A month before Xueyu proposed Laike come to the Tian family complex, Jiling posed the young disciple a riddle at the tail end of prayers:

“Laike,” she said. “Orphan of the deluge, my castaway child of the endless sword, tell me: if you stand at the epicenter of a flood spirit’s anguish, how do you survive?”

At the time, Laike thought that the priestess had mixed him up with another of his orphan brethren, thought that maybe she gave him credit for abilities he did not have. Perhaps she thought he was an orphan of a flood long past—Laike certainly didn’t know his own origin story. Respectfully, he’d bowed his head and pondered the question, resting his mind on it in the quiet of the catacombs before the living Buddha, before the endless walls of retronascent pearl hearts collected from the dead.

“I—”

“Shh,” she hushed him then, she hushed him the next time he tried to answer her, hushed him every time he brought the riddle up again. “Not too quick. Just think.”

Before they’d set off this morning, Jiling took Laike by both hands, clasped against the Heart of the Mountain embedded in her chest, and looked up fondly at her disciple about to take on the task she’d prepared his mind for. “Laike,” she said. “Do you know how to survive the epicenter of a flood spirit’s anguish?”

He didn’t answer her. He simply nodded. She wasn’t interested in the specifics: he knew this by now. Still, he didn’t understand which flood she spoke of—

at least not until he sat across a low table from Tian Yuhui, a cup of fragrant osmanthus oolong curling its steam up to the aether.

Since arriving, the switch of a boy hardly said a word, brows knit in concentration with his hazel eyes low, like he was listening to a melody sung across mountains, across rivers, across years, head tilted like he could hear the words if he cleared his mind. Even when Yuhui’s parents protested any alteration to their middle child’s treatments, Xueyu’s favourite disciple remained placid, unmoving; the doubt didn’t phase him at all. Jiling insisted upon sitting with the Tian family patriarch and his wife while they sent the boys away.

“Trust,” she assured them as the two boys left. “I’ve prepared him for this.”

Yuhui’s room was at the end of a hallway that saw little of the sun, tucked behind the shifting of a silent door shut behind them. The sparseness of his personal items spoke little of his family’s status—what he did have was of the best quality, the finest clothes and luxurious furniture, silks woven through with shimmering threads, a mountain of comfort in meticulously arranged bed linens. Even the cushions upon which they knelt were exquisite, utilitarian purpose masked beneath comfort’s splendor.

In his own space, the Tian’s middle child was more relaxed. He was less formal, with an easier posture; he was in the only place he ever really felt fully comfortable and that alone negated the nervousness typically reserved for meeting someone new. Sitting alongside the ceremonial sprawl of tea items scattered between them was a small vase. It was a squat thing, petite and colored like the umber blood of the earth sewn through with darker striations. A wide mouth supported the weight of a bloom that had yet to open. A single leaf hung off the clipping’s stem like an emerald platter.

Yuhui looked up from the bud and leaned forward, resting his cheek and chin in an open palm. Quietly watching the boy was its own reward, but knowing him would be much better. Xiaoxu’s naysaying rang in the back of his younger brother’s skull with tone of a curse, a persistent reminder of impossibility.

“So… are you a priest?” Yu turned into his hand, chin tilted, wide eyes curious.

“Kind of. Not really. I’m…” Laike’s answers were winding. Was he a priest? Was he going to be a priest? In a sense, he was, maybe he would be—but everything in that shadowmarked boy’s life was more complicated than yes or no, wrong or right, black or white. “I train with both Swordmaster Xueyu and Jiling of the Nascent Swarm.”

His eyes only ever flickered across Yuhui’s face, temporarily strayed up to the boy considered his superior by birth. He sat rigid in direct contrast to the other’s relaxed posture, still trying to gage exactly what he was meant to do here. Softly, he continued, words careful as he picked up his tea. “My mistress didn’t tell me what she treats you for, she didn’t tell me what she does for you—so I’m meant to figure it out myself.” Finally, Lai looked up, a little more sure of himself now that he’d begun to speak. So often that boy found himself without anything to say because he was listening too intently, a testament to his blood-blessed master’s teachings.

“Oh. How do you intend to figure it out, then?” Yuhui’s question had the underpinnings of a tease. He didn’t mean it so much, this was simply how he’d been made: slightly mouthy, a little testy. Surely he wasn’t supposed to just give himself away, so he didn’t offer. Rather, the young prince met his guest’s eyes when they were given so freely, amorous whim softening his gaze formerly intensified by his quizzical dare. He didn’t know how he felt about being treated like an experiment. He’d unpack that later—for now, he had the rest of the day in that dark-dressed boy’s company and he wasn’t about to waste it.

