"Do not restrain yourself, Kimberly." That command thunders through my mind, a relentless, locomotive order that relentlessly and remorselessly tramples what lingers of any inhibitions; it's as if I've been intoxicated by this furious welter of straining, quivering bloodlust that overtakes me without preamble. It roars through me, a violent and raging dragon whose flames sear through every reach of my soul; pure, shuddering strength boils within me, a convulsive pressure that has risen throughout this ordeal to an insufferable pinnacle, clamoring for release through hands that have been sheathed in steel. Xi Go's demand looses that accumulated, shivering tension, warrior spirit flaring forth in rippling, molten strands of raw vermillion through sight suddenly grayed. Everything lunges into extraordinary definition amidst that monochrome focus; even the furious palpitation of blood screaming through my temples has become a sight unto itself, misting within the periphery of my awareness; auras spring into ferocious contrast, even as complex and ghastly humanity recedes into nebulous smears of ambiguous form.
No longer is any thought required of me; thought, I realize, is impossible. My waking mind seems to have risen to a higher plane, detached with a gauzy and dreamy lapse of awareness from an insipid corporeal form. Limbs thrash and strike as if manic serpents, so deft that any conscious guidance is of the utmost futility. It occurs to me, dazedly and almost laconically, that I finally have attained that singular focus that I have witnessed within Xi Go; unfurling as if some ethereal flower of liquid flame, it flares into full jade splendor, a majesty in emerald that swells and blazes with a savage and impossible fury that guides every blow to its target.
It is as if a waking incarnation of Zhuangzi's parable of the butcher; iron fists lash out and recoil, stroking with the easy and unconscious fluidity of the Tao's instruction. My body, sinuous and rippling with a grace extraordinary, is alight with a quaking exhilaration that not once ruptures the serene and singular focus with which I unleash heaven's sanction upon the throng that has delivered such unfathomable ruination and anguish to Ariadne, to the one that I love as an eternal sister; to those that seem surrogates for the bestial and pernicious brutes that had inflicted such unimaginable cruelties upon the beloved for whom my very life endures, for whom this raging, livid spirit flames and roars within my breast. It hammers with the percussive enormity of my heartbeat, pounding and unremitting; this fury, this screaming and awful and glorious savagery that, at long last, uncoils following what seems an eternity of stifling restraint.
Dewy scarlet warmth, balmy and soothing as if the languorous caress of the first spring breeze through budding cypress, wreathes my hands; but those few streaks cannot quench an all-devouring flame. Blows rain as if a typhoon of divine punishment; we preside over a symphony of brutality, a serenade of cringing whimpers and pitiful, childish moans coaxed forth with expert focus. Paltry struggles at defense, sinewy and stout limbs raised in incredulous resistance, are as futile as a tree's silent protests before a saw; low, desultory crackles of failing bodies belie the seeming strength of our adversaries, and raise an almost manic and tortured agony at the ease with which they have enslaved and tormented.
Even Xi Go, I blearily realize, cannot rival the relish and intensity with which I approach this most sacred of endeavors; her own quicksilver grace, savage and rending strikes delivered with an effortless and liquid languor, has become virtually frozen as time itself dilates into limitless infinity. It feels as if I am the sole dancer in this celeritous ballet, infinitesimal, twinging motions sending me vaulting across vast distances, as though aided by some mystic hand of incomparable strength. I flow with a natural and intuitive grace, the languid cascade of a mountain stream along crags and culverts, guided by the spirit of almost frantically calm destruction that consumes me. It occurs to me suddenly that it is not even destruction; there is no malice, no ill intention, no conscious sense of devastation; it is the blazing fury of an erupting volcano, singular in its natural purity; the shearing immensity of tidal waves along the shore, obliterating all that lies in their path with a soul void of malevolence and compassion.
It is merely natural; Wu-Wei in fulminating motion finally finds me atop one of my adversaries, the others still and bathed in a darkened veneer of that curious gray smear, a fist upraised with a tingling and electric vengeance; and, at that moment, that mystic focus lapses, a scalding and tortured lightning raking along every nerve with a bewildering fury, as if the cruel grasp of the divine has claimed my very soul within an unyielding, suffocating grip. At once, even as my arm, preparing to plunge as a piercing blade into my stricken foe's feeble flesh, quakes with a bestial craving, alight with a liquid brutality, a voice whispers into my fevered mind, suddenly plunging from those vertiginous pinnacles of enlightenment to a base nadir of tortured humanity.
