Chapter 1: May Not End Well (不得善终)
A fat orange sun set low and heavy over the village on the edge of the Mingdao Wood (冥道森林). A stark white light winked between the fields and the trees. Its lantern hung from the top of a blue tent, its light keeping the honored spirit of the funeral within from getting lost as it moved from this world to the next. The spirit's body laid in an open coffin behind a rickety bamboo screen and its paint-chipped scene of heavenly delights. The kin of the deceased had painted the corpse in pitch and tar, the cheapest and least conspicuous way of keeping the body from rotting during the month-long vigil between death and the funeral. The daily and nightly rains of Shenmen (神門) didn't wait for the living, much less the dead.
A priest in the blue and white robes of the Mother of Souls chanted in Tien into the painted side of the bamboo screen. Behind them, two white-robed figures, sticks of incense between their palms, stood amidst a crowd of empty metal folding chairs. Under the itchy white hoods and veils, the two shared the same snub nose, monolid black eyes, and sallowed skin. The older of the two was also the taller, their body thin and shrunken. The shorter was younger by twenty years, their form still hale and stout despite the black rings around their eyes.
An Daiwen (安代玟) shut their eyes for just a moment. The next thing they knew, their mother was giving them a bony elbow to the bicep. They jerked their head up with an involuntary snort, fingers fumbling to keep the incense from falling to the wet grass. The priest turned away from heaven to give them the stink-eye.
"Sorry," they mouthed.
The priest wasn't even looking. He stared past Daiwen and their mother and into the west, his chant dying mid-drone.
A tall, thin man in Shenmen's signature waterproof black silk led a muscular, hulking posse in similarly cut and dyed silk on a path through the grass to the funerary tent. The village bandit lord and his enforcers each carried a black umbrella with a razor-sharp tip and a single-edged blade sheathed in the bamboo handle. Some of them even carried foreign lanterns of gold and glass.
Their mother's lip twitched with the slightest snarl. She turned her back to the bandit lord and snapped at the priest.
"Please. Continue."
The lord met Daiwen's eyes and raised a shushing finger to his lips. He pointed at the priest, who hastily turned back to heaven and picked up the chant. Daiwen shivered with disgust.
The lord's posse filed into the row behind them while the lord himself plucked a stick of incense from the box the priest had left on a table of flowers. He stood beside their mother.
"Lovely evening, Mrs. An," he said, touching the unlit tip of his stick to hers.
Daiwen's mother held steady, but Daiwen's incense snapped in two between their palms.
"It's going to rain."
Daiwen recognized the growl under her mother's even tone. The lord only laughed.
"Hence the umbrellas."
"A poor time and place for business."
"Then we're lucky this is no longer a matter of business but ownership. Perhaps even-"
"I'll get you the money."
"That's what he said. And then he died. Poisoned mushrooms, was it? Which one of you did he ask to cook them? Or did that wet stiff eat them raw in the dark?"
Each word was a burning needle in Daiwen's ear. Their face set with their mother's stone. They leaned across their mother and spat on the lord's shiny black boot.
His knuckles cracked across their cheek. The force threw Daiwen back over the chairs and into the muscle posse.
"No, please!"
The enforcers caught Daiwen by the arms. They kicked away the chairs and shoved them to their knees. The tips of two umbrellas drew a bead of blood from either side of their neck. Daiwen's fury shrivelled away into throat-parching, gut-sucking fear. They would really kill Daiwen and maybe their mother, too.
Their mother's clenched fists trembled at her sides.
"Please, forgive my child. Daiwen didn't-didn't-"
The lord raised a shushing finger to his lips. He swung his umbrella up from the grass and held it aloft, its tip under the tent's lantern.
"Why punish the living when I could punish the dead?"
He jabbed the tip through the lantern. Oil splattered onto the grass. The guiding light guttered out. Daiwen screamed.
"Dad!"
An aura of bright purple exploded out from Daiwen in all directions. Time slowed. Their aura passed through grass and metal, wood and flesh, but everywhere it flared, it struck solid against the wall of the spirit world first knocking, then breaking. It sucked out the living energy like blood from a wound. Behind the screen of heaven, Daiwen's tar-painted father rose.
The tent shook with screams. The priest sprang back from the undead, crashing into the table of flowers as his fingers made the sign of the spiraling comet.
The muscle posse threw Daiwen to the ground. They fell back into a defensive line, umbrellas and swords pointed at the walking dead.
The bandit lord, his forearm wrapped around their mother's neck, laughed.
"You backforest bumpkins," he pointed his umbrella at Daiwen, "they're a necromancer. Now then, drop your daddy's corpse and we'll all pretend we didn't just see you commit a crime against both the gods and nature itself."