There was a familiar feeling to the room they found themselves in, something that tugged at Laike’s clothes from the darkest corners of the royal boy’s personal space, whispered from a winter long past. The vagaries overlapped, impeding their own silent sound, fought for dominance in whisperwind disorder, bedlam in the minimal volume of haunted phrase. He felt it magnified around Yuhui, entropy’s aura strongest in a wide circle surrounding the puzzle he was meant to solve.

“I guess I’ll have to watch you,” the lowborn boy remarked, setting his tea down with purpose at the edge of the table. “And we can talk—until I figure out what I can do for you.”

if you stand at the epicenter of a flood spirit’s anguish, how do you survive?

He held his mistress’ question in his mind when he looked up and let the teacup go.

The cup fell sideways in a nonsensically shifted axis of gravity, hurtling itself toward a far wall and shattering in a mess of music and shards, liquid dripping ceilingward in a sick approximation of gravity unnatural to all sense. His family was well beyond reprimanding him for things that wound up destroyed simply because he occupied the same room as them, but Yuhui still frowned in response.

“Someone will come clean that up later,” he said, exhaustion evident in his well-practiced sigh. Yu liked to think the problem wasn’t him; he liked to believe the strange issue surrounding him was a construct of some atmospheric anomaly stubbornly attached to his heels. Time and time again this notion was proven wrong. The boy was always reminded: he was the constant, he was the one needing treatment, a haunted glassbody who snubbed most offers of friendship because he knew they’d just fall apart in a rift of fear. “Anyway: this is why none of my teacups match. After three sets, my mother said no more.”

Yuhui leaned back on his hands. “Do they let you have hobbies at the mountain?”

“My hobbies are training,” Lai said blank, leaning forward just slightly, much more interested after witnessing the vortex of destruction surrounding his haunted companion. His attention was rapt, focus steadied on the boy he was tasked with decoding. “Does this happen to people around you too? Or just objects?”

That heedless boy always rushed in when others fled,

pressed harder when the wound hurt most.

Yuhui shrugged like it was anybody’s guess, shoulders lifted for a long moment. “Are you more willing to break one of my teacups than your own hand?”

“How do I break my hand on you?” Lai asked too quickly.

“Not sure.” Yu tilted his head, doubtful. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one figuring this out?”

“If you know an answer already, it’s a clue,” the shadowstalker replied tersely, dangerously close to a pout as he slouched just slightly. He tilted his head, looking down. “We can solve this together, can’t we?”

The young prince huffed a laugh, easily coming around to more straightforward answers now that he’d seen the pretty damage being obtuse caused.

“Alright, fine. The truth is that this affects everything.” Yuhui spoke gently, easily; a lifetime of trying to make sense of himself helped finetune the particulars of his speech. “Yeah, people get it. Objects get it. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, Laike. Sometimes time marches forward as expected—the laws of nature are in full effect and everything works as harmoniously as it should. Other times nothing makes sense. The world is upside down. I jump and crash into the floor. I fall and break an overhead light. When I was younger my writing teachers would scold me for composing nonsense, just writing down the most abstract collection of lines that meant absolutely nothing. I think they thought I was purposefully disobedient, but the reality is there was nothing I could ever do about it. I can’t help any of this.”

The orphan boy with his unwise manner nodded along, thinking briefly, considering what he was told, and still—

if you stand at the epicenter of a flood spirit’s anguish, how do you survive?

—ran through the background of his thoughts. In his rumination’s pause, Lai tapped on the table. When his strange eyes flit up once more, he smiled. “Will you write me a poem?”

“Sure.” Yuhui pushed himself up and stepped across the room to a low credenza to retrieve his writing utensils. He kneeled again before that boy cast like a shadow by the mountain and ran his hand quickly over a scrap of rice paper, brush pen spilling verses in his favorite shade of muted indigo.

The young prince recited the words as he wrote:

“The wind in your hair

swollen sea and sinking stone

I breathe back and forth

la, la, la, la, ah—”

Finished, he turned the sheet around and pushed it at Laike. The characters were nothing: peculiar dots and squiggles, shapes unspoken and tangents entirely contradictory to common comprehension.

Lai picked up the paper and observed it, sitting back a little as he shifted, one knee up to support his elbow. Distracted by his thoughts, he rubbed at his mouth.

if you stand at the epicenter of a flood spirit’s anguish, how do you survive?

To survive the floodwater, he would split the deluge and hide in the gap left by the obstacle.

With his amber eyes still caught on every dip and curve of Yuhui’s nonsense markings, Laike made a single innocent request:

“Take off your clothes.”