Little more than the tenderest rustle of a serpent uncoiling amid rippling grasses, it nevertheless consumes me with an irresistible tension; a molten strain that grips my wrists as if leaden shackles, sapping every trace of that maniacal energy from them. A dying ember within the roiling penumbra of some dark and forbidden reach of my soul continues to flare and rage with a furious command that I continue, that I allow my fist to sunder this beast's spirit from his body, to deliver it unto the judgment of Yen Lo Wang and his boundless tortures; but that voice suffocates it as if a flood of crystalline beauty, stifling and smothering into submission the scalding flames of the dragon.
"Kimberly!" It gains depth and intensity, swelling into my resurgent senses with a curious and swimming distortion. "Kimberly! Kimberly!" Tinged with a faint, gauzy sense of the surreal, color and form have begun to return to my vision; what greets me is a study in crimson, a sanguine, bitter awfulness beginning to cool upon my fists, trickling in dense and gelid streams along my cheeks as if some abominable mascara. "Kimberly!"
"Yes." A sullen whisper of acknowledgment finally spills from my lips, coppery with what I know must be blood.
"You... You're all right." My love's voice has returned to its fullest and most beauteous definition, delicate and mellifluous, however agonizingly consumed by some torturous anxiety. "You're all right." The tenderest of warmth, a whisper of pliant heat, settles upon my shoulders; a convulsive, nauseated shiver flits through me as the sense of eyes opening fully reveals to me the awful wretch that lies beneath knees that continue to grind with unwitting brutality into yielding flesh.
Coarse features have been reduced to little more than a shattered husk, as if a city in the wake of an earthquake; pulverized topography in terrible pallor swells and plunges with irregular, careless and unnatural fluidity; scarlet streaked with glistening, sickly alabaster suggests unfathomable violence. Eyes bloated with violence glimmer a bloodshot azure, twin ebon islands swollen with a palpable terror amid those gruesome oceans; prickling whiskers glitter with a veneer of awful, blackening cinnabar.
"Yes." I again affirm with an enervated listlessness. "Yes, I am."
"P-please, don't kill me. Please. Please." The broken, quaking mewl that issues from between shattered lips, filtering through jagged and broken shards of ivory, threatens to stoke that awful and malignant fire, even as my love's caress soothes it. "Please." He speaks Russian; he perverts that tongue with a pernicious and ugly, thick groan, his tortured evil made manifest. "Please."
"Shego... I..."
"It's not worthwhile to kill insects, Kimberly; you may step upon them without notice, but you should never consciously destroy life that is without substance." She speaks to me in Wu, those elegant and sonorous strains drifting across me as if the caress of a gilded mist.
"He deserves to die." That protest is alight with a dreadful and angry hatred, even as a cringing resignation to surrender becomes so overpowering. "He deserves death, Shego." A peculiar trickling of that most beloved of names from the life of Kimberly Dmitriovna into a language that is no longer foreign. "He should die. He should die." An awareness that I am raving, that those words are coursing from my blood-flecked lips as if a devil's mantra, overtakes me; I know that I have begun to rage in a babel of tongues, of German, Russian, and Wu in alternation, or perhaps at once.
The shivering, animal fear that contorts this demon's broken visage confirms for me that he understands.
"He deserves to die! You deserve to die, you animal! I will kill you; I will break your body and send you to hell!" It is a scream; hideous and warbling, it rises to the heavens even as it plunges with a steely enormity into the bowels of the netherworld. "You will die!" And my hand rises again; no longer guided by the Tao, no longer with natural purpose, it nevertheless seethes with a molten strength that wreathes it with a gruesome and lurid midnight.
