Title: lost seasons
Characters: Thundering Rhino, Soothsayer, Boss Wolf, Shen
Summary: It's when he stops seeing the colour in his art does he first suspect that there really is no going back.
A royal headpiece upon the brow of Blazemane, without whom I would not have been able to get this piece up so quickly. I win, buddy. Enjoy the story.
i . Spring
The night was deep and warm as he walked through the city gates, inclining his head as the guards murmured their greetings. It was already approaching midnight and Gongmen City had only just quietened down as its last civilian retired to sleep, a benighted city finally put to bed. The shops had been shuttered up, houses locked tight as drums, and the night's watch mobilised to patrol the streets. Just outside the city, Thundering Rhino looked above him contemplatively, regarding the large horned moon holding still in the sky amid a spangle of shattered light. The day he had been appointed leader of the Kung Fu Council, his suzerain had called him up to the throne room at the top of the Tower of Sacred Flame to announce the news. That night had been very much like this one and he had looked from the balcony over the city, watching the mazing streets and masonry houses and zinc rooftops, all covered in a thin moonlit soak from the sky.
He swept up his stormcoloured robes about his stoutly body and walked on. There were steps carved into a talus leading up a steep barrow and he began to climb them, lighting his way with a lantern. At the top there was a stone pavilion and he went inside with the lantern held aloft. Illuminated only with the light of a number of tallow candles, the pavilion was a temple that housed the ancestral tablets of the royal peacock family and there were seventy-three tablets in all, each one carved out of smooth black onyx and inscribed in gold with the epithets and names of all those who had come before his lord and the young master, and so polished that you could see yourself in each one of them like a perfect daguerreotype.
Thundering Rhino hung up the lantern on a hook and walked into the centre of the room where the main censer was kept. He stopped. There was someone else already seated there on a thin cushion with his head held low and his hands tucked in the sleeves of his mandarin robes.
"Master," Thundering Rhino said.
Shifu turned around and nodded. "Master," he replied politely.
"It is good to see you."
"And you."
"I hadn't known that you were coming here as well, Shifu. I would have asked you to come with me if you'd said so."
He shook his head. "I apologise. I should have mentioned it." Shifu gestured at the unoccupied cushion to his right. "Please."
"Thank you." Thundering Rhino slid joss sticks from a niche in the wall and lit them over a candle. He bowed once with his eyes closed and the smoking sticks pressed between his palms and he said a short prayer. Then he set them in the bronze censer and took a seat next to Shifu, watching the thin spires of smoke rise from the lip of the censer. The fragrance of incense calmed him and helped him clear his mind of doubt. Much had troubled him in recent weeks and Thundering Rhino found himself coming to the temple every other night to find some semblance of peace. It was there that he would revive his faith and unravel his problems like a tailor picking at unsatisfactory seams, and come to terms with the things he had done that he shouldn't have, and the things that he should have but did not. He wondered if Shifu had come to the temple for the same reason.
"Why are you here, Shifu?"
He smiled. "Paying my respects, Thundering Rhino. The living have enough, far more than they deserve. And you?"
"The same."
They sat together for a few minutes in silence. Around them the onyx slabs were arranged in concentric circles, the tablets representing antecedents older and more distinguished the further away they were. Copper cressets with wicks set in petroleum burned silently from the rafters. The stone guardians of the royal family were perched atop columns of dark granite, gazing down at them severely with visages held stern and inexpressive, eternal watchers of both the living and the dead.
"You'll be headed back to the Valley tomorrow?" Thundering Rhino asked.
"First boat out. I wish to return by sundown."
"I pray you have a safe journey home."
"And I, for you as well." Shifu's eyes found the ends of Thundering Rhino's joss sticks, which were aglow with a throbbing orange like the light of miniature sunsets and issuing fingers of smoke in steady streams as they simmered fixedly in the half-light. "What else do you pray for, Thundering Rhino?" he murmured.
