“Our Doom?” Gu Xiulan asked. She tried not to let her voice quaver as she wiped at her eyes. “Now you’re being dramatic Father.”

“I am, is that not our way?” he said, briefly cracking a smile. “But, it is a truth all the same. We are the blood of the phoenix, but only its embers. Our ambition is often greater than our means.”

Gu Xiulan ducked her head. She knew it was not something to speak of, but she knew there were members of the Gu clan who were not in the public eye. Marked as dead upon the family roles. Cousin Tai’s father was one such. She knew that they existed below, in the forges, supplementing the great sun crow which sat at the core. Bound for their own safety and that of the rest of the clan.

“Will I become like those beneath Father?”

Kneeling in the bloated black ash, with the heat shimmers of heat distortion still rippling in the idea, the thought forced its way to the surface. The burning pain in her arm, was that only a prelude?

Father grimaced, his grip on her shoulder briefly tightening. “...Only you may determine that Xiulan. But… You must burn for a reason, our ambition and drive cannot come to be its own purpose. Power does not exist for the sake of power. If I may teach you nothing else, then meditate on the meaning of those words.”

Power for the sake of power, it resonated, she hated to say. Enough strength, enough might, and one could do anything, be anything, have anything. It called to the flames, it sang in the lightning. It burned with the sun’s light. For who was mightier than the Zenith of the sun, who with might alone held back the world’s ruin.

“The temptation will never vanish,” her father said, as if reading her thoughts.

“Why are our arts this way?” Gu Xiulan asked quietly.

Her father was silent and then withdrew his hand. Gu Xiulan worried, for a moment, that she had been too impertinent. However, father straightened only to sit, unmindful of his fine robes spreading out in the dust. He sat down before her cross legged, and gestured for her to sit as well.

When she did, he spoke. “We speak of Gu Guiying as a hero, who steadfastly preserved the arts of the Lu through the Death of the Sun. This is truth, but not whole. In our vaults we hold her journals and know that she was a woman who had survived the ending of the world. She had been among the lowest who held a noble name. In that time, the Gu were glassmakers and metalworkers.”

Father looked around the training room, and she followed his eyes taking in the etchings and patterns in the dark metal. “Of the great Arts of the Purifying Sun we were given by the Lu clan, our distant forefathers, ours were not things of warriors. They could be used for such, in the same way a farmer’s reaping scythe might be made into a spear, but that was not their purpose.”

Gu Xiulan was silent, this was not common knowledge, not what she had been told in her lessons as a child.

Father met her eyes steadily. “In the world that was born in Cataclysm's wake, there was no law. Law had died with the sun. The Empire was far away and reeling. Gu Guiying took every scrap of lore, of art, of technique, of legitimacy which could be torn from the molten grounds which had been the Lu’s county manor. But, although it was a great trove for her and the other survivors. It was woefully incomplete. Scraps and grave goods and secrets peeled from scorched bones. This is the foundation of the Gu clan. It is true that we are of phoenix blood, but it is a far descent indeed.”

Like the sun crows they often raised and partnered with, far, far degenerated. She had known that they were lesser than their ancestors, but to have it stated so plainly hurt, left her feeling confused and muddled.

“But,” her father said sternly. “Do not believe that Gu Guiying and her sons were not heroes. Our founder survived in the madness that took the land, before the Guo and Han ended the water wars. Among swarms of bandits and warlords, she established this place, our Phoenixhome, gathered and protected the people, made a land where law once again existed. This, with repurposed and scavenged fire, the fallen blood of the sun. To understand this is a different pride than what must be built to face the lords of the wider Empire, but it is not lesser.”

“Why tell me this?” Gu Xiulan asked.

“Because you have the potential and ambition for more,” Father said candidly. “I have told your sister Yanmei the same, but no others. Our Wildflower arts are dangerous, and they arise from the very desperate drive that you came to feel at the Sect. Your sister came upon it differently, but you Xiulan, walk the path of the Gu more purely. We gamble our lives on the fire, because in the beginning there was nothing else left which could be burned. Other ancestors have built safeguards, alternate paths, methods to slow the fires taking, but among us none have yet been able to rediscover that which allowed the Lu and the Purifying Sun to burn without fuel, to be reborn again and again from flame alone. This is what your Grandfather isolates himself in closed door cultivation to seek even now. It is, I hope, something you will seek rather than burning out.”

She swallowed. Her, seek answers that even Father and Grandfather could not find. It sounded absurd. But, Father wasn’t really asking her to do that, was he? No, what he was trying to say was that if she wished to grow and advance, to become something other than a living torch, that she would have to seek such answers. “The Way is difficult.”

“The world is cruel,” Father agreed. “So I hope that I may teach you, that you might avoid at least a few of my errors.”

“...I’m sure I will make my own,” Gu Xiulan said, lowering her head. “Father, I don’t think I can be as a son for you.”

It hurt to say, when she finally had the attention of her Father, before she had even begun any proper training. It hurt that she knew she was failing before she even began.

Her Father leaned back and frowned, closing his own eyes. They sat in silence for a time, as the air cooled and the ash under them began to lose its color.

“My expectations for you remain. It is not a simple thing for one of my cultivation to change,” Father said slowly. “But… one's Way must be their own. You are not a son, and I have maybe, been too eager in having a child to walk a path beside my own. I will endeavor to teach you all that I can regardless.

“I’m looking forward to it Father,” Gu Xiulan replied. She still didn’t know entirely where she was going but… that was something she would have to decide for herself