouth. ‘Don’t cause a racket over some filth.’
His lecture delivered, he turns heel. Qingxuan folds his hands over the fan; keeps it close to his breast. Falls back and breathes dust and blood-tinted relief.
The sea is dark and vast, her coat silvered in the light of dawn. Salt-laden winds comb the sands, bend dry reeds, raise waves, and Shi Qingxuan stands on the shore.
‘I don’t want this,’ he says.
In his fist are the broken remains of what was once his most prized treasure, and his knuckles are white as death.
‘I don’t want this,’ he whispers. The winds swallow his voice, silence his desolation.
He has been here before. Has wandered upon these sands, and stared at the waters, and trembled with dread.
‘You —’
His throat is dry, but he vies for ire; wills a pout to his mouth. ‘You took it from me. You — you did it. What use is this to me now? Take it back.’
The brief ember of ire lends him the strength he failed to find in the years before.
Shi Qingxuan tears the fan asunder and throws one half into the sea, as far as his strength allows. The waves engulf it. They spit it ashore, then draw it back to the abyss with their long tongues and fickle hands. Qingxuan’s knuckles tighten around the other half; the charred, battered half.
In the end, it is a short-lived farce. Shi Qingxuan turns away from sea and takes a few steps towards the bank. He falters. He runs back to the waters, kneels and paws at the froth with his withered hands, shakes old kelp off his wrists and swallows his small and pained whines. The rosewood will not sink, but his eyes strain to see in the fierce winds; they too water and cloud his sight. When the currents steal the battered wood from his stiff fingers, he wades farther out and thrusts his hands into the waters, again and again, while his teeth chatter in his mouth. A wave tears him off his feet, but it draws him closer to the remains of his fan, and his hand closes around it as the currents haul him farther and farther from shore. Black depths await at his back. He thrashes like a dog, swallows white froth and salt, gasps what breath he still can. Cramps seize him. His crippled bone flares with pain, and he flounders, left at the sea’s mercy.
Then, like his debris, the sea spits him out.
Sick to the bone, he crawls ashore, throws up seawater, buries his forehead in wet sands. Shivers there until the bleak sun dries the shirt on his back.
Ol’ Feng is not long for this world. His hair is white, his parchment-yellow skin sags, his teeth are few and far between. Forty years has it been. Another life lived; illness and starvation and debasement braided with mercy and solace; the companionship of cheerful peers, the odd treat of roast chicken or congee, the fortunate nights spent under dry roofs. Small merriments, boisterous banter, a hand on his shoulder, a jar of rice wine shared. They have scattered over old scars and made them easier to bear, but Ol’ Feng’s wounds no longer bleed.
His Highness is as young as ever, soft and bright and untouched by time’s tooth. He is at peace; at long last at peace. Ol’ Feng has weaved in and out of his life; laughed away his own sorrows, reminisced old days, taken his alms and refused all else. Now has he paid him one last visit, drank his best wine, wheezed at the latest rumors from the heavenly court, covered His Highness’ delicate hand with his own crooked one and dried his tender tears with his thumb.
Tears are unworthy of His Highness' fair face, and Ol' Feng is not afraid.
His breaths rattle, mouth dry with the arid stench of his ailments. Still he lies on the steps of a small shrine and waits.
Footsteps reach his ears, slow, almost silent, but Ol' Feng’s eyes are almost blind, and his ears have learned to be sharp.
‘There you are,’ he says. Smiles a shy smile. ‘I am afraid I have to return this to you now. I won’t be able to keep it much longer.’
His coughs swallow his chuckle.
The stranger kneels. With his last strength, Shi Qingxuan raises his watery eyes and reaches for an ashen hand. The man it belongs to is cold, bone-bleached skin a stark contrast against his black coat. There is no light in him, no warmth, each touch a breath from the depths of the abyssal sea.
The face is his own now, sharp and refined, gray as the barren bedrock of his kingdom. Qingxuan peers through narrowed, mucous eyes and sees in it the shadows of countless faces; the wealthy merchant’s son who always gave him generous alms; the martial artist who scattered his assailants, the itinerant tinker who shared his bread, the servant who let him sleep in his master’s woodshed.
The specters of four decades have faded away; left is but desolation.
‘How long have you known,’ rasps the voice from the depths of the sea, ‘what this was?’
And Shi Qingxuan laughs, hiccups, winces, catches his hand on his emaciated breast and shudders through the ache. How long did he know? He cannot say. The mind of a mortal decays; what once was stark and vivid has faded, and the past decades are a smear of paint on empty parchment. He no longer remembers his brother’s voice. He no longer remembers how it was to sink his foot in soft clouds, or how the winds once cherished him as they bore him aloft.