"N-no!" said the priest. "'Thou shalt not suffer a-'"
The lord shushed him. Half his enforcers turned their weapons on Daiwen. Daiwen swallowed hard over the knot in their throat but managed to squeak out the important words.
"Let my mom go."
The lord lifted his arm off their mother with a shrug. She ran obliviously past her undead husband to Daiwen's side, squeezing their clammy hand.
Daiwen, squeezing back, looked across at their father's stitched and tarred eyes before remembering they were sightless. Their gaze dropped to the bone pendant of a spiraling comet dangling from his throat. It was possible there was nothing left of him to send back to the Mother of Souls-that was Daiwen's fault.
"Sorry dad," they murmured.
The necromantic energy fled from his corpse. The break in the spirit world sealed shut before the body hit the floor. Daiwen blinked against the pricking in their eyes.
"Excellent! Now Mrs. An, if you'd be so kind as to come with me."
"What's going to happen to my child?"
The lord sighed.
"Bumpkins, you heard the priest."
"No-"
Daiwen staggered back, eyes darting from their mother to the lord to the brandished weapons. The enforcers stepped and climbed over the fallen chairs toward them. Daiwen tripped over their own stumbling feet, throwing their arms instinctively over their head and neck. Rather than steel through the skin, Daiwen felt only a shadow over their face.
Their mother stood between them and the muscle posse. She pointed a single finger at the lord.
"You have no idea what it means to suffer a necromancer. Let me show you."
The lord screamed. His skin stretched and distended over his joints. Spurs of bone ripped red through the soft tissues, splitting him open from the inside out.
The priest screamed. The enforcers screamed. Daiwen's mother screamed.
"Run!"
Daiwen screamed. Blood pounded in their ears. They ran.
They couldn't go back to the village. They ran into the woods. The forest was dark, but the people of Shenmen didn't need a light to guide them. Every tree and leaf was as clear and sharp as the sting of the branches whipping through Daiwen's robes.
Thunder rumbled. It was all the warning they got before the rain fell in icy torrents through the leaves of the trees, soaking Daiwen to the bone. They had to find shelter.
In the darkness between the trees, they glimpsed a wall of stone bricks riddled with cracks and woody vines slithering through holes. Daiwen ran to the wall, panting into the pelting rain. Wooden doors had rotted out of the wall's gateway, but the characters carved into the stone archway remained: Bashi Temple (耙石廟).
At the end of an overgrown walkway, the temple itself rose in stone tiers choked by a scaffold of trees, roots, and vines, but if it hadn't fallen after all these years, one more night of rain wouldn't make a different.
Daiwen stumbled up the walkway of roots and displaced stones and up the broken steps. With the temple doors rotted off their rusted hinges, the sound of falling rain followed Daiwen deep into the heart of the temple. A faint glow shone from a hall choked in the grip of tangled roots. As Daiwen moved toward the light, the raindrops faded into the deepening shadows.
A young priest with black hair woven into an intricate braid tended a crackling fire at the center of a broken mosaic. The warm glow of the flame cast all the colored stones in a single golden light and bleached the pattern from the priest's coarse robes. A long strand of heavy prayer beads each the size of an eye hung from their neck. They smiled at Daiwen.
"I won't ask your name if you won't ask mine."
"I won't," Daiwen stuttered between their chattering teeth.
"Don't catch your death. Come, sit by the fire."
Daiwen sat. They peeled off their funerary robes-wet, torn, and soiled. The fitted hemp shirt and pants they wore beneath had taken only slightly less of a beaten.
"You may have to take them all off."
Daiwen's face flushed scarlet, but they couldn't argue. Daily wear and underwear joined the robes. Their uncovered stomach growled rudely.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. If I had any food, I would offer it, but no one has made an offering in years."
Daiwen shuddered by the fire and curled their knees to their chest. The priest sat beside them, concern clear across their moon pale face.
"Shall I hold you?"
Under any other circumstances, Daiwen would've refused. The priest could only have asked to be polite, hospitable toward their ailing guest. But Daiwen had suffered one too many revelations today. They were a necromancer. Their mother was a necromancer. Their mother had killed a man. They had burned and defiled spirit energies to turn their father into a mindless undead abomination. Daiwen crawled into the priest's lap and rested the side of their face against the priest's sternum.
"I think I might've sinned."
"I can't offer you forgiveness."
The priest's words vibrated straight from their chest into Daiwen's back.
"What can you offer?" they asked, their voice fallen to a whisper.
The priest placed burning fingertips on Daiwen's bare shoulders. They pushed Daiwen's rain-sticky body just far enough off their chest to brush their lips against the dip between Daiwen's neck and collarbone.
-/-
See AO3 for explicit encounter continuation