Dead are the pools where the dark stars fell,

Where our tears do linger as sorrowing wells.

Therein, amid those tattered towers,

Spears of gods cast down,

When they grew men and beast together like flowers.

Who can say what lingers there,

Where lament only we who remember Hyas well.

Fragment of ancient poetry.

Recovered in 1932, in a sealed lead box from a Bagdad market.

~ Juni - ??? ~

She hit the water, the ruins of the deck scattering around her, as the figures on the pagoda laughed as if watching some comedic play. Once submerged, however, she grunted in shock because the qi-disrupting effects turned out to be many, many times greater than they had been in the mist.

The swirling current tore at her, sinking into her body and distorting her qi, trying to drag her in all sorts of different directions—

Flailing for the surface, her hand broke the water and something grasped her.

“Well, that worked out much better than I expected.”

She was dragged to the surface to find herself hanging in a grand room, having surfaced in a crystal clear pool. The person holding her was…

“Quazam…” she gasped, shocked.

“I am, indeed, Quazam,” the voluptuous figure chuckled, her masked face staring at her. “The question is, who you are.”

“Who am… I?” She was confused. More confused than she had been, at any rate.

Quazam, still holding her up by her hand, stepped back and deposited her on the ground by the pool. Looking around as she tried to buy time to think, she could see that the room was opulent.

The floor was smooth red and white stone, the ceiling vaulted and beautifully, if slightly creepily painted to represent a night sky filled with dark stars, the vaulted arches, rising from twisting pillars, flowing through it like the dark branches of phantasmal trees. The walls were carved much like those in the depths had been, but now, in the golden yellow illumination of the lamps suspended from the vaulted ceiling, she could see how colourful they were – depicting scenes of processions, battles, cities, mysterious landscapes and people bowing to various figures on thrones.

Quazam waved a hand, still considering her in some manner, and two masked but otherwise naked women, one with dark brown hair the other with golden brown hair, stepped forth, helping her rise and brushing the last of the water off her with silken cloths.

Left with no other choice bar running, which even if she was competent to do so, suddenly felt like a really bad idea here, she could only sit there and let them attend to her.

“What… are you?” she asked at last.

“What am I?” Quazam sounded distant for a moment, as if contemplating that question on some level beyond what was obvious.

“I am Quazam,” the naked woman shrugged, turning abruptly and walking over to a stone divan couch covered in a lustrous tapestry and silk cushions and reclining on it.

She gulped, sweating, because even that action was hypnotic and tried to stir things in her that made her deeply uneasy all of a sudden.

“Please, sit.”

The words were soft and welcoming, but still held an adamant sense of ‘command’, wrapping around her like satin sheets.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was seated opposite Quazam, making herself comfortable on another of the silk-covered divans.

“Servant… bring us refreshments.”

“Of course, Honoured Quazam.”

Another servant, a masked youth… with lustrous black hair, plaited in a weirdly familiar style she couldn’t quite place, appeared from somewhere and placed a tray with several vessels made of copper-gold similar to that which the spears had been made from on the table between them, before bowing deeply to both of them.

“They make the best servants,” Quazam mused, watching the youth, who, she realised with no little surprise, was a cultivator, pour a sparkling, aromatic drink from the pitcher into the cups.

“They… do?” she queried, still disorientated as she followed the actions of the youth, who was a specimen of physical perfection and, beyond the swirling golden tattoos like she had seen a few others bearing, totally naked apart from the silver mask he wore.

“Oh… yes,” Quazam laughed, a hypnotic, heart-twisting laugh that made her skin flush just to hear it. “Young nobles want power… glory… eternity… but what they really want is a place they belong. They enjoy power, but they are intoxicated by dominance. Give them what they desire and they will be yours forevermore and never even stop to question if they, themselves, could have been more.”

“…”

As Quazam spoke, she leaned forward and ran a hand over the youth’s chest then took one of the wine cups he had already proffered. With some surprise, she realised that Quazam’s mask no longer had a lower part, her mouth now visible and very normal-looking, truth be told.

“I was a common child, once,” Quazam mused, lifting the cup to her lips and taking a delicate sip before sitting back and sighing luxuriously. “Oh… not lowborn, just a minor daughter of a minor noble… but I was always beautiful, always destined to be the thing of others. A jewel in my father’s hall, a bright bird singing in a cage for others, a beautiful flower for others to admire… and pluck.”

The way Quazam lingered on those last words made her shudder inside, because it did evoke all sorts of uneasy feelings – not just of their recent experiences but also regarding what had happened to Lin Ling, nearly happened to her… even what had happened to Han Shu, in a different kind of way.

“I see that fear in your eyes, child,” Quazam said with a sigh, waving her hands again. Seven more youths arrived like ghosts, four male and four female, all flawless, most of their faces hidden by silver-gold masks shaped like flawless men and women. Among those two women, she saw the pair who had wiped the water off her.

“Tell me, who were you once?” Quazam asked the youth tending to them in a kindly tone.

“I was a Prince, Great Mother,” the youth bowed, “my father Emperor of a Great World.”

“And now you are my servant, and I give you everything you could possibly desire,” Quazam murmured, cupping his face with her hand gently. “Tell this young woman, how did you come to be here?”

The ‘prince’ looked at her then bowed formally, as a servant might to a master.

“I was saved by the Great Mother. My father desired the things of a great sage and so sent us into this land. Before we left, my brother somehow learned of a great artefact in this place that would help our dynasty pierce the heavens. I and my good comrades worked together to find it, overcoming many trials, but in the end it was all just my brother’s plot.

“I would have died here, were it not for the Great Mother. She freed me from my destiny, allowed me to be more…”

She stared, blankly, at the ‘Prince’, her mind spinning. It was possible that Quazam was lying, that this was something else, but at the same time there was a sort of all encompassing ‘reality’ to things here that was hard to deny.

“And what of the rest of you?” Quazam asked, waving a hand to the others who were stood demurely to either side of her divan.

“I was a Princess…” one beautiful blue-black haired woman bowed deeply.

“I was an inheritor of a noble clan…” a youth with golden blond locks replied.

“I was a Saintess…” a shorter, even more beautiful woman with white-gold hair murmured.

“I was an ascender from a mortal world who stood at the very top…” the powerfully muscled youth with tanned skin and curly dark hair declared grandly.

“I was the chosen disciple of a great sect…” the other youth, with long brown hair tied back in an ornate plait, added.

“I was the noble daughter chosen to inherit my heavenly clan,” another dark-haired and voluptuously proportioned woman sighed.

“I was also a mortal world ascender, the daughter of a world emperor, who reincarnated with a Heavenly Physique,” the last, a tall, athletic woman with pale brown hair, finished with a smile.

She looked from one to the other, her heart beating almost erratically. The momentum they each held was formidable, that much was undeniable. In any other circumstance she was sure that she, even though she was her father’s daughter, would have been bowing to them rather than the other way around.

It was disturbing as well, because she was, she realised, glad that people like these were bowing to her. The way they were so respectful made her heart quicken, again in ways she was not entirely at peace with. People like this had caused everything here. This stupid trial, all the death, chaos and destruction that came after it.

They had ruined Han Shu…

Abused Lin Ling…

Tormented her and nearly killed those from the Argent Justice sect…

Killed Arai and Sana…

-Nearly killed me… another old memory surfaced, the memory of why she had remained an eight-star hunter.

-Took what should have been mine… because of that event…

Exhaling, she realised she had put a hand to her breast and was breathing harder than she should have been.

“They all held power, but it was the power others gave them…” Quazam murmured, swirling her wine delicately. “You and I, however, we have had to claw our way up, to gain what power we had for ourselves…”

Quazam trailed off, her voice a murmur that seemed to meld with the distant, shimmering sounds of falling water where it flowed into the pool, with the gentle breeze that stirred the near-translucent drapes that hung between the columns.

When she continued speaking again, her tone was gentle, and… sad, as if reminiscing to an old friend about past sorrows. “I was sold to a prince, for 100 gold pieces… by my parents, to be his concubine, because I was a beauty and in that desert beauties only did two things… dance for people or dance beneath them.

“What could I have been…” Quazam sighed and lay back, apparently lost in thought as she took another sip of her wine.

She also sat there in silence, totally confused now, trying to piece together what exactly was going on here as she looked from one to another.

Quazam sighed, waving for one of the youths to come over. The tall, dark-haired one with tanned skin stepped forward and started to gently massage Quazam’s shoulders as she reclined there.

“…”

“Well?” Quazam murmured, her dark eyes fixing her with a lingering look, which again made her heart race, as if the other was able to stare right through her. “Just speak…”

“Why…” She had to gulp… Involuntarily, she found herself reaching for the wine, before stopping and composing herself. “Why, did you bring me here? Do you want to make me like… them?”

Quazam stared at her for long enough that she was starting to feel awkward, before she laughed – an enchanting throaty sound that, while not judgemental, made her flush with embarrassment for asking such a question.

“No… no… I have brought you here because I see something in you that is worth nurturing,” Quazam chuckled. “You are not like these ones. They had everything, but they never learned to struggle… truly struggle against the silken threads that bind them.”

That, she found she had no disagreement with, rather disturbingly.

“They, who were born with everything, destined to achieve miraculous things even before their births, are content to belong… but you do not want to settle for that, do you? I see it in your eyes, see it in the struggles you have endured, the scars you carry…”

She found herself involuntarily shaking her head, even as Quazam, who was still speaking, sat up and fluidly crossed over to her own couch. Sitting down beside her, Quazam almost tenderly caressed her cheek…

“Here…” The other woman, with a faint, somehow sad smile tapped a finger gently against her forehead.

“Here…” Her hand trailed down, lingering over her heart.

“And here…” Finally stopping, her fingers brushing against her stomach, where her dantian was…

She gulped, suddenly very aware of the other woman’s proximity, which was… intoxicating.

Sitting back, Quazam sighed again and put her chin in her hand, resting her elbow on her knee as she reclined on the other end of her divan.

Her hand shaking faintly, she was about to take a sip from the wine to try and assuage the hot, dry feeling in her mouth, when Quazam put a hand on her arm, still smiling companionably, stopping her.

“…”

She found herself staring into Quazam’s eyes, which were like placid pools now, dark and welcoming, before the other woman leant back and sighed again, stretching luxuriously.

“Consider it,” Quazam murmured, sounding almost like an elder sister now. “This place you now find yourself in is not so simple a place as many imagine…”

“You… don’t say,” she managed to reply, making Quazam laugh again, not at her, but with her observation.

“Rather than wine, My Lady should have water. It is cool and refreshing,” the golden-black haired prince murmured, passing her a cup that really was just water.

Grateful, she took it and had gulped some down before it occurred to her that in this weird place and circumstance that might not have been a good idea.

“Uh…” she gulped again and hastily put it aside, only for the youth to smoothly take the cup and return it to the tray, then pour more water into it.

Quazam, as if suddenly noticing her worries, laughed and reached over, patting her thigh companionably. “Dear one, it is good to be suspicious, but sometimes food and drink are just that…”

Somehow, that both assuaged her concerns and yet… didn’t at the same time.

“Well, it is a bit disorientating I suppose…” Quazam sat back and looked at the eight cultivators.

“Please, My Lady,” the prince, still kneeling beside her, offered her the cup, now refilled, and she found that she had taken it without even thinking this time and sipped it some more.

It was cool and refreshing, washing away the muggy heat and humidity of the mist and also somewhat refreshing. It made her realise that while the hall was warm, it was not unpleasantly so, as the swamps had been.

“Um… what about the others?” she finally managed to ask, after two more sips of water.

“Others?” Quazam murmured, before nodding. “Oh… your companions. They are no doubt running away like crazy from those hoodlums. They do like to chase when others run.”

“Crazy hoodlums?” she repeated dully, trying to… Oh, the children on the pagoda?

“They have many names…” Quazam sighed. “Let us not speak of them now, though. There will be time enough later?”

“Later?” she frowned.

“Yes,” Quazam suddenly looked a bit annoyed, holding out her hand for a wine cup which was readily provided by the youth with golden curly hair, the ‘inheritor of the noble clan’. “Later.”