It falters; shadows wither as if beneath the sun's blazing kiss, dissolving into the ether. There is not that hate throbbing within my breast; there is not that wanton and bestial cruelty; there no longer riots that senseless and fearsome dragon, raging without thought and reason, devoted wholly to the altered state of death. Tumbling before my tear-streaked gaze, slender fingers are released from their steel embrace; again fragile, they tremble with every wracking, breathless pant that convulses me. In that moment, a terror at myself was so nightmarishly manifest, even as a savage and bewildering rapture at the notion of destroying for all eternity this abomination cloaked in human form suffused me with an almost giddy elation.
"Shego..." I am weeping, my shoulders consumed by a wrenching quake as horrific, ragged moans tear themselves from the very depths of my soul. "Shego..." The brute beneath me no longer stirs; perhaps he has fainted from fear, a fragile and pathetic spirit.
"Kimberly..." A low and mournful murmur, delicately rustling, with a damp and tender warmth, against the hypersensitive flesh of my throat. "Kimberly, it's all right."
"Is it?" That emerges as a brittle and hideous parody of a laugh, wavering with an almost manic intensity. "Is it, Shego? I... I don't know what overcame me."
"You were angry; it's your right to feel anger, Kimberly. These... These dreadful and evil men deserve death, yes; but you did not wish to be the one to be their executioner."
"Are they dead?" A dismal and oppressive silence is a more thunderous certain answer than any other. "Shego?"
"Some of them." She finally concludes, with a curious and almost laconic sense of resignation. "Some of them."
"Did..."
"Does it matter?" A demand verging upon a fragile, knife-edge impatience.
"Shego, I..."
"You did not kill this man with a willful malice; that is what matters." My love admonishes; a gentle and insistent pressure upon my waist, a curious and solemn mockery of the caress that inspires such blissful and breathless delight, seeks to wrench me from atop this barbarian.
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Why does that matter, when killing them in... In that odd state does not?"
"You are a warrior, Kimberly; dealing death with your hands or with weapons, you still do not act with malevolence. Your strikes are guided by the Tao, not by a sinful and mortal yearning for destruction and cruelty. If you had not stricken them, if you had not descended upon them with a hunter's fury, they would not have shown such restrain for us. You were protecting me, and protecting Ariadne."
"I..." I nevertheless am ill; a racing pulse roars through my temples; my sight blurs and ripples with a surreal and disorienting distortion; a sickly and tortured knot clenches within my stomach, threatening to force itself from lips tacky with a monstrous and hellish dampness. "I still-"
"Do not think of it. I... I know that it troubles you; it troubled me, as well, as it had Bao Li and..." At long last, tugged with an irresistible force, I feel myself unfolding to my complete height; knees seem to slosh and quake with a liquid and enervated frailty; arms, limp and flaccid, offer little more than a pathetic and desultory sway as I'm tugged into the sheltering warmth of Xi Go's embrace, enfolded amidst an angel's wings.
"It is natural to take life, Kimberly, to survive; a lion does not think of its prey; a shark thinks not of the fish that it devours. Existence, the natural order, is a clash of wills and lives; it is a struggle for existence against those that would take your own life. For those so selfish as to destroy for their own indulgence, it is a fitting demise; Wu Wei dictates it as surely as the sun rises and sets for those that interfere with natural harmony." The words do not ring with the profound sense of hollowness that fills my heart amid this slaughter, but they afford me no comfort; sanguine lips tremble as tears continue their miserable and doleful trek along skin blotted with crimson.
"I..." Truly, I can say nothing; words fail me entirely, and I surrender wholly to her embrace, even amidst this chaos and carnage. The vaguest, distant awareness of subdued screams and incredulous shouts, voices upraised in a thrall of abject terror and bewilderment, has begun to trickle into my curiously barren and exhausted senses, but my mind can afford them no notice.
"K-Kimberly?" Another voice rife with a glorious and liquid tenderness that seeps through this senseless and arctic shell; at once, unaccountably, it ignites a hot and terrible fear within my breast, boiling with a manic and irrational certainty of cruel alienation.
"Ariadne." An acknowledgment that I desperately do not wish to offer. Xi Go is a warrior, as well; the spilling of blood in defense of love, in pursuit of a purpose greater than any insipid and temporal desire, is not foreign to her. Ariadne, however, has been tortured by such fury, regardless of the intent that underlies it; a certitude that she will despise me for my violence, that she will revolt at the crushing ferocity that must lie within my warrior's soul, reduces me to quivering, whimpering incognizance.