Thundering Rhino tilted his head up to gaze at the largest tablet. It was the largest one at the very back of the pavilion and had upon it the name of the first peacock king, a figure immortalised in the pantheons of Chinese history and children's bedtime stories, the first person to ever light up the skies of China. A noble leader by any standard, and a monarch loved by his subjects and people for his benevolence. "Guidance," Thundering Rhino said. "And courage."
"Do you fear that you have lost your way, Master?"
Not his way, no. He thought about the young prince in his charge and couldn't bear to continue looking at the tablet, couldn't look at any of them. Seated on the floor, he felt small before so many of his lord's ancestors, the family line he had sworn his life to when he'd become a kung-fu master two years ago. He remembered his liege, so worried and worn thin by the affairs of his kingdom and his son, struck down in a bout of ill health. The prince, his young master, so austere and insensate for one his age, who looked at everyone with eyes heavier than any Thundering Rhino had seen. And his lady, who came to him distraught and crying one fierce winter night, asking him what she should do. My lord, he thought. Oh, my lord.
Thundering Rhino lifted his face so that he could see the same thing that Shifu was seeing: his offering, smoking in a pit of ashes like the remains of a house razed to the ground. He sighed and bowed again, a low genuflection of penitence that he'd already managed to perfect. "Don't we all?" he said.
.
(guidance, courage, and forgiveness)
-x-x-x-
ii. Summer
The needles slip in her grasp and the pointed end of one of them slides past her hard hooves, pricking the flesh underneath. She sucks a rapid breath in and and shakes her head at her carelessness, lifting her hoof up to inspect it. There is blood beading out from an small puncture, but it doesn't seem like anything that a fivespice and wolfberry infusion cannot handle.
The Soothsayer sighs and lays the crochet on the table, picking up a satin handkerchief to blot up the blood. Her room in the palace is large and always full of air, with a bed and a wardrobe and a central pit for lighting fires. She smells hot wax and lavender, and ristras of dried herbs hang from the low ceiling. There is a cup of oolong that she brewed only an hour ago cooling on the table next to her chair, and she takes a sip of the tea. Lukewarm. She must remember next time to keep a burner in her chambers. The lord probably would not approve of her subjecting the royal chinaware to prophetic flames hot enough to crack solid bone. It certainly was the case for when she'd developed a strange craving for silken robes a while back.
Now it is very nearly the afternoon, judging by the position of the sun in the sky, and she basks in it. As a girl, she'd enjoyed the best summers that the province had to offer and seen her fair share of harvest moons, of months of plenty and years of hardship. It was there in the city that she first learned to read the skies and divine by starlight, where by sheer accident she'd invoked her first vision and saved a life. Hierophants were and still are far and few between, so naturally word of her abilities got around quickly to the royal family of Gongmen City. Her lord was only just older than Shen when she'd first come into the service of the noble house of the peacock and she'd been there for him through the years. She carries memories of him fondly with her — how he'd beg her to hide him from his father so as to skip chemistry lessons, his first and last heartbreak, chestnuts smashed open on courtyard stone all the way from the top floor of the palace, a balcony bed she ordered to be carpentered specially for him as he loved the stars more than anything else in the world.
And his son, the boy, Shen — she cares for him as much as she did his father, perhaps more by virtue of the fact that she had been given both honours of naming him (Shen, the divine one) and the title of godmother. She was the one who scolded and washed him when he came home sulking and muddy all over, who held his nose when he refused to eat his greens, who sang to him in his sleep. It isn't foolish sentiment that keeps her seeing so much of his father in him, and never mind the nasty rumours and mysterious fires and unsettling reports from his school about him and the other students, because accidents do happen and children will be children —
But Shen isn't a child anymore; of all people she knows this best. He is now a brooding youth of fourteen years, cagey and slender as a knife. He takes to skulking about the seldom-used corridors of the palace at unpredictable hours of the day, pale and wispy as he shuffles past like a ghost. Unlike his father he maintains ascetic studiousness, spending more time in his family's laboratories than he does anywhere else in the palace. Tacit and speaking only when spoken to, he always gives replies consisting of the single word, three if only to ask to be left alone. She has her suspicions but doesn't ask anyone for confirmation, and while no one says anything of it, enough observations elide for her to infer that he isn't speaking to his parents either.