The probable reason for that annoyance arrived a moment later as she heard distant footsteps.

Gulping down the wine, unheeding that quite a bit spilled down her breasts as she did so, Quazam waved a hand and the golden lights dimmed, giving the whole hall and its pool an even more ethereal look. The curtains now obscured much and the whole scene resembled less a hall and more some sacred inner chamber.

“GREAT MOTHER, QUAZAM, MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!” a grand voice echoed through the hall.

“THE MASTERS COME! SEEKING AUDIENCE WITH YOU, WILL YOU HEAR YOUR CHILDREN, O GREAT QUAZAM, MOTHER OF THE WATERS!”

Ten figures, hunched and elderly looking, all wearing deep golden robes, masks and veils that covered their faces became visible in the gloom, processing towards them through the hall from where they had presumably just entered.

“GREAT QUAZAM, YOU HONOUR US WITH AN AUDIENCE!”

The proclaimer’s voice echoed grandly again and she noted that behind those ten and the speaker, who held a golden staff, came maybe two dozen more. It was hard to count in the gloom but all were dressed in yellow and red robes, wearing silver masks in the style she had seen the town masters wearing.

They stopped some ten metres away, just outside the columns and diaphanous drapes that surrounded their divans and table, next to the pool, bowing respectfully.

“WE, THE TEN MASTERS, SEE THE GREAT MOTHER, QUAZAM.”

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS,” the others echoed, all getting down on their knees and bowing.

“…”

Quazam said nothing, just stared at them until the one with the golden staff, who had been announcing, stepped forward again, leading the ‘ten’ between the pillars whereupon he bowed once more.

“Apologies, Great Mother, the Masters were merely eager to see…”

“Yes…” one of the ten suddenly spoke, turning to look at the other cultivators and then her.

“Is this she?” a second asked, looking in her direction in a way that made her skin clammy in an entirely different manner to when Quazam had been looking at her.

“Indeed…” another murmured, also turning to look at her.

“She is,” a fourth echoed.

Quazam just continued to stare at them – almost as if they were idiots, which was a very weird thing to intuit suddenly.

-They are here to see me? That was the only reason she could think…

-And why does Quazam seem… displeased?

Mind racing, she looked unobtrusively between the two groups – the Ur’Vash and Quazam, trying to read what the dynamic actually was here. Quazam had seemed – well, actually… Quazam had seemed much as she had up to this point, she realised, from what she had seen. Aloof and detached, venerated by the Ur’Vash.

One of the robed figures walked forward, arriving before her. In that moment, she realised that while the figure seemed old and hunched, this close, somehow the scale between them felt off in a way she couldn’t really place.

The old Ur’Vash sighed, masked and veiled face looking at her in a rather disturbing manner as she tried not to push herself backwards into the divan to make distance. Abruptly a hand, old and gnarled by age, reached out to brush some of the tangled hair that had fallen down across her cheek—

Quazam’s hand stopped them, blocking it smoothly, as she realised the other woman had slipped across the couch to sit right beside her.

“Do not be so…” Quazam chided the figure, who turned to look at her… with a momentary flicker of… displeasure?

“I… Ah…” she was pleased she hadn’t actually flinched at the touch. The figure – all ten of the figures, actually – made her feel oddly uneasy. It was hard for her to say why, explicitly, beyond the masks, but certainly the energy associated with each of those figures standing before her felt twisted and strange, like it was lacking in harmony somehow… rather like…

-The mages on the battlefield? The association landed like a splash of cold water.

-These are Ur’Vash mages…?

Sitting back, she exhaled as the figure took a step back and Quazam waved to the ‘prince’ with a hand, rather unobtrusively, while putting the other around her shoulder.

“She is just a young woman, my child. Your rampant aura has scared her…”

The words were not quite a rebuke, but there was a clear sense of chiding in Quazam’s tone now as she stared at the ten and especially the one who had stepped close.

“…”

The ten all bowed slightly but made no overt sound of apology, masked faces still staring at her with an intent that she could only call… unsettling.

-Greedy… a faint whisper echoed in her head.

Collecting herself, she noted in a rather detached manner that the others, still outside the columns, were all still prostrated except for the announcer and some masked guards by the door, barely visible now in the dim light.

She was still wondering what the dynamic here was, when she found another cup of water offered to her by the ‘Prince’. Exhaling, she gratefully took it and gulped down a mouthful, glad of the refreshing coolness to distract her.

Sighing, she let it wash over her… and then gasped as it continued to sweep over her and she realised she was actually sinking into cold water!

Bizarrely, the last thing she perceived of the other room was Quazam whispering in her ear, “We will meet again, my dear. Do not forget what I said.”

Opening her eyes, she grasped for the arm around her shoulder and found it was not Quazam’s warm, satin-like arm but that of one of the guards who was sinking into the pool with her. Flailing, her other arm found pond weed, reeds, something crustacean-like and then her feet found mud and she stood, the water up to her waist in a swampy channel.

The guard floated up beside her, missing his upper torso and much of his head.

“SHIT! Someone grab her!” a voice yelled nearby, in the Ur’Vash tongue.

“Teheheehe…” a childlike voice echoed in the distance, carried on the wind.

Staggering up, she coughed and found that the one who had shouted was not an Ur’Vash she recognised from the boat, but rather one dressed like those she had seen in the hall, bowing behind the ten ‘Masters’, in a loose red and yellow tunic tied at the waist and wearing a golden mask that looked like a sleeping face.

“Wh-what?” she shook her head again and made to dash backwards, only for that robed Ur’Vash to suddenly reach out for her, space distorting around his arm as he plucked her out of the pool and dumped her down beside him.

“She is the one the masters want, you cretins! Who cares about the others?” a voice shouted, belonging to a second, yellow and red gowned Ur’Vash who came hurrying out of the reeds, now gesturing wildly.

To her surprise, however, the one who had grabbed her said nothing in reply and just struck out with a palm, hitting that newly arrived figure full-on and crushing him to the ground. The luckless Ur’Vash deflated like a skin balloon, mists seeping out of him with a strange hiss that sounded like mocking laughter.

Two of the other guards on the far side spun and she saw a flash of a child, maybe nine years old, on the far side of the channel, a mask between the reeds, bow already drawn—

The one holding her snarled and the reeds rippled around them—

The arrow took another Ur’Vash guard, who was now running along beside them, through the leg. She noted with surprise that he was not one of ‘Quazam’s guards, as she had been thinking of them, but just a ‘normal’ Ur’Vash even though he was dressed in armour and carried a golden-copper pointed spear.

“GREAT MOTHER! SAVE ME!” he screamed as he went down, while the person carrying her just ignored him and raced on—

“AAHHHAAAIIIEEEEEee—”

A moment later, a second Ur’Vash screamed somewhere in the reeds, the howl of agony continuing for far longer than was at all comfortable before abruptly cutting off.

“Shit… what the hell, they never come in this far!” the one carrying her hissed as they ran on. “Fucking N—”

“You think us most fair and gay?” a childlike voice giggled as two small blond children with masks slipped between the reeds to either side of them.

“That’s a crime, you know…” the other smirked as the Ur’Vash carrying her was sent sprawling by a rope they had held between them.

“A crime… definitely a crime,” the other giggled, even as both of them vanished with a rustle.

“By the Great Mother,” the Ur’Vash who had captured her pushed himself up and she found herself bodily grasped again, even before she had properly orientated herself.

The pressure on her abruptly intensified several times over, scattering all the unrefined qi in her body and making her meridians creak under the strain of the very inauspicious qi flow being forced on her.

“Great Mother, give me strength. See off the demons of the mists!” he snarled, rushing on—

She hit water with a yelp, bouncing twice as something—

-I was thrown? she realised with shock as she turned over a third time before stopping with a splash.

Pushing herself up, she saw the masked Ur’Vash spin on the spot and draw a dagger that was carved out of a serpent fang, she realised. With a grimace, the Ur’Vash tossed it into the waterway and then appeared beside her like phantom, grabbing her.

{BIRTH OF TEN THOUSAND SERPENTS}

The reeds around them shivered and twisted, knitting together as he dragged her along. She could only watch as each reed shed leaves, becoming a serpent a few metres in length, each one with a cultivation greater than her own.

Laughter echoed in the distance as the Ur’Vash ran on, grasping her with his qi and cursing in a tongue she didn’t understand.

“Master Zazuus!” a voice rang out from nearby, and, as the Ur’Vash angled, she saw a watchtower—

The Ur’Vash who had just called out toppled out of it, the arrow that had pierced his head and buried itself in a wall already vanishing in a wisp of mist.

“Idiot,” the Ur’Vash running with her muttered as he passed the watchtower, bursting out of the reeds into a broad, open area that had been cleared for agriculture, she guessed.

Ahead of them, three boats, much like the one they had been on, were manoeuvring while local guards on them stoked fires in braziers on their decks that burned in off-yellow hues and exuded a strange pall of acrid herbal smoke that seemed to push the ‘mists’ away. Beyond that, she could see, through the haze, what looked like the wall of a small fort-like compound, not dissimilar to the one they had been taken to by the scouts before they ever got to Udrasa. The tower in the middle of it also had, at its peak, a blazing bonfire that exuded billowing acrid smoke.

“MASTER ZAZUUS!”

“The Master Lives!”

“THE GREAT MOTHER’S MERCY IS OUR SHIELD!”

“Strength to Master Zazuus!”

“By the Great Mother, we overcome!”

Various shouts echoed from the boats as Zazuus skipped across the fields rapidly and landed on the nearest boat, depositing her in a bedraggled heap.

~ Lin Ling – On the Ruined Boat ~

The right side of the boat’s forward section disintegrated around them as Kozrak’s axe blow missed its target and in the same instant the suppressing mists melted away. The guards staggered and in that instant she saw, at last, the opportunity to escape their—

“No, no, no… you’re not running, little serpent!” one of the guards snarled.

Pain blossomed through her body as she found she had been stabbed in the side by one of the spears. It expertly bisected her heart meridian, making her qi turn chaotic in her body. In her dantian, her Nascent Soul recoiled and grasped its own side as that same wound somehow also formed on her spiritual body.

-Great. Well, that confirms that, she cursed as the one who had stabbed her pushed her down to the deck.

The four who had been guarding her placed their blades against her elbows and knees while the fifth put his spear point against her neck.

“You may not die, but we can bring you back a broken puppet. That will suffice for what the Masters intend for you, serpent,” the one who had stabbed her added, sounding disgustingly satisfied.

-Anything? Other than screaming? she shot at the memories acerbically.

They, however, were thrown into utter panic still – not because of their captors or the Orichalcum weapons, but because of the children. They knew what they were, the ‘handmaidens’ of the ‘Huntress’ as they called her. The only reason she had not involuntarily transformed was because of the ‘control’ the symbol gave her. The horror and terror of those later memories spun like a wheel in the mud while the older ones were mostly focused on keeping that insanity in check.

Unbidden, another scene of ‘the hunt’ scythed through her memories as one of the memories tried to impress on her just how terrifying these giggling children were. They ran in the wake of a shadow, silver in the moonlight, golden hair like star fire, riding a golden kirin, carrying a bow that unerringly found its quarry, a vast ten-headed serpent whose body was made of shadow and stars, with heads like lions, that fled between night and day amid towering canyons of collapsing space in the shadow of a vast mountain wreathed in lightning and clouds of myriad colours.

The memories knew ‘Her’ by many names, each more contradictory than the last: ‘Pure Maiden’, ‘Willow Bound’, ‘Great Advisor’, ‘Huntress’, ‘Great Bear’, ‘Light Bringer’, ‘Queen of Mountains’… but the one that they feared most was ‘Butcher’ and even now, in her memories, that primordial serpent that was pierced through by arrows of silver lightning still held a finality akin to that she had seen in her own tribulation.