Ariadne is my friend; a deep and powerful love, even bereft of a lover's passion, sears within my heart for her. And she will reject me; she will abandon me for my viciousness, for the ease with which I have taken life without the slightest restraint and reserve.
"Are you all right, Kimberly? There... I..." A fragile and delicate tone dips to a frightful whisper. "There is so much blood. It's- it's not yours, is it?"
"P-pardon?" Despite a command that I avert my eyes, that I not allow my curiosity to impel my gaze toward the shimmering and beauteous fabric of this beloved gown, that twangs through this wondrous jade nexus, I cannot restrain myself; my bleary and whorling sight beholds a ghastly ocean of scarlet upon crimson, dragons swimming through currents of gore. "Oh, my... My god, Shego, it-"
"It's all right, Kimberly; it's all right. Please, do not panic; none of it is yours, or mine, or Ariadne's." That is perhaps not my singular concern, though those fears have rioted above all others; a deeper, sullen, and more subdued horror and disgust at the lifeblood that I have wrung from my adversaries, now staining my clothing as if some sanguine dye, has risen in its stead.
"Thank god." Ariadne finally materializes before me; while lovely pools of fine auburn are agape with a wide and electric bewilderment, a subtle, quirking suggestion of an almost foreign smile creases ruby lips. "Thank god, Kimberly; I was so worried that it was your blood, that you'd been hurt. These- these brutes don't warrant the slightest kernel of your notice; they're not even human anymore." Perhaps I had not expected such a vicious and profoundly heartless sentiment from a beloved friend; a slight twinge of flushed horror flares through me at her words, even as I know them to be true. She, more so than anyone, is entitled to such a certainty; I behold the crushing blow, delivered with a resurgent and furious humanity, that shears into senseless flesh without the slightest trace of astonishment.
Again and again, Ariadne's heels lance with a cruel and remorseless ferocity into the man that I had abandoned in the throes of unfathomable anguish; her features crimson with a scalding, fulminating, and unreasoning rage, a low and anguished moan of almost hellish savagery spilling from jaws agape, she rains blows upon him. Again and again, piercing spines hammer into sensitive and frail flesh; between his thighs, they stroke with a brutality that a suddenly steely gaze appraises with a certain vicious approval.
"Ariadne. Ariadne." Only as Xi Go's slender fingers fasten with an iron firmness upon Ariadne's fragile wrists does the frenzy that convulses my friend recede as if a supernatural haze; tugged away with the utmost tenderness, I realize that her enormous eyes blaze with a liquid fury, tears of unutterable rage streaming along cheeks flushed with animal ferocity. "Ariadne." Xi Go repeats, the stern intensity of her tone finally coaxing her from the depths of that thoughtless anger.
"Y-yes?" As though a child chastised for some trivial mischief, even as her chest heaves with ragged and enormous pants that seem to roar from her parted lips as if a fierce typhoon. "Yes, Miss Shego?"
"It's all right, Ariadne. You're safe now."
"This... This worthless beast, this vermin, this... This piece of shit," unaccountably, perhaps childishly, that obscenity startles me more than the frenetic outpouring of brutality, "He deserves much, much more. Kimberly, he... He should die. I should kill him. I should kill him." Whimpering, those words of inhumanity unbefitting of this beautiful woman stream in hot and tormented currents that blaze with a tangible, scarlet anguish from her trembling lips. "I want to kill him."
"Yes, you do, Ariadne; I'm sure that you do. But, you would not wish that." An emphatic shake of Xi Go's head, fine and lustrous locks whispering in a chorus of affirmation across her creamy shoulders. "I know that you would not. You would not forgive yourself for squandering your humanity upon this creature." An illustrative blow, with a careless and easy stroke of a dark heel, upon a stout leg that yields a hideous and resonant crackle of bone through an oppressive silence broken solely by the low, keening whimpers of Du's benighted harem. "Please, believe me, Ariadne."
"He... He, they all hurt me so badly, Miss Shego. How can you tell me to forgive them?" She pleads; I realize, quite belatedly, that her gaze has drifted to the glimmering and sleek curves of a blade that tumbled from the stricken hand of one of the fallen animals.