She comes across him sometimes, seated against a window frame in the higher levels of the palace, light coppering his milk-white face as he stares down the setting sun, the sky several tinctures of rose and gold. Born white as mountain snow, his colours evolve variably under different kinds of light, a feature of his that she's always observed with a maternal reverence. He is coral and rufescent by fire, creamy and buttercup yellow by the afternoon sun in spring. He turns to alabaster in the lightless evening, and infinite shades of grey when it rains. In the dark his eyes capture even the slightest bit of illumination and glimmer in kind, red and antiquarian and impossible to ignore.
By the window he blinks slowly and ponderously, as if assembling his thoughts to fathom the world. If he is ever aware that she is watching, he says nothing. Most of the time she leaves him be, because Shen has always enjoyed his privacy, but on one occasion she had approached him and asked, "What do sunsets make you think of, Shen?"
Even then he didn't turn around as he shifted ever so slightly, his aquiline head drooping against the window frame like a phototroph locked away in a cave. "Endings,' he replied, and then he said no more.
The answer had stirred a small feeling of discomfort within her as she walked away from him, a stray shiver that crept under her skin for the rest of that day, erupting afresh whenever she subsequently sees him at the same window in the same seat with the same forlorn eyes and tiny hands. Nowadays he still frequents the window but has been migrating to the balcony, a change that she knows shouldn't be significant but she can't help but take note of. You can see more of the sky from there, and she's not sure if it's for the better. The way he had said it, endings, so controlled and sure down to the last sibilant consonant — she tries not to think about what it could mean or the possible implications corroborated by the signs she has been seeing, ill omens spelt out in smoke letters and a serrying of tea leaves. Her oracle ossuary, a hundred different bones painted with cinnabar characters, all telling the same story that she relays to no one. Precognition is hardly an exact science, growing exponentially foggier as the scope of divination transcends decades, and she's been wrong about these things before. All she can do for now is hope the same for Shen.
The Soothsayer tugs at her goatee sagely and shivers, looking out the window at the tiring blue blaze of sky stretched above, wonders if he is looking up at it too. There's a storm brewing. She can feel it aching deep in her own ancient bones.
-x-x-x-
iii. Autumn
An introduction? Me? Oh, if you insist…
The name's Boss Wolf. I don't even know how I got that name, but yeah, that's it. People call me that, even though I'm not the actual boss. In some ways I am a boss — I lead the pack on hunts, I get the kills done, I earn my own keep, I make sure everyone's fed and clothed and that no one goes hungry. Anything that needs addressing comes to me. If there's a problem here or anywhere, I make it disappear one way or another. I've got my subordinates and soldiers and orders, and when I howl, my word is absolute. I am the one who takes charge, and I am the law.
Oh, yes, I am a boss. But I'm not the boss around here.
I'll tell you a little secret about wolf packs — the alpha is everything. In a pack, you've got the omegas and lotas and zetas who are the lowest-ranked, gets the leftovers, and are generally more expendable than anyone else. Then come the epsilons, deltas and gammas; these wolves are slightly higher up the chain and have more authority. You wouldn't be adverse to sending them out to head more important missions like scouting out an enemy territory or dogging a tracked target. Two of my lieutenants are gamma wolves I handpicked myself.
Then come the beta, the second-in-command. Like the alpha, there's only one beta wolf in any one pack. When the alpha isn't around, the beta is the de facto leader of the pack and assumes command. He or she is the alpha's right hand and disseminates orders whenever the alpha gives them, and ensures that they are always followed up on. So, the beta tends to be very bold and forceful in nature, unyielding in character, and unquestioningly loyal.
