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CC: Chapter 35
🕑 Added 2024-04-23 13:57:10 +0000 UTCThe silence that stretched between the three men in the Grove seemed to go on for an eternity.
It was only XJ-V that finally spoke, addressing the mountainous form of the Planeswalker with a curt bow.
“Forgive us, Planeswalker Ori’un,” he said. “We spoke words in seclusion, words meant only for each other.”
He looked to Feng-Lung for support and found the boy to be focused not on the new arrival, but on the Shuigui as they traced the surface of the pond and finished their dance with a boastful flourish.
“Peace, XJ-V,” Ori’un said, waving away his apology. “You have nothing to be sorry for. In truth, it is I who have disturbed the serenity of this place.”
“That is certainly a theme,” Feng-Lung muttered under his breath, and XJ-V was struck by the uncharacteristic hatred in his words.
Ori’un merely laughed with his booming, brassy laugh in response, jumping on top of a willows tree and standing upon its drooping branches with his tiptoes.
“They say that the world is forever changing,” he said, more to the pond of departing spirits than to anyone else. “But Ai-Lee’s Grove remains fixed in its state of tranquility. They say it is an image of Qing’s forests as they once were. Did you know that, XJ-V?”
The Cog shook his head as the giant man leaped and came crashing down before them, battering a crater into the sandy plane before the pond and watching the earth simply repair itself in the aftermath of his strike.
“Now, here’s a man we could get used to,” the Huli sisters in the trees murmured. “Little Arha, why did you not choose this one to form an attachment with?”
Arha looked from the massive bulk of the Planeswalker to XJ-V and answered mmediately.
“Who wants a smelly human when you can have something new – something exciting! Arha chooses XJ-V because XJ-V is special.”
The Huli came to rub herself on the Cog’s calf and provoked laughter from everyone who could see her antics.
Everyone, that is, except Feng-Lung. He sat in silence, not meditating, but simply ignoring. It was as though the entire spirit of joy had been sapped from his soul as soon as Ori’un entered through the reeds.
“Har!” the giant roared. “I almost forgot about these wily Huli. I tell you, I met more than my fair share of you out there in the Wastes. Why, in verdant Xishanbana, there is a Huli spirit at the foot of every tree. Most of them are harmless, but some,” he winked at little Arha hiding behind XJ-V’s foot. “Some of them will make pursue you to the ends of the earth if they take a liking to you. You should count yourself lucky, Cog.”
“Did you come here to regail us with your stories of the outside?” Feng-Lung asked. “Or is there something you wished of us, Planeswalker?”
Ori’un bowed his head, flashing a sad smile at the boy who would not look at him. Once again, XJ-V was forced to see a side of his Brother that he had never seen before – a side that betrayed genuine animosity towards another.
And it struck him, then and there, as Ori’un scratched the back of his head like a child.
The reason for your malaise these past weeks…your seclusion…it was because of him, wasn’t it?
“Feng-Lung,” the hulking Planeswalker said. “You can have my sympathies, but you cannot have my apology. You know this.”
Feng-Lung said nothing, and his Cog companion simply blinked at the mystery that was unfolding before him.
“Arha smells juicy gossip!” his Huli whispered in his ear.
“It has been five years, Brother,” Ori’un continued, kneeling before Feng and burying one closed fist in the sand. “If your heart is closed to forgiveness, it does you more a disservice than it does me.”
Feng simply continued to stare ahead, unwilling to even look the Planeswalker in the eye.
“You have not come here for me, Ori’un,” he said. “You gave up on me a long time ago.”
“That is a lie and you know it, Feng,” Ori’un replied. “I would not have come here if I had.”
When Feng-Lung did not reply, the giant rose after heaving a heavy, and weary, sigh of resignation.
“XJ-V,” he said. “It seems I must speak with you alone, since this one will not hear me.”
The Cog nodded, knowing not to push an issue that must be personal between the two of these men. He knew enough of human relationships to understand when something had to be, as mortals so eloquently put it, ‘let go.’
“We shall speak on the roof of the library,” he said. “I’m sure dear old Gira would not mind. She always was my biggest fan.”
XJ-V followed the Planeswalker from the Grove, bidding farewell to Feng-Lung who flashed him a reticent smile.
“Be careful,” he warned his incredulous friend. “This one is not all that he seems.”
…
The sunset over Ramor-Tai bathed the monastery in the peach-pure colors of dying day – throwing shadows across the communes, the still-practicing Disciples, and the statues of both the Eternal Dragon and Waiting Tiger that lines the monastery walls. Any bandits who dared approached would doubtless be scared off by the sights of these guardian statues themselves, brought to viscous life by the world’s fading light.
