He builds her world carefully; she is his obsession – even Dawn Star, his own daughter, is useless in her wake, and it is only right that the world be as obsessed with her as he is. He, who has toppled and bound the God of the Dead, he who will one day be Emperor, will bear and control that power properly.
She is his every waking moment, his every restless dream. Even if he were an ordinary man, he would build her world carefully, stone by stone, bar by bar, until she was wrapped in a gilded cage; since he is not an ordinary man, he will tie her with strings even finer than gossamer, so that she could not even breathe without his say so.
She is his obsession.
He will be her world.
Kia Min does not notice anything amiss. Wu is kind, skilled and humble – she's everything a teacher could want, everything a student could aspire to. It's natural for Master Li to be proud of her. She has been there the longest, too – Two Rivers has grown into her, so that one is constantly finding blades of grass in her hair, and dirt on her feet even when she wears sandals. The sun has darkened her skin, buried itself in the crook of her neck – she is beautiful in the way Two Rivers itself is, serene, peaceful, so far removed from the rest of the world as to be a world all on its own. It's natural for Master Li to dote upon her.
And with her strength and beauty, of heart and soul and mind, it's only natural for the rest of them to follow after her, to strive, one day, to be as pure, of heart and soul and mind, as she is.
For Wen, it's like stepping into a foreign country – a divine garden, ruled over by a benevolent lord, and she is the heart of it, and lotus blossom blooming in a serene pond, far out of anyone's reach.
He calls her that once – and it sticks somewhere between his mouth and her hair, like an intangible kiss, something that could never really be. Soon, everyone is calling her that – Wu the Lotus Blossom. He hopes she doesn't know he said it first.
Perhaps he is a little in love with her, in the way one loves the sun, and the moon and the stars. Like a goddess appearing before an initiate, her attention overwhelms him, makes him feel at once dizzy and blessed.
Gao hates everything she stands for.
He doesn't really know what she stands for – doesn't know the full story, of an infant stolen at birth, of a city of shepherds massacred in secret, of a dragon slain, but only partly – but he recognizes hubris when he sees it.
He recognizes obsession – he knows there is something going on behind Master Li's eyes, something dark. He knows she's just a sacrificial lamb, a tool, meant to bleed for the sins of a hellish world – it's unfair that she should also be strong.
Tools are meant to fulfill a purpose and nothing more.
He hates her, hates the serene cage of Two Rivers.
When he leaves, he will burn it all to the ground.
When he leaves, he will leave only ashes in his wake.
Sometimes, it's the only thought that keeps him going.
Jing Woo would like to think they were close, but deep in his heart, he knows only Dawn Star is even close to Wu's level, much less Wu herself.
He laughs it off, keeps up the illusion. Sometimes he fancies she'd be lonely without him – but part of him always knows he could be replaced. That she doesn't is graciousness on her part, and he knows it, even if she doesn't.
She runs into him one day while she's trying to find her way out – she's always getting lost, as though it were a symbol, or a sign.
"I do know my way out of here," she says, lightly, and he offers to walk with her.
Asks her what she plans to do when she leaves Two Rivers. She's asked others the same question, watched them graduate. Now she's the most senior student – it will surely be her turn next.
"Leave?" she asks, like she hadn't thought of it.
She seems troubled after, so he makes a joke about the weather, and the ships and the merchants, and she smiles, and the troubled look in her eyes melts away.
Wu has everything Lin has never known she wanted, and Lin aches with the thought of reaching her heights, of being beloved, of being strong, and not being shunned for it.
It's Wu who calms her down, who reminds her that no matter what she feels, she has the option to move forward. No matter who she's been in the past, she has the option to make her own future.
It's Wu she relies upon, even while she's being eaten alive by jealousy, and it's Wu who never scolds her for speaking harshly, never offers up excuses for the way things are, simply the way to walk around them.
Sometimes, Lin thinks that the entire village dies or lives by Wu's command. Anywhere else, that would be a dark thought, preposterous and frightening, but here, in Two Rivers, it is only natural. And she knows, more than she knows anything else, that Wu would never let her fall.
Later, much later, when everything's over, when secrets have been uncovered and cruelty undone – or at least, corrected, because cruelty can never be truly erased – when everyone is about to go their separate ways and forget or forgive, Dawn Star thinks, for a moment, that what Two Rivers really was was a cult, a cult designed to take the fall when it was time for Wu to die.
And she wonders, if maybe they really did have reason to feel betrayed, by her father, by Wu. By herself.
She wonders, and knows she'll never really know.
The ending is a little weak/clunky. I couldn't figure out how to tie the idea of Lin being wrong about Wu letting everyone fall to how . . .wrong . . . Two Rivers feels (to me) in the beginning of the story smoothly, ahah.
This was really hard to write because I renamed my Wu "Bao Ling" which means something like, "Treasured Spirit". It's supposed to be a nod both to Li's treatment of her as a tool, but the most important of his tools, and also to her heritage as a spirit monk, and it feels more meaningful than "Wu" which means something like "affairs/business" when it's for girls, or Jen Zi, which actually is not really a Chinese name, but a Chinese sounding name, and the closest I can get for a translation is based on "yan qi" and yan can mean a lot of things, but "qi" for a girl really just refers to the Qi River. I mean, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, because I'm not Chinese at all, but still.
I wish the default names weren't the only named used, but I can't wish they didn't exist, because I'm not sure I'd have looked more into Chinese naming or anything - though even with my desire to write about Bao Ling and everything, I still don't know much about Chinese names haha.