Sounds a lot like me, doesn't it? Yeah. Figured it out yet? I'm the beta wolf. I could never be an alpha. The alpha wolf has to be more than just strong or authoritative. If you can get people to listen to you, so what? If you make fouled-up plans or stupid command decisions then you may as well go be a peddler or a trader. If you're strong, sure. Tell that to snare traps and spike pits and midnight ambushes in the dark. It's more than that. The alpha has to be astute, sure, and most of all capable of protecting everyone in the family. When all else fails, family is the only thing we've got left.
Here's another secret — what do you think happens when you lose the alpha?
It's a lot more complicated than one might think. Most assume that there's a chain of succession, that once the alpha's gone, the beta wolf rises to the top of the pack and becomes the alpha. Ha. We're not royalty. You could say the exact opposite, as a matter of fact. Remember what I said? An alpha can be a beta, but a beta can never really be a true alpha. It doesn't work like that. It's all nice and dandy to think that if you do your homework and practice being a strategist then an omega can become an alpha over time, but it never happens in reality. Leaders are born, not made, or else just about anyone would be an alpha.
It was my fault. We'd had the same alpha for years, during the glory days of our pack. Bright young lass, she was, even if I never admitted it. Pretty and brash, with a sweet face and a beautiful mind and a dangerous smile. We had such escapades, such victories under her command. My gammas tell me sometimes that it wasn't my fault, but I can see it in their eyes. I can see it in mine. We all know who was to blame that day. After all, it's the job of the beta to protect the alpha.
When there's an opening, we howl. Not in despair or sorrow or anything like that, but to recruit lone wolves, to replace the fallen member as soon as we can. Especially when it's an alpha you're looking for. The longer a pack takes to find an alpha wolf, the more likely it will fall apart, or worse, become prey to stronger, complete wolf packs seeking to annex territory. The beta can plug the gap for a short period of time, but time runs out fast where lifeblood is in the equation.
Alpha wolves are the hardest to find. Any lone wolf cunning or sly or acute enough to be an alpha wolf probably already is one in some other pack. And even though the chances are slim, sometimes you install an alpha wolf who secretly bats for the other team and your pack gets shredded from the inside. That's not cruel, don't get me wrong. That's survival. It's someone else who loves their family enough to throw themselves to the enemy. To be honest, I'd do the same thing to a rival pack if I were ever given the chance.
I don't know how I managed to keep it together for so long. Pure dumb luck, I imagine. Some scraps here and there, and the slow expiration of loyalty.
He came to us at the turn of summer one year. We'd been calling for months already; I imagine he heard us in the mountains. Wasn't what we expected to find. Even I laughed when I first saw him. We called for an alpha wolf to come and lead us, not some sickly peacock princeling.
It's hard to think of him as sickly when he's on top of you, pressing the blade of a guan dao against your throat. He was fast, much faster than any wolf could hope to be, and deathly strong. Then he spoke. No bargain or proposal or petition, just a clean offer. If you want to live, he said, follow me. Then he got up and walked back the way he had come.
If it were anyone else I would've ignored it. Who wouldn't? Just some punk prince trying to play an adult's game, who got a bit too bold for his feathers. And yet, at the end of that day, we had ourselves a new alpha. Lord Shen, regnant and heir apparent to the Gongmen City throne, was our leader.
You'd ask why we would name him alpha, someone who wasn't even a wolf! It's difficult to explain. There was something that day. You could smell it on him as he stood and breathed, powerful and calculative and silent. Those eyes like none other — cold as metal and angry as a wildfire.
They were the eyes of someone who could never belong. And what were we all but a sad little gang of misfits when he found us?
Well. Better head back to camp and throw another log on the fire. Winter is coming, and best we keep the youngins' warm for when it arrives.