Other figures now leaped down as the shadow girl reined in her Kirin and gave out a great shout, men and women dressed in skins, their eyes burning with star fire, cheering her achievement. Behind them came the 60 children, dressed such as those here, in white linen and clay masks, dancing, mocking voices proclaiming victory and praise as they set to skilfully butchering it, even as the memory faded and she realised that she was seeing the final moments of one of the memories…

Gasping, she pushed the scene away, her body cold from the remembered sensation of that horrible death that had come with the shadow of it vanishing as something wet and sticky scattered over her.

Recoiling, she saw that the guards above her had been subsumed by the mist, their skins flayed and their innards butchered as an… offering. Having seen that memory and others she understood the horrifying symbolism at play here and now: The skin was a trophy, the succulent pieces were consumed and what was left was offered to the ‘Gods’.

It was that ‘offering’ that had just plastered her surroundings, even as mocking laughter echoed everywhere and the mist surged again.

-Do not, the very oldest, amphibian voice hissed in her mind, cutting through the chaos in her head and aborting the sudden urge to ‘transform’ and ‘flee’ that those ranging memories had suddenly tried to induce in her, now that she was ‘free’.

-It is not that they will hunt you…

-Though they may, depending on which of our foolish descendants makes their clamour heard clearest, another ancient serpent snarled, casting a disparaging look inwards.

-…but that if you take such a form, they, who were chosen to be her cupbearers, and who have protection over youth and dominion over all the ‘beasts’ of the wild, will have dominion over you, the old turtle concluded.

-Then what would you have me do? she screamed at them.

-The words in your heart, that thing we showed you, it can touch more than blood.

-Do not become the beast, another old shadow-like lizard rumbled.

-Become the ‘Huntress’… Ochirioptrix cackled.

-Become the…?

Form took shape in her mind’s eye, even as she grasped what they meant – another application of ‘Yang as a Shield’.

{Rampage as One}

Her qi boiled out from her body, even as the words settled into her head and her mantra shimmered strangely as the five mnemonics overlapped in a strange way to merge for a brief moment with those three words.

Memory swirled through her again, of another Huntress, different, the ‘original’ one, as that memory called her – she saw a blindfolded woman, golden hair cast strangely against the shadows that flowed around her. In her hands she held a bronze bow, set with an arrow whose point burned like a small sun – from the waist down she was not a normal person though, but instead had the form of a serpent. Beside her ran a pack of the same creatures that Ochirioptrix belonged to, covered in iridescent feathers that made their outlines appear to be ever-shifting mirages.

The world chimed as her form shifted and she grasped one of the spears and, spinning, shot for Zashral and Kozrak.

“You!” Zashral gasped, shock rippling across his features as Kozrak pushed him back, using the other orc to block her strike which would have otherwise nearly found his throat.

Kicking the bleeding Zashral away, Kozrak stepped past her spear strike and cut at her body with a grim expression. She managed to parry it, her arms shaking under the force of the impact, and dodged backwards across the deck.

Casting about, she tried to find Juni and Chunhua. The latter was, she realised, being dragged onto the bank by two guards, along with the stunned form of Lashaan. There was no sign of Juni anyway though, except…

Her gaze caught something drifting in the shallows, the tie that had been Juni’s storage talisman. She still had her own and, beyond stripping Juni and Chunhua for the sake of demonstrating ‘control’, those had not been taken away.

-Don’t be distracted!

She swayed back again, lashing her tail at Kozrak’s leg. He blocked it, grunting, just by kicking her. Her blow left a bit of a weal but that was it – her qi and principle gained no purchase…

-Foolish. Remember what those words mean! Ochirioptrix hissed as she was forced back a second time by Kozrak’s sweeping strike.

-Remember what the words…?

-Oh!

As it currently stood, her ‘realm’ was being pushed up an entire great step, so even in this form she was basically a quasi-Ancient Immortal, at least in terms of the qi she could manifest. She focused inwards and drew out the strength of ‘Yang Laws’ in her blood that she couldn’t normally touch, this time using her Mantra, which was no longer spinning weirdly.

It was a glass pagoda, but there was still a thorough constraint on soul sense in the area, so the one method the Ur’Vash had to really make her day bad, beyond the accursed Orichalcum weapons, high realm soul attacks, was currently not being utilised.

-Not sustainable either, not in this form, she grimaced, considering the ‘land’ as she used her tail, this time on the boat itself to break Kozrak’s footing.

It was Zashral who bought her the extra moment in the end, because he lunged at Kozrak as the other again made to cut her tail.

“Idiot boy!” Kozrak’s blow easily hit Zashral, sending him flying back. “Come to your senses. Whatever complaints we have between Udrasa and Katum, deal with the common threat first!”

Zashral snarled, rolling up, shaking his head—

Something hit her body, hit the boat around them and also Kozrak. She crashed into dirt and tried to move, before realising that she had been cut in two by Zashral’s strike.

-Shit… not good!

She had had no warning there at all. Her principle had done nothing, even with the support of the qi armour that should have deflected an Ancient Immortal’s strike.

-What realm even is that damn orc?

Kozrak was largely unharmed, apart from a few cuts from Zashral’s art, but the boat itself was now thoroughly ruined, its two halves sinking into the water.

“Rupture”

She focused on her lower half, glad that Zashral didn’t have an Orichalcum weapon, because the wound was purely physical, and directed the word. Her ‘serpent tail’ exploded in a cloud of yang blood and orphaned energies, consuming both of them in a flower-like blossom of Yang Laws that swept out across the water, consuming everything in its path—

She rolled out of the way, barely, as Kozrak landed on the bank beside her, his axe burying itself in the dirt where her neck would have been.

Her form rippled as her qi armour flowed out and she recovered her ‘normal’ form, naked and covered in mud for a brief moment, grimacing at the amount of qi she had just lost.

-Can’t do that again!

“VILLAIN!” a child’s voice howled and a girl carrying a bronze spear and a shield landed on the bank amid the swirling mists.

Two more charged past her, striking at Kozrak with ferocity that, had she not seen some of those memories and understood clearly what these ‘children’ were, would have been shocking to behold. Kozrak deflected one strike, attempting to backhand the girl, who blocked the blow with a strike and suddenly grew in stature – no longer was she a girl of eight or nine, but a young women of sixteen or seventeen, her dark hair crowned with leaves, her body garbed only in the lightest clothing.

Her spear flashed and Kozrak cursed and danced back a second time, spinning his axe, which she again skilfully deflected with her shield.

“Mother of the Hunt, hear my prayer. Grant me strength to strike against these villainous thieves who betrayed your grace!” the woman exclaimed, and the words, chiming in the air, spoken in a language she only knew because of those ancient memories, made the mists swirl ominously.

“Well, that also works.”

A hand grasped her by the hair and she found that a masked Ur’Vash in a gold and red robe had emerged from the reeds and grabbed her by the hair.

“AID MASTER KOZRAK!” a cry echoed from behind.

A moment later, two ships cut out of the mist, almost a hundred archers lined up on each, bows already nocked, arrows with tips coated in flickering green-gold fire sighting on them.

“HONOURED ARE THE MASTERS! SHIELD OF UDRASA!”

Not for the first time, she found herself wondering about those phrases. The words were a salute, that much was certain, but they held some aspect of her own use of the ancient tongue of the blood memories. There was also something else in there, a strange, disturbing cadence that defied her ability to grasp but was still weirdly familiar.

Arrows scythed out at the woman fighting Kozrak, who hissed in annoyance and retreated into the reeds, deflecting a few arrows with her shield as she went.

She fought as best she could, but the realm of the person grasping her and dragging her down the bank was again obnoxiously high. They didn’t seal her movement, but her ability to touch qi in their vicinity was nearly impossible, such was the turbulence instilled within it. As such, her struggles were, she guessed, about as effective as a real 17 year old girl. It was infuriating and…

-Do you have a hole in your head? the turtle sighed.

-She has not been shown what to do with those words, the old amphibian replied, sighing as well. You brats forget what it means to walk the path alone sometimes.

-Eh? She was momentarily distracted from her attempt to free herself by the exchange.

-If she can take a form evoking that of Thrice Sacred Kynthia, she can certainly touch the path by which we were delivered, the amphibian sighed.

-That is fair. She has more in common with that echelon of old now than the apes, the turtle mused.

“…”

She was just about to ask them what they meant by that, when a memory shimmered in her mind’s eye, that of a small newt on a river bank, a silent, awed observer of aeons wondering what ancient power it had conceivably offended that it kept winding up in such situations.

Above her, the stars wept, the sky was dark and all things were abandoned by life. Staring up at the sky she saw darkness beyond all comprehension, turning over her starless palm to bury an era she had come to despise, hiding her bright daughter’s eyes from the vileness of those who had ruined it.

There, in that darkness, a shade knelt, for now that that darkness had fallen no illumination was known to the world, weeping by dark waters as the sky behind her was consumed by what she guessed would be fire in other circumstances. In her hands that young woman held a body, bloody and abandoned, washing its wounds as her own tears melded with the river.

The figure kissed the brow of that broken form, whispering something that became chimes on the winds of a dying era that sang sorrowfully in her mind. Somehow they touched, or resonated with her mantra and the intent within, and pulled something out of it while at the same time burying all the pain and sorrow and turning it into a seed of strength, even as the memory faded, the specifics of it vague amid all the screaming.

The screaming was her, it turned out, as she was hauled back to the moment, wracked by the oppression of what she had just witnessed. In the same instant, she pushed all that pain and rage and hate that was welling up inside her into the Mantra and grasped the arm of the orc. He, in turn, was exposed to that horror, all the turmoil of her experience as her qi, born by the Mantra this time, and supported by the symbol in her mind, tore into his body.

Pure Yang strength consumed him from the inside out as the mud baked around her and the reeds turned to ash. The water of the river boiled briefly then became searing fog as she pushed herself up.

{Rampage as One}

For the second time she used the art, but this time she didn’t use it on the blood, she used it on her own rage, drawing it out. With a single bound, she realised she had covered the distance to the nearest boat, crashing down on the deck as orcs scattered.

Grasping one of them, she tore an Orichalcum spear from his grasp and spun it. She had never been good with martial forms, they were not a thing ‘women’ in the Lin clan learned, but at a certain point ferocity would make up for technique, she had tended to observe, and she had ferocity to spare right now.

Soldiers, most of whom were not much stronger than she was, scattered as she tore through them, uncaring that the spear broke quickly. When it did, she grasped a second spear, that she had broken moments earlier, and wielded both the long blades on the spears’ ends like daggers, ripping through scrambling orcs while her presence set the very boat itself on fire.

“STOP HER!” a golden-masked official, presumably the orc commanding the boat, screamed.

His cry turned out to be ineffectual, because all it did was clue her in to his presence. Ducking under one archer who had tried to cut her with a blade, she disembowelled them and spun past two more, lopping limbs as she went forth to arrive before the official.

“SUBMIT TO THE MASTERS!”

The command hit her with enough force to make her pause… however, the turmoil within her that instilled also went into the Mantra, like a rock into a deep pool.

The orc, not seeing the expected reaction, took a step backwards that somehow took him halfway down the boat—

“BE BROKEN!”

Rather than stop everything, she chose to funnel her rage into the words and threw herself after him. The boat disintegrated into ruin around her, as did every orc within earshot. Their limbs twisted, their bones shattered, organs ruptured and qi deviated. Everyone was cast into the water as she landed on the official with enough force that she felt his bones creak with the impact as they cratered the water.

She ignored his strikes as he flailed and hit at her, trying to get free, letting them keep feeding the vicious cycle of power that was sustaining her, opting simply to keep stabbing with the Orichalcum spear blades until the accumulated damage overcame his realm and her quarry expired.

Kicking off the corpse, she shot out of the water like an arrow and landed on the stern of the boat that was pitching as it sank. The wreckage had already been carried a good distance up river, the other vessel manoeuvring past her now as archers turned to look for a target and ropes were thrown into the water for the few survivors.

Bracing herself, she pushed qi into the ruin of the boat and leapt for the other one. The stern shattered into broken parts, a small tsunami of water sweeping out from it to disturb the reeds. Two arrows hit her in mid-air, making her grimace with the pain they brought, but again, the pain just fed into her strength.