"Forgive?" Tinged with a scorn more abject than words alone could aspire to capture. "Forgive, Ariadne? Is it forgiveness not to murder a fallen and wounded man with a knife?" Her creeping and surreptitious advance toward that lethal shard of steel halts at once. "Do you not take heart in that his life will be short and terrible?"
"W-what do you mean?" Ariadne seems incredulous, even as she begs an answer that will even begin to soothe the molten rage that boils through her dark eyes.
"Have you forgotten a particularly pathetic coward in our midst?" A venomous snarl elevates a niggling sense of some pitiful, shriveled wisp of a diseased and putrefying aura to a supreme focus; my sight penetrates the wilted and murky darkness, beholding the cowering and feeble silhouette of a humiliated Mandarin struggling to evaporate into the shadows.
"Du?" That emerges from my throat as a deep and gurgling whisper, as if I've not spoken for an eternity. That foul and odious wretch's presence gleams as a savage beacon of indescribable evil amid the sullen penumbra; fine, dark silk glimmers with a vague and diffuse luster beneath the mildest of creeping caresses of distant lights as he shivers beside one of the women rendered dead-eyed and vacuous with accumulated miseries and the torturous grip of opium. Their vacant gazes do not even seem to register us, even as mirthless smiles continue to torment me with sorrowful permanence.
Du clings to the sweeping, elegant curtain of one woman's dress beside the table as if a child sheltering in his mother's skirts in the face of a particularly cruel bully. Once bestially confident, ebon shards have opened into vast and yawning, liquid pools of agonized midnight; a whispering suggestion of some feeble and pathetic mewl filters from that huddled creature. It is a struggle not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of that outrageous and evil spectacle, of a man so powerful in this diseased world of wealth and privilege that he had been emboldened to claim the seemingly weak and defenseless as property, now struggling to vanish into the shadows.
"Get up, Yueshang." Even that grave affront cannot wrest him from this inarticulate and shivering terror. "Get up, Big Ears." Another jab that yields nothing but perhaps a deepening of this man-child's dread; a simmering and piteous trickle of burgundy begins to suffuse an otherwise pure and vulgar, arctic azure.
"Get your ass up, Big Ears; I'll kill you if you don't." Even I am consumed with a sudden and convulsive terror at the raw and vicious brutality with which that is spoken; harsh and gruff, my beloved's tender and dulcet tones, a sonorous and majestic melody of liquid gold, have been warped into a jagged razor, shearing through one's very soul with a serrated savagery. There is no doubt that she will; jade has become impenetrably, impossibly dark, conjured into a shadow that eclipses the mellow incandescence as if some evil moon. It is not the black sun that blazed from my hand, but seems no less purposeful.
"P-please, I think that we can discuss-"
"Shut up." My wife speaks as if possessed, molten currents of hate deluging from within her; Du is the target of her loathing, enveloped by those suffocating tendrils as if in the grip of an impossible monster. The further widening of his already implausibly enormous, glimmering eyes signifies that it is not merely to my sight alone that this fury has been unveiled; intangible power has transgressed upon physical reality, and something unfathomable has been unleashed. "Shut your fucking mouth, Yueshang. I never would have expected that such a superstitious thug as yourself would fail to recognize Xian."
If at all possible, his terror swells to magnitudes unimaginable; a sickly, diseased carrion flower of harsh and horrified burgundy, it unfurls around him, staining everything in his midst with a ghoulish and inhuman aura. Eyes virtually burst from his flat features, contorted with a fear that renders him virtually mindless, seemingly beyond any suggestion of awareness; and, yet, his gaze remains anchored inseparably to Xi Go as the quiet, ominous clatter of heels signals the inexorable advance of his waking nightmare in a sweeping tide of emerald.
"X-Xiannu." A cringing awareness, acknowledged with a torturous finality that suggests a certainty of imminent mortality; perhaps he prays for the release of death, the quiet and gentle embrace of the grave, even if it will usher him into the courts of Yen Lo Wang. "Xiannu."