-x-x-x-
iv. Winter
It begins, he knows, as a gradual, impalpable sublimation of the things he used to hold dear, warping into unfamiliarity the way magicians do it with smoke and mirrors: a memory from his childhood of acid-green explosions and a heavy odour of sulphur that clings to his clothes and never washes out, a spring day in the courtyard where he sinks a blade into a straw opponent, his palsied hands guided by strong grey ones, whispers at the doorway in the candlelight while he keeps still, feigning sleeping. He tries his hardest to efface those memories, thinking sal ammoniac and meal powder and finely divided manganese and aphronitrum and a hundred other reagents that he's committed to memory but can't seem to place in the right order while everything else bubbles and bubbles and bubbles —
A noxious leaden slime effervesces out of a ceramic crucible, spitting malevolently, and then the world turns to white noise; concussion and a searing heat and then he becomes filled with light bright enough to see the hollowness of the bones in his own outstretched wing.
They will find him in the destroyed pyrotechnics laboratory afterwards huddled in a corner, smoking and blackened and bleeding from his ears. He will not get up and will not say anything, rocking back and forth in a vacuum, nursing his burnt feet and whimpering piteously with eyes wide and arcane and unseeing as river stones. The Soothsayer arrives minutes after, kneeling down to tend to him, and it is only then that he will lift his head and speak. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
It's when he stops seeing the colour in his art does he first suspect that there really is no going back.
(pull back the curtain at the end of the show, and nothing is as it was)
.
The fires, they burn, and how these things change. To grief and ashes and the falling stars in the eastern skies. He stumbles out into the balcony in his night robes, gasping for breath, and he rests his damp forehead on the wooden railing. He had sweated in his sleep in spite of the cold. With a shrug he shucks off his clothing and steps onto the balustrade in his undergarments, flaring his train out as if to fly away into the night electric. A chilly wind rustles his sticky feathers, sending prickles down his back as he gazes at the city below.
Completely bare, Shen's feathered chest is almost silver in the moonlight. He preens gently, with a lapidarist's precision and a governess's care, until there isn't a single vane out of place. Then he preens again. And again. And again. Then he just stands there with his head held skyward, a marble beauty of avian origin.
Since the accident, he has been sleeping badly. He hasn't told anyone about the dreams, not just yet, because the last thing his father needs is another shove to send him reeling off the edge. The codger's been diagnosed with exhaustion for the sixth time that year; doesn't he know when it's time to take a break? His mother's no better with her fussing and endless worrying, like Shen is still a child to be coddled and patronised. They don't speak much nowadays, as just the sight of her makes his lips stiffen, even more so for his father where Shen has to swallow an awful bitterness down whenever they're in the same room.
And no one else dreams the dreams that he does. Plains of brimstone and soot-filled calderas and a bloodred meridian running full circle through a scattering of cured bones. Of snarling flies and ruined kingdoms, of fighting and warring and carnage. The screaming, and the voices. He holds his head tight in his hands and cannot keep the tears back, a sob catching in his throat as he steps down into the safety of his palace and crosses the room in one torpid motion to collapse into a chair.
.
He doesn't sleep for three days and three nights. On the fourth day, he turns eighteen years of age.
.
Ten years into exile and they're still on the move, taking up residence where residence would be given to people of their number and background. Mostly they are treated with a wordless deference bordering on nonchalance by other creedless vagabonds too poor in their own way to be judging their peers. When he gets far enough from Gongmen such that no one can place a name to his face or asks too many questions, Shen starts to spearhead the journey. He improvises a rudimentary black powder mixture and sells the formula to the leader of a rhinoceros army that guards a prison somewhere in the Mongolian mountain ranges of Tavan Bogd. With a wolf pack at his call, mercenary work is common, assassinations a rarity but not unheard of. They move northward across China and leave an indiscernible trail of blood in their wake, stopping infrequently and harbouring even less.