-Is this how Arai and Sana could fight people a whole realm above them? She could only marvel at that terrible wellspring of strength…

-Not that it did them any good.

She hit the other boat, burying her rage at that as well in the mantra, watching it sprout new power as she eviscerated a luckless orc and vaulted his corpse to kick a second into the reed beds by the shore.

-Can all mantra inheritors do this?

-Yes, although your strength is uniquely suited to it, the amphibian whose memories she had seen giggled.

-Yes, another, chiming voice, sounding like a regal bird, added. But there is another trick you can pull as well.

A veiled woman in a shimmering white dress and veil embroidered with celestial birds plucked at a zither, the tones of a mantra shimmering in her heart, resonating with every note as a dark-haired youth lay on a bed, listening rapturously. She could feel a strange kinship with him – with his blood in fact, even as the rage in his heart was cooled and harmonised by the echoes of her song, reflected by the mantra.

-This is what Juni did… she exclaimed in her heart, recalling how she had almost overwhelmed that…

-I also walked through that darkness…

She turned to stare at the orcs who had massed on the boat and found herself looking back into the darkness, into the shadows of those deathless halls and the sorrows buried within them.

‘Blessing’ she became one with the darkness as she walked towards them. It settled across her like a veil, reflecting her ill mood as it gripped everything around her and the world grew still.

‘Path’ shone like a solitary light. She was the solitary path, her principle a flame dancing amidst it that drew the orcs in…

‘Lotus’, those same flames flickered on the water, ethereal, as the river seemed to flow backwards around them, a strange, sighing song echoing from beyond her now as the mists and the swamp seemed to take on a much more sinister appearance in the faded world.

‘Body’ connected to the orcs’ gestalt link, projecting that shadowed darkness her mantra was holding up to the world once again into their innermost beings.

‘Gift’…

She stared as, one after another, the orcs crumpled down, dead. Their last words lost amid that sighing groan that seemed to emanate from the depths of the darkness. Shuddering, she pushed the darkness back down… barely, before it consumed her completely. The only survivor was the ‘official’ in charge of the boat, who was sobbing and grasping at his mask, begging the ‘Great Mother’ to welcome him home.

Stalking over to them, she grabbed the orc by the hair and stabbed it viciously until it expired, the last hopeless prayer to ‘Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters’ fresh on its lips. She wasn’t sure what to expect as she pulled the mask off, but it was not the anticlimactic discovery that it was ‘just’ an orc, with no visible physical oddities.

Shaking her head, she kicked the body away and, kneeling down, put her hand to the deck before pausing. Looking around, she found the entrance to the lower level at the back, behind the mast and near a pair of drums that had a series of mysterious symbols daubed on them. Walking over to it, she opened it and hopped down into the deck that had the rowers… and wished she had not.

The rowers, all of them, were orcs, sat there, ignoring her, keeping the boat from moving too much, but they were certainly not living, not in the conventional sense. She could feel the twisted, bound longevity within them, despite many of them looking like little better than flesh-draped skeletons. Looking around, she could see something akin to arrays branded on the back of each one – the symbol mirroring the one she had seen on the drums.

Approaching the nearest one, she tried to pull them away—

With a scream, the rower cast aside his oar and leapt for her. In the same instant every other ‘slave’ on the deck cast aside their oars and also twisted and surged towards her.

-Ah, what in Yama’s hells? she cursed, scrambling away and leaping up to the top deck.

The rowers scrambled up after her, both out of the hatch she had just exited and also out of the sides of the boat, worming out of the gaps for the oars and scrambling up onto the deck. She kicked one, trying to send him sprawling; however, it was like kicking a block of stone and her principle, even with the help of her mantra, might as well have bounced off all those rushing towards her.

She contemplated destroying the boat itself, but, looking across, she found her gaze drawn to several scrawny figures staggering out of the water near the wreckage of the other boat she had thoroughly abandoned. Rowers, who had survived apparently unharmed.

“…”

Considering for about half a second longer, she took a running jump off the boat towards the shore, noting that the boat was now starting to drift quite rapidly downstream.

She didn’t make it the whole distance, crashing down in the muddy shallows, but it was good enough, she concluded. Behind her, the rowers paused, then all slowly filed back down below decks. As she watched, after a moment, the oars started to move again and the boat returned to holding its ground in the mists of the riverway.

Looking around, she noted the distinct lack of any friendly Ur’Inan… or anything other than orc corpses and the odd rower stumbling out of the water and vanishing into the reeds.

“Well… shit,” she grimaced, closing her eyes for a second to try and focus on the sounds of the swamp itself.

All she got was the hissing of reeds and what could have been faint laughter on the wind.

“…”

Sighing, she kicked the corpse of an orc into the reeds and started off down the riverbank to recover Juni’s storage talisman.

~ Chunhua – Now hating swamps as much as jungles ~

Chunhua surfaced, cursing, and immediately felt a hand grab her by the hair and drag her to the shore.

“By the Shaper’s rabid cock,” a male voice snarled above her.

Flailing, she found that the person dragging her was one of the ‘guards’. Nearby, she could see Lashaan and also Eruuna being hauled bodily into the reeds. She attempted to use her mantra to attack the guards, but got no purchase on it at all.

-What…?

She attempted to feed her fear into it instead, but that also went nowhere, as if her mantra mnemonics were no better than phantasms in her mind.

“Stop that,” one of the guards said, hitting her, hard, on the head, and her qi turned utterly turbulent, which turned out to be their undoing.

She staggered up, looking around in the reeds as they thrashed weakly, dying to the faint miasma of parasol qi that had been unleashed when he tried to disperse her qi. All around, the sounds of fighting and screams echoed eerily in the mist.

-Where is Juni? she spun, looking this way and that, but there was no immediate sign of the other woman. She was right beside me when we went down…

Nearby, she heard a scream, not Juni, but Saruuna.

{One with What Is}

Orientating herself, she ran through the reeds in the direction of the sound, rapidly sorting through what few offensive talismans she had left. It was a minor miracle that they had not taken her storage ring or talisman away from her, or Juni for that matter. She guessed that they had just not considered it important, or more likely not recognised what they were.

-Well, at least there is something working in our favour. She grimaced, leaping across a narrow water channel as she continued to head in the direction of Saruuna’s screams.

It didn’t take her long to arrive at her destination. Half a dozen of the Ur’Inan had been dragged out of the water by the local guards and were being dragged, flailing, through the mud.

-Still no soul sense, she sighed, unstoring her bow and a quiver of arrows doused in yang blood from the storage talisman.

“So that’s what that was,” a voice spoke. She swore and threw herself sideways as Ashaal stepped out of the reeds beside her, effortlessly plucking both out of her hands and then the talisman for good measure. “The Great Mother warned me you might have some strange means, but these are valuable.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Get over there and join them, human girl,” Ashaal sneered, pointing at the other prisoners, who had also noticed her presence now.

“Go. There. Now.” This time, the command sank into her body much more forcefully, making her grit her teeth as she fought to resist with her mantra, even though it was still somehow dissociated from her.

“If you hadn’t shown that trick in the courtyard it might have worked now,” Ashaal giggled behind her, “but I suppose that shit-show had to have some—”

The world went white, fog drenching everything without any warning as chiming laughter swirled all around them. As before, the constraints on her melted away. This time, she wasted no time in immediately bolting for cover; however, she only got some ten paces before it felt like she was grasped straight out of the air by an invisible hand and tossed down with the other prisoners.

“Fucking demons,” Ashaal snarled, holding up a golden fire in her hand which expelled the mist from the area around them.

“This is more bothersome than expected,” a second masked figure wearing loose red and gold robes stalked out of the reeds, dragging an unconscious Naakai by her hair.

“Tell me about it, Karmaz,” Ashaal hissed. “I wish to hear more about how this is more ‘bothersome’, or not going as ‘planned’.”

“…”

Karmaz clearly knew enough to say nothing, simply choosing to kick Naakai into the others. Saruuna had been gagged at this point, as had Lashaan who had blood around her mouth. One of the guards was nursing a nasty wound on his arm as well.

“ASHAAAL!” an enraged voice echoed through the reeds.

“Seriously, you would think I killed his mother,” Ashaal grumbled.

“ASHAAAL, COME OUT!”

“It’s not him,” Karmaz scowled. “He is fighting Kozrak on the boat.”

“Ahahaahaahaa…”

An echoing peal of laughter swirled around them and the golden light grew dim for a second. Karmaz unslung a pack and tossed it to a guard who opened it, revealing a dozen torches.

“How far are we from the nearest fort?” Ashaal asked as they watched the guards rapidly light torches that gave off the same acrid, aromatic smell as the bonfires in the town.

“Two miles,” Karmaz sighed, casting about as she fought against whatever force was holding her in place. “They picked a good spot. Why did the Quazam not accompany you?”

“Fucked if I know,” Ashaal scowled as she watched the last of the guards light their torches. “That one remained in Ulhar so presumably the Ten Great Ones have some need of her.”

-Ten Great Ones? The more we learn about this place the weirder it gets, she complained in her heart.

A guard grasped her and they started to move rapidly up the waterway now, led by Karmaz, who seemed to be someone from the nearest fort, while Ashaal brought up the rear. Behind them, the sound of battle continued to echo through the mists weirdly.

They continued like that for nearly ten minutes, she guessed, crossing channels and occasionally diverting this way and that around deeper pools or stretches of open water until Karmaz called them to a stop.

“What is it?” Ashaal asked, a bit testily.

“Why are they not chasing us? They chase anything that flees. It’s like a compulsion,” Karmaz hissed, looking around warily.

“You think those children are that predictable?” Naakai giggled from where the Ur’Inan were seated.

“You think you know more of them than we—”

Karmaz trailed off, because a childlike figure was standing right beside him, peering with him, in near mimicry of his worried and wary manner.

“Eheeheh…” the young girl, dark-haired and carrying a small drum, stepped smartly back into the reeds.

“Oopsie!” her mocking exclamation echoed strangely amid the rustling of the reeds in the wind.

“…”

Ashaal turned and stared at the guards, then, with a single, grasping motion, tore all their heads off. All but one deflated with a sad whistling sound, mist flowing out of them and flowing away.

The reeds around them seemed to sigh, as if this was both frustrating and amusing at the same time.

“…”

Karmaz turned to the other Ur’Inan, who flinched backwards at his grim look.

“Should we?”

“…”

“The Ten Masters want the women it seems, but the others…” Ashaal shook her head.

“Do your worst,” Caanar spat. “How you are not orcneas is a riddle only for the mothers.”

“Ahaha…” Ashaal just laughed.

“You wonder how? It is not we who have turned away from our heritage, but you, little savage,” Kermaz smirked.

“I wonder…” Caanar sighed. “From the clay I was born. To the clay I—”

Ashaal covered the distance to Caanar in a single bound and grasped him by the neck.

“Nope… no… one old curse is quite enough.”

“You… will… not… let… us… live… You will… not… let… us… die?” Caanar rasped through her grip.

“You think your lives are your own now?” Ashaal hissed, her grip tightening. “Your lives are a thing of Udrasa. You exist only to Honour and Obey.”

“And you exist only to be prey!” a cheerful voice declared as two more of the young girls stepped out of the reeds ahead of them.

“We…?”

“You were made of clay, because those lords of Vash could not bear to see their glorious flesh and blood so defiled by death and wasted through war,” the right-hand girl said rather smugly, in the manner of a child repeating back a teaching they learned in school.

“Indeed… indeed,” her companion nodded her head seriously. “They made you to die for their kith and kin, to be hunted and slaughtered by the thousands on those fields of war so that they could live in luxury and wealth.”

“You could have cast it aside, but instead you returned to it,” a third girl, the one who had been blowing on the flute, added, stepping out of the reeds in the direction they had come.

“But all you have done is return to their image, and you have taken from us, from our mother, from our sisters…” another, dark-haired, carrying a brace of javelins, a drum tucked under her arm, agreed.