XJ-V watched the sights from atop the great tiled roof of Gira’s grand library, Planeswalker Ori’un sitting beside him and finishing off another bowl of Baijiu.
“No better sight in all of the Badlands than this,” he said, wiping the clear alcohol from his bushy lips. “This place really hasn’t changed at all in the ten years I’ve been gone.”
He offered his almost empty bowl to the Cog who rejected it politely.
“It would do nothing for me,” he said.
“Har! True enough, I suppose. Forgive me, XJ-V, but I wonder how it is to be a man without the impulses of flesh to guide you. No booze. No sex. No eye for artistry. Can a man really appreciate the beauty of the world without these things?”
“I too had such doubts,” XJ-V replied. “I have only ever known a world that hates me for what I am. But that was before I came here and undertook Master Longhua’s training. Now, I know there is a soul within me. Now I know what it is to look upon the sunset and feel the pangs of its beauty touch my heart.”
“Har!” the Planeswalker roared in reply. “He’s even got you talking like them! Here was me thinking that someone like you, coming here out of the storms of the Wastes, would be more than happy to get the power he needed here and head back out to vanquish his enemies. But there’s no desire like that in you, is there? You’re a Cultivator, through and through.”
XJ-V hesitated at these words, knowing too that Ori’un saw his hesitation.
“Or, am I wrong?”
XJ-V looked out at the dying orange light dipping over the horizon.
“I know what waits out there,” he said. “I know they bring only destruction. I know my steel Brothers suffer under their yolk.”
“And you know you have the power to do something about it. So, why don’t you want to?”
XJ-V’s eyes flew to meet the narrowed slits of the Planeswalker, seeing his crescent moon tattoo shine as the pale light of that celestial body began to creep towards the world.
“I feel,” he said. “I see what I will become. I have looked upon that image of myself before, and I fear it. I fear it more than I have feared anything, even the eyes of the High Eagle himself.”
The Planeswalker eyed him warily, taking in his words and absorbing them with care, treading lightly should he reveal too much.
“Jin’ra,” he said. “Yeah. I’ve met him too.”
He showed his deep, black scar to XJ-V.
“It is a meeting few men survive. I reckon we might be the only two men in the entire Wasteland to defy him and die.”
XJ-V felt his body shudder at the thought.
Jin’ra…
The name of his enemy. No, the name of the enemy of all mankind.
“And yet you fear this vision of yourself you see in the Dao more, don’t you?” Ori’un continued. “But, and I’ll tell you this for certain, the ghosts which we see in the Dao are sometimes just that – ghosts. Flickers in time. What those of the Waning Moon call ‘Grey Potentials’. They are possibilities, XJ-V, not certainties.”
“If that ghost of my self has even a chance of coming to fruition,” the Cog replied with determination. “Then I will stop it before it ever draws breath.”
Ori’un leaned back against the light of the moon, chuckling to himself in the odd way he did.
“Longhua told me you would be a surprise, but what he didn’t say was just how human you would seem.”
The Planeswalker seemed suddenly entranced by the moon, his eyes sinking into it like it represented, for him, home.
“The Prophet of the Waning Moon, Chu’Akra, often spoke of the great war between the free will of a soul and the will of destiny that guides us in the Dao. I am not saying I disrespect the words of a Prophet, but lately I often find myself thinking there is a third, more elusive force that affects every little step we take in our lives: chance.
“Or maybe,” he added drily as he slurped the rest of his bowl clean. “That is just wishful thinking.”
The Planeswalker stood and offered a pale hand to XJ-V – a hand that sang with power.
“Your Brother, Feng-Lung, despises me,” he said. “He despises me because I rejected that which the Dao showed me, as you wish to now. And yet Longhua despises me because I abide by what the Dao now shows me with such clarity that I would have to be blind to simply turn away. So you see, XJ-V, no matter what path we walk – no matter what ghosts we see in the Dao – we are shaped by our choices. Us, and the world around us.”
XJ-V looked at the Planeswalker’s earnest face and then down to his waiting hand.
“Why are you telling me these things?” he asked.
“Because,” the dark-cloaked mountain replied. “I think we are alike in more ways than one, my Cog Brother. And so I am offering you the chance to take the hand of an Anima Banisher and look through his eyes. I am giving you the chance to see for yourself why your Brother hates me, to look at a moment in time when I rejected my Gray-Potential and made another suffer because of it. Because of my own fear, and cowardice. I am giving you the chance to see the day when Feng-Lung’s mother died.”
The Cog stood up abruptly, shock running through his systems.
“I…I did not know she had perished,” he said. “What does that have to do with you?”
Through cold, death-pale lips, the Planeswalker replied.
“Because,” he said. “I’m the one who killed her.”