He thinks about home often and beats himself down whenever such thoughts arise. Not home, at least not anymore. He keeps these sentiments to himself and only speaks to Boss Wolf when absolutely necessary, preferring not to talk at all if possible. Instead he fills his head with constructs of what it will be like when he makes his return, every one different and more spoiled with vengeance than the last. The city gates blown open, the palace walls torn down, bad blood in the water, a smell of carbon in the air. He twists a dagger at the leery moon as if to curse the gods and drags his guan dao in the dirt where he treads, marking out burial sites for their terricolous occupants. Months of experimenting and self-inflicted burns later and he manages to synthesise two kinds of propellant that punch through solid rock with no difficulty.
On a nameless winter night twenty-three years denied he sits outside on the steps to the small foundry that he now owns, an ornate pine box cradled in his lap. He opens it and delicately removes the headpiece inside with both hands, turning it and studying it by the soft phosphorescence of his chemical lamp. It is a fine accessory with narrow pale tubes for slotting head feathers, crafted from white jade and ivory and decorated with carnelian stones, accompanied by a gold pin to slide home and fasten in place on the head of the crown prince. His father's, once, and his grandfather's before that.
Now his, and his alone. It's too small to fit him now, and besides, he'd never allow it. He's always hated the damned thing, so tight and obscenely uncomfortable to wear, and yet he finds himself lifting it to the crown of his head, his breath stilled, and as expected, he cannot bring himself to don it once again. Bygone days and lost seasons of his youth, the times that he cannot return to or reproduce even if he wished it to be so, all of it rolling back in an inexorable flood through this conduit, this artifact in his hands, paradoxically so full of meaning and yet meaningless to him, and when he twists the headpiece sharply and cuts his fingers on its edges, the pain of it finally reminds him to breathe.
He exhales long and profoundly with his breath taking shape before him, and in one palm he contains it, taking care not to taint any of its surfaces with his blood, wishing for the painlessness of insouciance, atonic. With his burning eyes held shut and his withered heart atremble as he lowers it back into cerise velvet with shaking hands, he replaces the lid, clenches his hands in an implacable knot over the sigil stained into the wood and the slow seep of blood through his knuckles, and nothing is forgiven.
A/N:
— It would seem that I'm stuck with a recurring motif with regards to titles now; I blame Think Of Me for being such a dastardly lovely song, of which I now have no less than twenty different versions of on my iPod in five languages. The secondary title's because I'm physically incapable of discarding a good (pretentious? pompous? take your pick) title, and also as an obscure reference to the aforementioned composition.
— This was planned out as a writing experiment to use as many different narrative styles as possible in a single piece of work; for this attempt I have chosen third-person past tense for the first section, third-person mixed tense for the second, first-person mixed tense for the third, and third-person present tense for the fourth. Accusations of cheating here and there with tenses in the first and last section, as with much reason as they may arise, will be dutifully expunged.
— Special thanks to Hymenocallis Caribaea for solving my formatting problems here.
— Wasn't sure to what extent Gongmen City would be allowed to exercise sovereignty in canon, but I think it's not too far off to base the political structure of the KFP verse on ancient China where, more often than not, feudalism was the norm, hence, 'suzerain'. I'll leap at any reason to avoid having to refer to Shen's father as 'the feudal lord of Gongmen'. What a mouthful!
— A method of pyromantic divination in ancient China was to carve or write script on pieces of tortoiseshell or ox scapulae and then subject the bone to intense heat. Diviners studied the cracks that formed and wrote their interpretations on the bone itself. It is thought that Chinese farmers in the 19th century were the first people to unearth oracle bones dating back to the Shang Dynasty, most of which were either reburied or ground up and prescribed as traditional Chinese remedies for ailments like malaria.
— The royal headpiece bit is based on an actual practice that was carried out by the emperor during the Han Dynasty, where the heir apparent would wear a headpiece through his topknot to signify that he was the next-in-line to the throne.
— Nope, still using anachronistic descriptors.
— Thanks for reading!