He remembers gray teeth sharp as needles, and the sickening tear of skin and sinew, the spatter of his brother’s lifeblood and the stench of pestilent breaths as hands swarmed and crowded and clawed at him.
Those remembrances he kept; branded into him and buried beneath thick and blackened crusts.
‘I am not — I have never been a clever man,’ he says rather, because he cannot remember how long he has known. Each breath is heavier than the other, but he closes his eyes and wills his chest to rise. ‘But I — the Wind Master Fan was most precious to me, you know. I knew it like — like I knew the freckles on my cheeks.’
His is an old man’s brittle laughter. He wonders if his eyes are as clouded.
The voice which answers him is dead. ‘This is your fan to a fault.’
Qingxuan sighs another slow breath. ‘By look, it could have been. You even got the notches right.’ He skims his stiff hand over frigid skin and closes it around the wrist he finds.
‘But this is not my fan.’
When silence answers him, he raises his eyes to the skies. They are bright and laden with summer; even his eyes can still see their gentle shades.
‘You always wore so many faces,’ he wheezes at last. ‘This — what you did — it suits you.’
He raises a hand, runs his thumb over the charred, blackened wood; an old and worn reminder of his own anguished resentment. In those long years, it struck him in waves; came upon him in the word ge shouted on the streets, in the fineries worn by the city’s highborn, in the song of winds which no longer heeded him. But his soul is diaphanous; a whisper in the breeze, and the sharp and jagged shards could not fester; found no soil in which to root. When it flared, it blunted against his sheer self; lost its teeth and softened to warm tears and gentle acceptance and faded longing for his brother’s safe hand.
The cold one does not wince from Qingxuan’s repentant touch, does not shudder with old shadows of past agony caused by those flames. His eyes shine with a hunger as black as the waters under the Naihe bridge.
‘When?’ he asks again.
Qingxuan hums. His thoughts are threadbare, few and far between. There is no resentment left in him now. There is no more left in him than light and air.
He will not be anchored to undeath; he will not be reborn.
He wishes he could answer the cold one; yearns to appease the ravenous hunger he sees. There is no strength left in him for that. Between their entwined hands, the battered, broken fan falls apart; becomes a fistful of ashes.
Qingxuan closes the cold, deadened hands around the ashes, enfolds his own withered hands around them and warms the frigid skin as the cold one lowers his brow to the earth.
Old Feng draws his last, stuttered breath, fulfills his fate, and leaves the mortal coil.
Above the city, the skies blaze white.
Shi Qingxuan ascends.
The God of Mercy is a quiet and unobtrusive member of the heavenly court, often clad in diaphanous robes of white and pale blue. When he reveals himself, he may take the form of a handsome man, a maiden soft and fair, or an elder with hair white as ivory and eyes bright as the first stars of dawn. His devotees are few; his shrines small and modest. They are not built for the affluent and blessed, but for those whose hands are soaked in blood, whose souls are leaden. In prisons damp and dark, or on the executioner’s scaffold, small prayers may be whispered to him past numb and chapped lips.
His parlay with Fate is everlasting. When he can, he will abate the punishment; against all hope, the condemned will be pardoned, the executioner’s hand stayed, the vengeful heart softened. Where he cannot bend Fate’s iron will, he shall breathe peace into the ruined heart, and courage into the coward’s.
His origins are obscure. Old tales have it that he was never meant to ascend; that his ascension is an ink stain in Fate’s own records, and this is why his spiritual powers are slight and wan. Other tales say that when he was a mortal man, he gave them up to lay the ghost of an unforgivable sinner to rest, and has never been whole since.
He wears no blade, but keeps on him a rare treasure - a silken fan from which he takes his strength. The treasure, though made of ashen silk and salt-bleached deadwood, is his sword and shield, his unquenchable font of strength.
‘They are one, him and the fan,’ says the pale sculptor to the wayfarers who pass the humble, ivy-clad shrine where he kneels. He tells them the tales he knows of this quiet deity; declines to share their fire and their dinner for the night, and returns to his quiet devotion.
The wayfarers keep their distance.
He is a strange sight, is the sculptor; garbed in black, neither young nor old, his face unmarred but for an old burn scar on his jaw, his eyes ancient as the sea. No one knows from whence he came. His reputation is as strange as his hoarse voice, and no one knows what stains he bears on his conscience.
For years has he traveled far and wide; carved his tablets and erected small shrines of humble stone. Day after day, he tends to them. Year after year, he prostrates himself before them. His veneration is silent; beyond prayers, beyond praise. Undaunted by weather or wind, he leaves himself at mercy of his deity’s small shelters. But on those bright days of summer, when the winds laugh in the trees, he will draw nearer to the tablets carved by his own hands and lean into the faint warmth of sunbaked stone.