“So, we will hunt you…”

“Skin you…”

“Butcher you…”

“Burn your entrails…”

“Offer you up to Great Father Sky and Great Mother Earth…”

“That you might be returned to that pure being, relinquished of the sins of your stolen path…”

“…”

Listening to their far too cheerful exchange as the group circled them, it rather reminded her of very cute if utterly terrifying cats by their demeanour.

Ashaal narrowed her eyes.

“Then do it…”

“…”

“How little of us you understand,” the flute girl sighed. “Can you really waste time here?”

“What do you—?”

Kermaz frowned, but Ashaal abruptly spun, scanning this way and that, looking wary.

“Dead are the pools where the dark stars fell!” the drummer murmured.

“Where our sister’s tears do linger as sorrowing wells,” the archer sighed, sorrowfully, wiping a tear from the eye of her mask.

“Therein, amid those tattered towers, spears of gods cast down when they grew men and beast together like flowers…” the flutist sighed, a trifle theatrically.

“Who can say what lingers there…” the one holding the javelins giggled.

“Where lament only those who remember Hyas well…” they all echoed, bowing their heads as if in mourning.

“…”

“Or we could be talking complete bollocks!” the drummer cackled as she suddenly danced forward and swatted Kermaz’s blade out of his hand and kicked him into the reeds and out of sight.

“You decide!” the flutist smirked, her form shifting and growing older, to become a stunningly beautiful young woman with flowing locks as she arrived before Ashaal who tossed Caanar straight into the others’ path.

In that instant she was again freed from her immobility and scrambled desperately for cover. The young woman spun past Caanar effortlessly, her feet kicking up water from the pool and her hands brushing through the reeds, turning the glittering spray of her passage into a net of mist that swept over Ashaal and tried to bind her up.

“OVER THERE!” an Ur’Vash yelled in Easten, and a moment later two dozen soldiers in yellow robes with leather breastplates and copper-gold machetes charged out of the reeds on the far side.

The other childlike figures laughed and dashed towards them, the mists already swirling around the new arrivals as they cut at it and waved more torches.

A hand grabbed her – Lashaan, she realised – hauling her up as the other Ur’Inan fled for the reeds.

“What are they?!” she managed to gasp as she found her footing and ran after her and Saruuna who had managed to take off her binding.

“The children? An ancient thing. Do not be fooled by their demeanour. They are perhaps the single most dangerous group that exists in this broad land,” Naakai gasped.

“Those are the Daughters of the Sea?” Eruuna gasped, even as she adjusted the badly injured Caanar across her back and scrambled after Naakai.

Teshek, following after, snatched up a spear from a fallen guard and just shook his head. In passing, she did the same, because if nothing else the metal blades appeared potent enough to be worth future investigation.

“Yes. It seems we have a cruel fate to meet strange things of every stripe,” Naakai hissed, hauling them up short as they arrived at another pool. “The tales regarding them and their kind are as many as they themselves are. Those you see here are among their most childlike and innocent.”

“These are childlike and innocent?” she muttered disbelievingly, thinking of what she had seen so far.

“Compared to their elders? Yes,” Naakai grimaced. “Their elders are such that even the greatest gods feared them and the mightiest figures of our tales entreated them with caution and took their counsel gladly whenever it was proffered.”

“I guess we can only cross,” Naakai added after a moment’s further consideration before heading left along the bank and starting to wade across as the screams behind them reached fever pitch.

“What are these ‘Ten Masters’?” she asked, scrambling out and then helping Saruuna up after her.

“Probably the root of our problems,” Naakos spat. “Old mages with more power than sense.”

“Ur’Vash mages are notable for being either mad, bad or dangerous to know,” Naakai agreed, leading them on through the reeds. “They are a cabal of old freaks who control the major towns here. Mostly they have been accommodated, because living out here who is going to…”

Naakai trailed off and waved a hand to make them stop.

“What is it?” Naakos, who had been bring up the rear, came forward as they all bunched up.

She followed and found they had reached the edge of an open area of reeds. Beyond it was a large ruin that had been built up to a fort similar to the one they had first been brought to by the scouts, around which several hundred figures were toiling in fields patrolled by guards. Off to their right, the waterway twisted in the mist, several vessels barely visible thanks to the burning braziers on their aft and stern.

“I guess we go back…?” Lashaan murmured, casting a look behind her.

“This is Umaja,” Naakai hissed.

“Oh…” Naakos groaned. “They have taken us all the way up river to Udrasa?”

“Were we not in Udrasa?” she asked, confused.

“…”

“Ah, I suppose that nuance was lost,” Naakai muttered, pulling a grimace. “The town we went to was called Udrasa. However, there are… five ‘Udrasa’s at strategic points on both sides of the river, all founded by the Udrasa Tribe who are now part of the Grass Stalker confederacy. The city you saw earlier though, just before the attack, that is the ‘real’ Udrasa, built on the ruins of a place the older tales of our people call Yom Shadras, one of the outlying settlements up river from ‘Vashada’.”

“Oh… so the Udrasa were one of the tribes who originally founded Vashada?” she guessed.

“Yep,” Naakos agreed, sounding grim. “If we had just been able to cross and bugger on our merry way… It hurts my soul that that unfilial brat Uaazar died as he did.”

“Some of the others might survive,” she glowered, thinking of the various other Ur’Inan who had been with Azuum and what she would do to them if the opportunity ever presented itself at this point.

“Hah… I like your thinking,” Naakos chuckled darkly, retreating back into the reeds.

“At least while they are maintaining the soul wards at full strength and that terrible warband are orchestrating all this mayhem we have some cover,” Teshek remarked, looking around nervously at the shifting mists.

“…”

She turned to look at the marshlands behind her, both glad and frustrated that it was so easy to bury her concerns about Lin Ling and Juni with her mantra.

“You are worried about the others…” Naakai nodded, clearly reading her thoughts in spite of that, not that it required any great skill to guess she was worried about her comrades.

“Yes, I…”

She trailed off, staring at the reeds beside them, which were shimmering weirdly.

“What is?” Lashaan, crouching beside her was also staring around, as were the others, having noticed the odd phenomenon.

“Some kind of ward?” Eruuna frowned, pulling the injured Caanar away from them and waving her hand in the air as the qi density around them started to shift—

{BIRTH OF TEN THOUSAND SERPENTS}

The echoes of a strange art, like a sibilant hiss, twisted the wind, and maybe a third of all the reeds within eyesight shed their skin and turned into Soul Foundation strength serpents.

~ Lin Ling – Girl, Homicidal. ~

The entire marshland around her turned into serpents surrounding her, literally into serpents. Every swaying reed within eyesight shrivelled up, the swaying, feathery tops turning into serpentine heads as the stems of the plants became the bodies.

It was doubly frustrating because not only was she likely not the target, but it wasn’t every reed either, but rather three in ten or thereabouts. As such, the reed beds were thinned out a bit but visibility was still non-existent… and she was now surrounded by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Soul Foundation serpents, many of whom were now turning to look at her.

“…”

“Burn?” she muttered, staring hopefully around her.

The yang qi around her surged and a few reeds withered, but most resisted quite admirably. While there was a strong ‘yang’ strength in this land, with the river and the sheer longevity of the swamplands themselves, Yang Fire was about the weakest element of the five thanks to the pervasive nature of Yang Water and its support of both aspects of ‘life’.

Several of the serpents shot towards her, showing a remarkably uncritical desire to bite her. Catching one, she injected yang qi and her principle into it, easily withering it away, and then tossed what was left in disgust.

“I see… so it’s a tar pit,” she complained to the world at large.

There was no qi at all to be reclaimed from the serpents themselves, at least that she could affect, and no cores either, which meant that it was a very good tar pit at that. They were being fed by the land, and when the serpents were destroyed, they dissipated, the qi dispersing into unstable elements that even if she could refine, would still be done at a complete loss.

You could kill them physically, but that left corpses which then got devoured by other serpents, just making them stronger. To cut her way through, she would expend qi and have few if any opportunities to reclaim it.

The ambient density was already dropping rapidly, she noted as she stomped on another one and then winced as two finally bit her. The venom was not in and of itself dangerous… to her at any rate, but it also held leeching properties that tried to disrupt her qi flow and was also corrosive in a way her principle couldn’t touch… though the Yang Laws in her blood and bones still easily obliterated it.

Picking up another serpent, which hissed and tried to spit in her face, she was struck by how familiar it was… Green and brown with leaf-like scales and thick skin, a horn on its head, and even though it was at Soul Foundation, little if any soul strength to speak of, just prodigious venom and physical strength.

-So, the same species as had attacked the camp that time, she mused, thinking back. Does that mean it was deliberate? That attack pretty much prevented us from leaving… Had we encountered them in the night we would have been in a lot of problems as well…

She sighed and crushed it, then she tossed the body away and watched as it was immediately consumed by some others.

“Great, so not only is qi being leeched, but they are body refinement serpents who can fully utilise all their tricks here without suffering from a lack of soul strength?” she complained to the world at large as several more wrapped around her and continued trying to bite her.

Killing several dozen more serpents with her bare hands and what passed for her ‘Martial Intent’ in rapid succession, she watched what happened as she just tossed them aside. The first thing that was apparent was that her ‘Martial Intent’ was easily the weakest part of her foundation. The second, though arguably more important one, was that any body of a serpent she left was immediately devoured to become the strength of the others at a rate that was rather concerning.

Looking at the rate of aggregating strength amongst those near her, she did a rough calculation that killing a few hundred could see her facing Dao Seeking serpents in numbers large enough to be inconvenient…

-And that is if it is just me…

In the middle distance she saw several serpents with nothing else to turn on after consuming some luckless swamp critter start to fight and devour each other with frenetic abandon.

Off to her left she heard the enraged hiss of a genuine serpent, also now presumably fighting for its life.

-Great, so everything here is going to feed the swarm and the last person standing gets to fight a huge serpent and then probably get cleaned up by these god-cursed orcs?

“…”

Looking around, she rather suspected that person might be her, assuming the masked ‘Daughters of the Hunt’ didn’t stick around to see things out. She somewhat suspected that they were too canny for that, given how they had rather skilfully stalked the boat up to this point.

{One with What Is}

She activated the stealth art, more so to help her just blend with the surroundings as to hide her soul presence at this point.

“I will find whoever did this and I will make them regret it!” she declared, crushing the head of another Nascent Soul one that had just bit her arm… and then paused.

-Wait a minute…

She clapped her hand to her forehead, her previous determination having taken a somewhat minor stay as she thought back to their other encounter with a bunch of serpents… before they met the Ur’Inan.

-Could this just be something similar? Is that why I can’t absorb it, because the soul wards are screwing with things?

The idea that what she was seeing was, in effect, a physical manifestation of an Immortal Soul or something very similar…

-Not an Immortal Soul, she shook her head, shaking a few more free.

-More like a really formidable illusion, a formation?

Moving on, as she tried to kill as few as possible, she had to admit that neither of those felt right either.

-My first thought, that they are real, physical things is spot on. They don’t have soul power, their qi can’t be refined and just dissipates, yet they are clearly able to draw qi from other… things…

-Is this someone’s fates-accursed treasure?

The more she turned that idea over, that this was a rather rare example of what was known as a cornucopia treasure, the more certain she became.

-It’s refining the surrounding qi and uses the medium of reeds to transform a huge number of them into serpents… but…

She plucked a reed and tried refining it.

-Idiot, of course it’s that, she sighed, understanding at last because the amount of qi she got from a random spirit vegetation reed was about the same as the average serpent.

-This kind of tar pit artefact you could sell for the ransom of a small sect outside, she grumbled in her heart – assuming it was reusable of course.

-That said, it could look like any accursed thing, and buried out here, without soul sense to help me find it and with no visibility, I could hunt for…

-Do you seriously have a hole in your head? The old turtle snarked back at her.

“…”

She chose not to rise to that rather justifiable accusation and instead looked around, doing a calculation in her head as to how much qi she was going to waste just on setup…

-Oh well, living beyond the day is priceless, she sighed and put her hand to the ground, feeding the anger and pain that the bites were causing into her mantra.

“Magnitude”

The whole swamp shuddered, the shockwaves of her yang qi turning the already muddy ground to liquid as they rolled out, and her grasp of the landscape came back from the things that distorted her qi back towards her. Three things immediately jumped out – there was a large underground complex about four miles to the east, that the pagodas all had basements which was rather convenient… and that there was an extensive complex of foundations maybe three square miles across that she had given a good shake to about two miles to the north-west, around a bend in the river.

Diverting towards the north-west, she started to run flat out, ignoring the serpents entirely. A tarpit was only good if you didn’t know where you were going and had to walk about in it after all, she thought with nasty laugh.

It didn’t take her long to spot the first watchtower, helped by the echoing laughter of the ‘Daughters’ who were already there. Rather than stop, she just put her foot to the wall and raced straight up it, landing on the top, and found that the three archers on top were very dead.

A quick check showed that their arrows were all Orichalcum-tipped, which was disappointing in this instance, so she pulled out her own bow and a quiver of the black bone pointed arrows already dipped in her blood and swept her superior vision across the diorama below her.

Off to her right, by the river, the daughters were running riot through the forces there. They were not actually entering the small town or its harbour, but she could see that several boats were being prevented from leaving. Off to the right… she sighed with relief as she saw another group embroiled in their own fight on the edge of the reed beds – Chunhua and a few of the Ur’Inan retreating from a wave of serpents.

Heading towards them, she saw several groups of local armed guards and two more robed figures. Off behind her, another masked figure abruptly exited the reed beds closer to the docks, sweeping serpents away from her – Ashaal.

After her ran a few other orcs; however, when she spotted them, Ashaal reached out and wrung them out like they were washrags. She was amused to see that they were real orcs, not mist-possessed ones, not that that seemed to bother Ashaal much.

-No sign of Kozrak and Zashral though. I can only hope they are still fighting it out by the river, she frowned.

It was tempting to go fight Ashaal, but she knew all too well how the orc gestalt worked and now that she had achieved a certain evolution in the use of her mantra, she knew what she had to do. Her experience on the boat had shown her the template as well, although she was in no hurry to try that feat again, in quite that form at least.

Giggling, she put on the mask of a ‘Maker’s Dancer’ and then reapplied her war paint. She then took out Juni’s swordstaff and thought back to what she had seen of Juni using it. In a way, it was still the best weapon for brute force.

{One with What Is}

It was made out of Duraminium, she knew that now. A dense, qi-rich ore akin to star iron or the much rarer Adamantium. The information about Orichalcum had also been quite informative about the other famous weapons of that era – it had no special ‘properties’ Orichalcum and some others did; instead, it had been widely held to be second only to Arborundum in terms of durability. In fact, the memories noted in passing, as she slid down the tower and ran towards the fort, it had been called ‘Pauper’s Arborundum’ or ‘Plebeian Adamantium’ for quite a long time.

It took a moment for her to be noticed, whereupon she started to get all sorts of weird sensations through the gestalt link that snapped back into focus.

{Rampage as One}

“Blessing, Path, Lotus, Body, Gift”

She focused each mantra mnemonic in turn on that link, drawing on her own rage and frustrations at their current circumstances that had been building for quite some time and been little blunted by her earlier use. Orcs everywhere screamed, or fell back, stricken with panic as she smashed into a wavering group of local guards who had been heading towards Chunhua. The sword-staff, which she wielded with non-existent finesse, carved through them like they were rotten wood, scattering broken weapons and bisected bodies in a blizzard of gore.

Crashing into the only ‘Dao Seeking’ orc in the lot, she sank her hand into his chest.

“Absorb”

Vitality flowed out of him, fuelling her own accumulation.

“M-maker’s?” someone screamed nearby.

“GREAT MOTHER PROTE—”

That one she arrived before, the blade of the spear splitting his silver mask before she tore it down and spun over the haft to kick the one behind him.

Landing, she spun on the spot and took three more off at the knees before launching herself forward to crash into a second group who had been massing near a gateway into the interior of the fort.

“Shatter”

Her cry washed over them, even as she continued to put pressure on everything around her through the gestalt link. Through it, she could feel the panic and the confusion, the morale shock that this totally unexpected intervention had had.

“THE SHIELD STANDS STRONG!”

A powerful voice echoed through the courtyard as an Orichalcum-armed official rushed out of the tower by the inner gate to the main settlement.

Grinning, she shot forward and let her qi armour swirl out around her, again turning into the half-serpent form.

“HOLD!”

Her shout, intended to mirror what the memories told her should be an infamous strength of the ancient form she was mimicking now, constricted space in the whole courtyard. The official stared, bug-eyed in his mask, as she surged towards him and bisected him with a single blow, grasping his Immortal realm heart-core in passing. It probably wouldn’t be a fatal blow, but it would ruin his short-term strength.

“Absorb”

She ripped vitality from him as well, then swung her tail, smashing it into the half-charging rank of guards, splintering their bones and bending their bodies with ease.

The constriction passed just as she spun through into the group behind the officer and half the courtyard staggered or screamed as the delayed momentum caused by the ‘hold’ command overwhelmed them. Two arrows hammered into her, Orichalcum tips allowing them to bite deep, but she was already through the gateway and sheltered by its narrow angles by the time other archers had recovered.

Plucking them out, she tore those scrambling to escape her limb from limb, viciously wielding the sword-staff as much like a bludgeon, relying on her momentum and its mass to do the damage.

“Ahahaha…” childlike laughter echoed up above her as she saw one of the Okeanides take aim and shoot an archer in the heart as she skipped across a rooftop. With her, the mist thickened again and the screams of other orcs became distant and distorted.

Two more came after, one, dark-haired, playing her flute, another with golden locks casting javelins that became mist and returned to her with every orc she slew.

Resisting getting distracted by them, she spun back and rolled into another group of the orcs who were trying to form up a spear wall to contain her. Thankfully, while the weapons they wielded were dangerous, the low realms of most combatants meant that the danger was more in their massed numbers than any particular expertise as she slipped under their blades and levelled half the formation with a sweep of her tail, enhanced with her qi armour.

“Why is she a—!” an orc’s confused exclamation was cut off as one of his compatriots started laughing manically and putting his hands over the orc’s face, dragging him back into a shadowed doorway.

A second formation was turned to anarchy right as it passed through the gateway, three of its number also revealing themselves as mist puppets and starting to dance in a circle, holding arms and mugging like drunks while those around fought to try and hack them down.

Taking that opportunity, she shot into that formation, hacking left and right with abandon to break through into the inner town itself. Here, orcs were running everywhere – shopkeepers were shutting up in panic, various others were scrambling back or being ordered to stay where they were at spear point by guards looking no more sure of their actions themselves.

Under cover of the swirling mists, she returned to her fully ‘human’ form, so as to really confuse things, and randomly shot an orc who was remonstrating with a guard while pointing at several bound and branded figures who were collapsed and shaking with a whip.

“Maker’s Dancer?!” someone screamed.

“How…?! The Great Mother protects!”

“PROTECT US, SHIELD OF UDRASA!”

“Great Mother, your servant…”

“By the Great Mother, we overcome!”

That last one made her turn, because it had had a different intent to it. Hurrying down the street from the docks were half a dozen robed figures wearing silver masks, followed by maybe 50 guards with Orichalcum armour and spears… and nets.

“BY THE GREAT MOTHER, QUAZAM, MOTHER TO THE MASTERS, WE OVERCOME!”

This time, the shout surged both through the gestalt link and, through sheer force of conviction, trying to push back into her and undo the chaos she was inflicting on the link.

“BY THE GREAT MOTHER, QUAZAM, MOTHER TO THE MASTERS, WE OVERCOME!”

Their chant surged a second time as Ur’Vash…

She did a double take, focusing on thinking of them as ‘Orcs’, but somehow that thought was pushed back, rejected simply by their presence here.

“HONOUR TO THE GREAT MOTHER, MOTHER TO THE MASTERS – SERVE IN HER NAME!” the leader proclaimed grandly as others now started to mass, echoing his cry.

“Strength to the Great Mother, Mother to the Masters – overcome in her name!”

“Fortune to the Great Mother, Mother to the Masters – overcome in her name!”

“BREAK!”

Her roar, drawing on everything to push it back into the link, met the grand momentum of the chant. The two collided and repelled each other, and the group of robed figures staggered back, many around them groaning in disappointment. She grimaced, understanding immediately that this was not a fight she could win in this way…

“Oh well,” she sighed and started to muster her qi properly.

Yang Fire was not really feasible, especially not now that it was starting to rain and the mist had doubled down – however Yang Earth was very possible. The strength of the land here was already unstable, both because it was a swamp, and also because whatever had been done to the land itself long ago had never really recovered. She had sensed the scars when she used the earlier cry to scout the land and also to seed qi rich in yang laws through it.

“RUPTURE”

Focusing on the spear, which was also another prodigious manifestation of ‘Earth’ in its own way, she slammed the butt into the ground. Her qi, intent and principle all focused through it, to the point where she was glad she had opted to use two hands to plant it.

The town creaked as the shockwave tore through its foundations. Anyone below Immortal who happened to be standing on solid ground had their legs shattered outright, even before the disrupting wave of qi arrived. The ground itself became a quagmire a second later. Buildings that hadn’t collapsed simply sank while many of those sent sprawling were devoured by the shifting land.

-From mud they were made, so by mud do they die, one of the memories giggled.

-A fitting end, the turtle chuckled darkly.

“…”

She resisted sighing again. It wasn’t that she didn’t share their antipathy at this point, but the chaos and death had been thoroughly indiscriminate… and now that the momentum of her attempt to subvert the gestalt like that had been awkwardly forestalled, she could see how mass ‘slaughter’ might in fact work against her, much as it had for the cultivators in the battle against the forces from Ajara.

“MASTER ZAZUUS!”

“Strength to Master Zazuus!”

“FORTUNE TO MASTER ZAZUUS!”

“THE GREAT MOTHER’S MERCY SHIELD US!”

“By the Great Mother, we overcome!”

Salutes and cheers swept through the soldiers massing against her as a figure arrived like a ghost to stand some twenty paces away from her. He was powerfully built, wearing a mask similar to the one Ashaal had worn, and carried a pair of curved orichalcum blades. The other thing that stood out was the carved charm around his neck, which radiated qi with a subtle intensity that screamed ‘treasure’ to her.

“…”

She narrowed her eyes and tried to work out what realm he was.

The memories were precious little help, but the overall impression was that he should be close to Kozrak or Zashral, maybe Ashaal as well.

-Great, so that makes four possible Ancient Immortals or better chilling here. This all seems remarkably planned as well, if those early serpents were also associated with someone from here?

“So you are the one who Great Master Sharvasus foretold,” Zazuus frowned, dark eyes staring at her from his golden mask.

-Foretold?

That immediately struck her as both decidedly ominous and also rather curious, because up until this point there had been no mention by anyone that she could recall of a ‘Great Master’.

“Incidentally, if you are hoping that those rabid hunting dogs of a bygone era will help you much, you are going to be mistaken,” Zazuus added, rather conversationally.

-Too conversationally, she thought, forcing her rage down a notch as an ominous thought surfaced.

“Really? I though you lot were all about Quazam,” she muttered, deciding to see how he replied and buying time to let her inner turmoil still somewhat.

-They are trying to bait me, draw me out? That guard on the boat called me a ‘little serpent’ before, but I don’t look like one, or didn’t then… and didn’t show any transformation or signs of it. The only time I transformed was in the battle, which means someone here saw that?

“…”

“The Great Mother Protects!” Zazuus declared, his tone taking on a degree of grandeur.

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

The cry reverberated through the whole town, travelling like a wave, making the oppressive strength of the ‘gestalt’ bearing down on her even greater.

-The mage from before?

“I do not know what you are. Perhaps you are one of those reclusive storm-crows so venerated by the backward savages of the plains,” Zazuus chuckled, as if amused at the idea. “If that is the case, it will all be for our, Udrasa’s, strength though.”

“Right… right,” she shrugged, projecting outward disinterest while still pondering that previous mage from the barrier. “So, Sharvasus?”

“…”

Zazuus remained impassive, raising his hand.

“Seize her.”

“YES! MASTER ZAZUUS!” the massed ranks roared, levelling their spears and slowly starting to advance towards her.

~ Juni – Umaja by boat ~

Unable to do much of anything due to a lack of qi, Juni found herself hauled up by a guard and taken bodily to the rear of the vessel where she was confined within a canopied resting area as the boat moved slowly down the waterway from where they had boarded. Thereafter, she was largely ignored beyond four silver-masked guards carrying strange silver fork-like polearms taking up stations close enough to easily prevent her from trying to toss herself over the side to escape.

Zazuus didn’t interact with her at all; instead, after he had held a short conversation with another, silver-masked male Ur’Vash, he came to the same canopied area and sat cross-legged and silent on the couch opposite her, clearly waiting for something.

Looking around, she could not help but be struck how weirdly opulent the whole setup was. The couches were made of wood, covered in cushions and silks, while the view itself was obscured by hanging drapes that hung limp in the misty stillness. Several brazier-like constructions sat around the edges of the area, made of a combination of the golden-copper and silvery-blue metals, the golden flames within keeping the mist at bay and again dispensing that strange acrid yet bitter aroma that suppressed her cultivation slightly.

It was weirdly opulent, in line with what she had seen in the Hall, an encounter she was still trying to unpick in her head.

The whole encounter with Quazam was strange. Strange in ways that made her head throb unsettlingly. The details were clear as day… individually, but now removed from it, she found it almost impossible to keep a thorough grasp of the whole thing as a singular moment. As soon as she focused on recalling more than any one thing – the prince, Quazam, the refreshing water, the horrible ‘Master’, all the pieces twisted and skittered this way and that, confusing her recollections by various turns.

Watching the scenery flow by, she found that the fort was a bit bigger than her initial impression through the reeds had led her to believe. The bulk of the taller structure she had seen with its four towers and glowing bonfires was built on the remains of some older ruin made of large stone blocks. The rest of it was a sprawling walled settlement with a dock and various watchtowers, while beyond it lay various fields.

“Umaja protects!”

“UMAJA PROTECTS!”

“THE MASTER OF UMAJA!”

The announcing cries made her return to the moment to find that they had stopped moving and all three boats were now pulled up to dock by the town and a group of Ur’Vash were already embarking from the dock to stand on the deck.

She forced herself to recall the last few moments and shuddered.

-Something is messing with my perception?

Looking around the obvious candidate was the braziers. However, the exposure to the golden fires had not had…

“What of the others?” Zazuus’s question drew her back from pondering that with a jolt.

“The one with serpent blood appears to have gotten free and we have not heard from Master Ashaal or the others,” a rather rotund Ur’Vash in a silver mask, standing near Zazuus, who she had not seen step through the curtains at all, replied a bit uneasily.

Outside the rest area, more guards were now standing to attention, while several other loosely gowned figures in bronze masks bowed deferentially in the direction of Zazuus.

“It would be helpful if those rabid dogs killed Ashaal, but I suspect she is too tenacious for that,” Zazuus sighed, waving a hand generally toward the reed beds across from the fort.

“…”

The Master of Umaja said nothing, clearly not willing to be drawn on any opinion about whether Ashaal should survive. She could not blame him, honestly, given what she had seen of the female Ur’Vash. Ashaal struck her as someone who repaid any slight with terminal prejudice.

“In any case, I have set in motion events to flush them out, especially the serpent one. She should already be approaching… the other going missing is annoying.”

“We could relax the Eyes of Quazam?” the Master of Umaja suggested.

“Unnecessary,” Zazuus said simply. “The other will not flee. That has also been determined by the Great Master.”

“By the Will of the Great Master, he who advises Quazam, Mother to the Masters,” the Master of Umaja murmured.

“Wise is He,” Zazuus nodded.

-That also had a weird intonation, but not the same kind? She frowned, trying to focus again on that oddity as it kept returning to plague her like an itch she just could not locate.

“So, how shall we deal with her?” the Master of Umaja asked deferentially, presumably asking about ‘Lin Ling’.

“Draw her in; use what you have to. Do not be concerned for the cost. Both she and the serpent-blessed are the precious things Great Master Shavasus has a plan for.” Zazuus stated.

-and how is Shavasus, is that one of the… the…

She had to really struggle to focus on that part of the recollection of her meeting with Quazam and haul it out.

-Is Sha... va... sus one of those robed figures?

-And why is it so hard for me to even focus on his name?

“Wise is the Great Master, he who advises Quazam, Mother to the Masters,” the Master of Umaja murmured again, even as she was struggling with that, before stepping back and bowing deeply.

“Wise is He,” Zazuus agreed, waving a hand in clear dismissal.

“At your command,” the Master of Umaja bowed again and turned to depart and several other Ur’Vash who had been standing deferentially all stepped back and started to bow—

The boat suddenly swayed in the harbour, the reeds rippling and the mist swirling faintly.

“So… it begins,” Zazuus murmured.

As to what ‘began’ she was unclear, except that the likely culprit was Lin Ling based on the context, because Zazuus just sat there for the next ten minutes or close to it, without so much as making a further comment until the distant sounds of combat and shouts started to echo through the mist.

At that point, Zazuus finally sighed and stood, looking to the nearest of the guards.

“Have the other matters been prepared?”

“They have, Master,” the guard addressed nodded, saluting slightly.

“Very good,” Zazuus mused, picking up a scabbarded blade she had totally failed to notice sitting not four paces from her on the table and drawing it slightly to consider the golden-copper surface for a brief instant.

Abruptly, he turned to look at her, and she had to struggle not to gulp, because his gaze was every bit as…

-Stop that! she remonstrated with herself, forcing herself to meet his gaze in something approaching a steady manner.

-I am not that… she was about to say weak, but she cut herself off.

“Hah…” Zazuus sighed softly and shook his head, before turning to the guard he had spoken to before. “When I disembark, move the boat back, observe, and then, when it is clear, take her on to Udrasa.”

“What of the Mist Butchers?” the guard queried.

“…”

Zazuus turned back to her, eyes pensive, then looked at the swirling mists beyond the curtains. “While they are an unpredictable element, those who are here will also be wrapped up in the Great Master’s stratagem.”

“And what of the other Masters?” the second guard on her left asked deferentially.

Zazuus simply shrugged, snapping the blade back into its scabbard and pushing the nearest curtain aside.

“As the Master commands,” clearly taking that action for some kind of answer, the guard saluted.

“As the Master commands,” the others echoed, also bowing to Zazuus’s departing form.

“…”

The whole exchange made her deeply uneasy. She had no reason to think Zazuus was bluffing, which meant that whatever was going on here was still going well enough to plan. Even the wreckage of that boat, Zashral and the interference of the ‘Mist Butchers’, as they were calling the ethereal children, was evidently not sufficient to be significant cause for alarm.

-What is their plan?

-Why do they want us…? Is it the blood Lin Ling has, or the qi Chunhua does?

Thinking through Zazuus’s remarks, that seemed quite plausible, truth be told. For her though, all she could think of was the talisman itself, but if she was to believe what Han Shu and also Lin Ling had implied at various points, it was not a thing so easily grasped—

A second, much more forceful earthquake rippled through the town, collapsing a nearby tower and putting cracks in a wall, distracting her train of thought as the boat pitched amid the sudden waves.

While the guards were not unduly affected, she was tossed to the ground and slid—

She was stopped from actually falling over the side by one of the guards who slammed his silver-blue metal, forked spear down over her arm, halting her slide. In the instant that the metal connected with her flesh, she felt a deep, chilling cold seep through it. In her current, qi-deprived state, the sensation was close to paralysing, wrapping around her like an icy fog and robbing her even of the ability to scream.

The guard hauled her up and held her in the air until the boat stopped tilting then carried her back to the couch and deposited her back on it without comment.

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

The great cry reverberated through the whole town, travelling like a different kind of tidal wave.

“Honour to Quazam, Great Mother to the Masters,” all four guards murmured, tapping their weapons on the ground.

Such was the force of conviction behind it that she felt the faintest tug on her own connection to the gestalt, that had been largely in abeyance given everyone here ‘knew’ she was not an Ur’Vash.

-Strange… she narrowed her eyes, covering her surprise by pretending to still be uneasy about the pitching of the boat in her weakened state.

-Why can I… unless it’s Ling or Chunhua?

“…” One of the guards was suddenly looming over her, staring at her with inscrutable eyes from behind his mask.

-They noticed that connection? She felt her heart cool as the guard continued to stare at her, as if trying to look through her.

“MASTER ZAZUUS!”

“MASTER ZAZUUS!”

“MASTER ZAZUUS!”

In the distance, a great shout echoed again… and again, reverberating as if the whole town was chanting her new captor’s name. Each time they did so, she once again got a faint, involuntary tremor through the gestalt link, as if something was trying to force its way in, but could not because of how her mantra was still acting weird.

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

Another great shout pushed against it… making her skin slick with sweat as the guard continued to stare at her with shimmering, empty eyes. Again, there was something hauntingly familiar about the shout, beyond the words themselves which she had already heard enough to make her have nightmares regarding them.

-The cadence?

-The rhythm of how they are spoken…?

She nearly called on ‘Bright Heart Shifting Steps’ to see if it could help, but stopped at the last moment, mainly due to the way the guard was staring at her. In a disturbing way it called to mind how Quazam had…

“It is time for us to pull back,” another guard stated from the far side.

“Mmm… not just yet,” a female voice smirked from behind her.

The guards turned, and with the one staring at her no longer focusing directly on her, she found she could also move… and breathe again. Ashaal, muddy, but otherwise very much alive, was sitting on the other couch, turning a spirit fruit over in her hands.

“This is not part of—”

“Do I look like Zazuus?” Ashaal chuckled darkly.

“No, Master of Udrasa.”

“I thought not. I have better tits than he does for starters,” Ashaal smirked, pushing out her chest.

“…”

“Master Ashaal, you are aware that—?”

“Did I perhaps not speak clearly before?” Ashaal sighed, beckoning with a hand and dragging the guard who had spoken before over to her and forcing him to kneel, cupping his chin with her free hand.

“You spoke very clearly,” the other guards murmured as one.

“That’s what I thought. Really, the defective ones are the worst!” Ashaal sighed, then snapped her fingers closed, obliterating the guard’s head in the process.

She stared blankly as the body of the guard deflated like a stuck bladder, mist seeping out of it with a giggling, wheezing laugh, realising that that was the guard who had asked about the ‘mist butchers’.

~ Lin Ling – Clash of Titans ~

Skipping backwards and dodging arrows, Lin Ling found she was garnering both a growing appreciation for, and rising hatred of Martial Formations. The infantry did not really engage, choosing mostly to screen and cut off the main avenues of her escape, while groups of archers shot volley after volley at her from a safe distance.

In theory, she could have dealt with just that, using shouts and various other means, but the serpents from outside had also arrived. They now pushed out of the gateway she had just come through, a natural barrier that very effectively funnelled them straight to her, now that the few forces beyond it had all retreated or been consumed by the tide of serpents.

Those at the fore were now almost all Dao Seeking and durable enough that she struggled to kill them just with physical means. That approach was problematic now anyway, because any Dao Seeking serpent who left a corpse immediately meant that she would be facing two or three more moments later as peak Nascent Soul serpents pounced on it. It was a side of the ‘aggregation’ she had not anticipated, that the swarm had a sense of ‘judgement’ in what it devoured to maximise the potential of the whole somehow.

The result was that she was rather neatly stuck between a hammer and an anvil… and she was having issues working out which was which. Zazuus had fallen back with the other masked and robed figures and had also been joined by a few guards carrying bidents made of a blueish silver metal – Illidrium. It was another charming substance from the memories’ greatest hits of dangerous metals from those ancient eras.

If Orichalcum could injure souls as if they were physical flesh, Illdrium’s special trick was to poison the vitality of soul strength directly. With suitable preparation it was the best material to imprison powerful beings was how the memories viewed it… Ancients had woven nets out of it to catch the great beasts of heaven and earth.

The question of how they had such weapons was beside the point. The idea that the Ur’Vash were not doing metallurgy because they lacked the skill had always seemed unlikely given what the memories told her. Rather, it was because they lacked the materials. Materials which, somehow, Udrasa possessed in quantity great enough to outfit basic soldiers with sufficient Orichalcum to be the misery of most qi beasts below the 7th circle, she was sure.

“HONOUR TO QUAZAM, GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

Another rallying cry echoed across the town, sent up by those around Zazuus first, then continued by the soldiers as they stamped their feet and shuffled forward again.

Sighing, she grabbed a Dao Seeking serpent and flung it towards the soldiers. It hit a shield studded with Orichalcum and recoiled, injured and hissing, then shot back towards her. It barely got half way across the distance as several Nascent Soul serpents all shot for it, like sharks in the water smelling blood, and ripped at it. The Dao Seeking serpent killed two, but the three who remained all promoted off of its remains and she had traded another singular serpent for three of the same grade.

“YOU SHALL SERVE QUAZAM! GREAT MOTHER TO THE MASTERS!”

“YOU SHALL BE BOUND!”

“YOU SHALL SUBMIT!”

“BOW TO QUAZAM!”

“Great Mother to the Masters…”

The assault of chanted words, like spears cast purely with their intent, buoyed by the gestalt strength of the thousands of massing orcs, again washed over her. The intent was pretty clear at this point – wear her down and capture her. What was bothering her though, was what Zazuus had said… or maybe let slip in a single moment of overconfidence. They were chanting about ‘Quazam’ but Zazuus had said she was part of some orc called Sharvasus’s plan.

She skipped backwards, opting to roll through the serpents and just accept the attrition to avoid another volley of arrows.

“…”

“It seems a complication has arisen.”

She jumped back as Zazuus appeared in the break in the battle like a ghost, standing no more than five paces from her.

The masked orc took a step and arrived before her—

“DIVIDE”

She snarled the word even as she punched the ground, deciding to take a gamble.

The memories had harped on so often about stolen gifts, yet refused to say what they were, that she was sure some of them were doing it to mess with her at this point. However, they had been at their most vehement concerning those towns in the jungle and also a few other instances associated with such settlements. The abiding effect of those places had been that total repression of all cultivation, pushing everyone down to their original, mortal state. Everyone except her, and later Juni. Even Han Shu had not really been immune.

That was partly thanks to the symbols, but now that she had seen some of those memories, seen that half serpent transformation and understood something of that era, she had a clearer grasp of what she was…

The qi of the world flooded away as all of the comprehensions of the memories merged with her own, manifested by her mantra and also that deep, divisive darkness of those dead halls they had crawled out of.

The expression in Zazuus’s eyes shifted from determination to shock as the word tore through the whole town. The soul wards failed, but that didn’t matter because no mortal could use soul sense anyway. The chants also foundered because they, while rooted in the links to the gestalt, were just a thing that bolstered morale when devoid of everything else that came with them.

{Rampage as One}

She opened her heart up to the tumult within her and tackled Zazuus with a scream of fury. Her own qi could not help the transformation, but she didn’t need it to now. That half form had shown her the route, even if it was only a glimmer. The memories did not need qi either, and that glimmer was enough as her body’s form shifted.

Armoured plates grew out of her skin, spikes and chitin below them, scales over hair, claws on her hands and feet.

She tore at Zazuus, who was just a mortal orc now. Strong, yes, because he was imbued with the innate strength of earth, through the origins of his shaping, but merely a single person.

“This is not—!”

Whatever he had been about to say was cut off as she grabbed his arms and head-butted him in the face with all her might. His body bent and twisted like a rag in her hands before she tore it apart and threw the tattered remains at the stunned orc spear wall.

“BE BROKEN!”

The roar twisted the natural world, calling it to act on her behalf just as it would for the children who ran with the hunt, or other terrible figures of that era.

The orcs crumbled, their bodies unable to sustain the command within the words. Had she been realms higher, she might have returned them to the very mud, stone and wood they were first shaped of, the memories lamented; however, as it was, their mortal forms still collapsed. Bones fractured, organs ruptured, muscle twisted and broken.

High above her, she heard the sound of childlike applause and whistles. One of the Okeanides banged on her drum doing a little backwards shuffle of mockery at the dying masses; however, she didn’t have time to worry about that, because the serpents were still there. ‘Division’ had not broken their form, which all but confirmed her original suspicions. The thing of their origin was much like her… innately superior.

“Little… onessss.”

The serpents shivered and all paused, turning as one to look to the north.

“S-such s-sweet blood… you cannot hide it from me…”

The words whispered through the ruined town like a gentle breeze, a breeze that totally belied the malevolence in them.

Every syllable of the sending made her skin crawl. The blood memories shivered, the later ones in fear, the older ones, lost to those later eras, with fury… and a few, like Ochirioptrix, with something akin to anticipation.

“Old… blood… so sweet… the smell…” the ancient voice hummed, the very rocks themselves seeming to reverberate with each tone.

The mist shifted, twisting as if caught between two competing masters. The sense of division she had instilled in the world was already fading, but in its place was a different kind of draining strength now, a devouring hunger that exceeded the strength of principles and was able to compete directly with the yang strength in her blood and bones.

-Myriad Mists Hydra, one of the old voices hissed.

-Sky Seizing Neonate, another, more sibilant tone snarled, hate dripping from it.

“You… have… the key…” the shadowy presence sang, almost dreamy now. “Your blood… is… old… So… old… so sweet…”

-Not good? she guessed.

-Time breeds many ills, the mountain turtle muttered.

-Many kin were chained by those sorcerers.

-Not their kin, their arts, another snarled.

Memories shimmered, overlapping, filling in context as she pulled out the cores of the pair of Immortal realm serpents they had slain before meeting up with the Ur’Inan. She had held both of them in the end, because neither Juni nor Chunhua had anywhere close to the capacity to use them. She wasn’t confident she did either, but now she was going to need a lot of qi, both to fuel her transformation and then to sustain any kind of reasonable defence against whatever was coming.

The scenes in her mind showed the edges of how those kith and kin of theirs had been claimed. None remained within the auspice of the memories themselves, except for a lucky few who had escaped or died before fully being captured, but that showed her enough to see the path by which it was achieved. Adults were chained using the means the orcs had tried with her, as she had suspected. Worn down and oppressed then captured with Orichalum and Illdrium, or other ancient materials. Afterwards they had been refined and consumed, bound as totems and their offspring imprinted from birth with something approaching the symbol in her own minds eye, but intended to ‘Shape’, giving control to the wielder.

The cost, simply put though, was that in reshaping that connection, their past was cut off. They were powerful, terrible beings, but the wellspring of their blood inheritance was severed unless they could seize it back… and so had many other kinds of beast been doomed and many strange creatures arisen from the breeding pits of those ancient cities, made, among others, by the creators of the Ur peoples themselves.

After absorbing those two, she also took every other core in her talisman and Juni’s, dumping them directly into her dantian along with all the remaining spirit herbs and other cultivation resources they possessed between them. As the sense of impending crisis approached, she let her body properly shift.

She hadn’t transformed fully since the breakthrough and it was a weird sensation, more like qi armour flowing out of her, and becoming a new body, which was her. Her physical form was massive as well, close to thirty metres long. Her soul was still human… normal-shaped, residing within it, a bit like a formation centre she realised. Again, a very strange and not entirely pleasant feeling, certainly when compared to how easy it had been to shift and work with the half-serpent female form.

Fortunately, the memories took up the slack as the final aspects of the transformation, the colour of her body, took hold. The armour that clad her shifted between black-red iridescence, tinted with gold, while the lesser scales of her form shimmered like light refracting through raindrops. By comparison, her previous transformation had been quite drab, she felt, whereas this reminded her rather of bird plumage…

-Birds came from us… one of the older memories pointed out, giggling. Rather than say that, it is birds that are reminiscent of us.

Lifting herself up, she considered her body in detail, and the mist around her. The main reason to transform, beyond the question of using the words, was to negate the potential drain that the clouds were generating.

-No wonder that damned orc thought that the Okeanides would not help much. If Udrasa had this old monster to help them squat here, this land is actually perfect for them.

The yang blood surged, pushing back against the devouring strength, just about able to hold her ground… thanks in part, she realised, to her principle and the mantra, which was still usable, but now focused much more on her Nascent Soul.

She looked around, sweeping out her soul sense, and nearly spat blood, because while the ‘Neonate’ or maybe ‘Hydra’ was nearby, her instincts, enhanced with the memories, suggested that she had actually spooked it with the change in her strength, giving it second thoughts.

“…”

“I see… I see… This is outside expectations… outside expectations…”

A shadow emerged out of the mists, near the edge of the town, a figure standing amid it, a pale splash of yellowish grey amid the swirling maelstrom of devouring cloud. It wore a long, gossamer-like robe in off yellow and a dark golden mask in the form of a smiling old man. Over that, there was a bright yellow hood and veil, emblazoned with the symbol for Udrasa in bloody red.

-Just a shadow, made of vapour and perception, a memory sneered.

“You must be Sharvasus,” she called out.

“…”

“At least that acolyte’s death means I need not bother to introduce myself,” the robed figure chuckled, seeming amused if anything. “I expected a child who got lucky with some old serpent or a strange core… You, however, are quite something else…”

“So people keep telling me,” she sneered, projecting her words with soul sense. “Most of them are dead it has to be said.”

“…”

After a moment’s pause, the old orc laughed, rather disturbingly, at her comment. The shadow in the mist swirled and moved this way and that, feeding her half a dozen confusing signatures and making her sigh inwardly.

Taking note of where the ships were, which were now retreating back up the waterway, away from the ruins of Umaja, and where Chunhua and the Ur’Inan were on the far side of the town, fighting various parties there and the serpent swarm, she focused her qi and longevity according to the manner the memories suggested and then fed her mantra and her principle into it as well.

“Day Break”

The roar didn’t simply shake the swamp, she knew. Perhaps it shook the whole plain. The sky warped and shifted, the mists parting to allow blazing sunlight to wash down over everything. The town around her spontaneously combusted, everything within a mile of her wreathed in a shimmering heat mirage. Buildings burned, corpses turned to ash, the ground and quite a few nearby buildings became coated in a sheet of glass and serpents vanished into dissociated qi.

The backlash made her vomit blood, even as a huge chunk of her longevity melted away and the soul strength in the immortal cores crumbled. It did, however, do exactly what she needed it to, revealing a 50 metre long, three-headed serpent on the edge of Umaja with a somewhat shocked figure in a smoking yellow robe stood on the middle head.

Opening her mouth, she roared again.

“ABSORB”

All the Yang strength in the surroundings flowed towards her as she pulled herself up onto the wall, already focusing on the words the memories provided, even as her mantra shifted again and the rage within her also fed into her intent.

“Bright Burn”

Given form, they coalesced a sheet of blazing Yang fire in front of her that split earth and sky like a curtain.

{GREAT GATE OF UM’AJAH!}

The golden-robed figure roared and the swamp itself rolled up to block the blazing wave of yang death before it could consume everything in its path.

The serpent’s three heads all ducked behind the barrier, even as she caught a hint of its body shaking… Her intuition told her that it was calling upon its innate strength even before the maelstrom of turbid, dark water rose out of the steaming swamp all around Umaja.

“These things… Abzu Devours!”

Its sibilant hiss infused the collision of Yin and Yang strength with a terrible sense of rending distortion that turned what was already a rather unpleasant corrosive pall of mist drenching everything into a landscape-scouring gyre. The buildings around her that had not been coated with glass warped and hissed, leaving behind strange imprints as their material fabric was consumed by the conflicting energies.

It clawed at her body, tearing at the yang strength surging around her, forcing her to push more qi into her surroundings as space itself began to corrode around her. The serpent itself transformed into a shadow within the land-searing miasma and, with a sneering hiss, surged forward, beginning its own attack in earnest.