"Yes, Yueshang; Xiannu. Both of us. Or, did you not recognize that power? We would have paid you handsomely with heaven's own gold to release this beautiful young woman from your diseased bondage; instead, you will be paid with something less..." A bestial quirk of full lips with a malice that I have never before witnessed, "Pleasant."
"Please, Xiannu Go Xi. Please, I beg of you. I- I am a stupid man; I am but a poor and humble peasant, and-"
"Still your protests, Yueshang." My love looms massively above him; transcending her mere physical height, her presence is that of a giant. It eclipses anything within imagination; anything so insipid would cower in equal, unreasoning fear before the monstrous, flaring, roiling cauldron of ferocity that churns from her. "Silence your whimpers; they will not move me. You should know better than to throw yourself upon an immortal's mercy. Have you ever heard of Monkey staying his hand or staff against a wicked foe, or Xian Lu sheathing his sword in the presence of a demon? I am not Guanyin, Yueshang." A sardonic beat. "Big Ears."
"Please, have mercy upon me. I- I am a fool; my mind is ravaged with opium. I am not thinking clearly." A brutal stroke lifts him to his feet; barely do even I perceive the lash of her hand, even as an impossible thunderclap resounds with deafening enormity throughout the hall.
"You were not thinking clearly? For how long have you not been thinking clearly, Big Ears? Tell me this; grant me this indulgence." An unremitting tide of pathetic squeals wrings itself from his throat as he realizes that his silk-clad feet do not brush against the fine marble with every wriggle in an invisible grasp. Xi Go's slender arms remain interlaced upon the gentle swell of her chest; the ferocious grip of those ethereal hands is abundantly manifest in the harsh, quivering mewls that seep from broken lips streaming with blood. He sounds a child, or a tortured animal, struggling to cling to its final breaths.
"I will tear you in half, Big Ears, if I do not hear anything from you. I would not tell you for how long I will wait; I am sure that so dreadful an animal as yourself never learned to count." Unaccountably, I pity this pathetic monster as it lies suspended in agony; it seems the tortures of Ivan Groznyii's prisons, horrible cries continuing to flood from within a feeble chest sagging as though in the throes of crucifixion. I barely recognize my love in the throes of such awful brutality; even Ariadne averts her gaze, deep auburn pools falling to the glimmering pallor that lies beneath us, as hellish crackles issue from a ravaged body.
"Tell me, Yueshang!"
"I- I do not know! I am sorry! What- what do you expect from me?" Breathless gurgles, barely a facsimile of humanity lingering within his straining speech. "What do you expect from me?"
At once, I feel it; lapping gently at the molten fringes of her raw, quivering, raging hatred, there is something positively nightmarish; a living shadow, liquid darkness; it seems evil incarnate, channeled from the depths of festering pain long-suppressed. It terrifies me; it is the essence of that penumbra that consumed my hand, that craved the blood of a fallen and stricken foe, but magnified and purified, refined to concentrated bloodlust.
A black grin leers from that oblivion, alight with an inhuman glee at the looming fruition of its most hideous yearnings. It brandishes a rapture that I know could never coexist with the beauteous spirit that lies within my beloved; it is the antithesis of love, a pain and grief and warbling torment that smiles with insincere and malevolent eyes; it is not Xi Go. It is a nightmare past, a torturous and terrible and unforgivable series of affronts and cruelties unaddressed that cry out for vengeance, no longer content with an unattainable justice. It is a young girl in the grip of grinding poverty, wailing at the pain that she cannot understand; it is a young woman flowering into beauty with no sense of her own worth, reduced to a slave; it is an apprentice, struggling with the wanton malice and gleeful depredations of her vicious master; it is a newborn goddess without companionship, without love, without anything to stave off her sorrow.
It is not Xi Go, and it threatens to devour her as assuredly as it had me.
"What do you want from me? Please, tell me! In- in all that is sacred, please! Please!" Quiet, sickening pops and crackles issue from a body upon the brink of destruction, sobbing whimpers supplanting that haughty and pernicious imperiousness. "Please! Please!"
"What do I want, Yueshang?" That is not Xi Go's voice; it cannot be. It has never been so dead, so detached, so cold that I am consumed with a terrific shiver. "What is it that I want?"
"Please, Shego." My own voice, at long last, struggles through that ocean of pure void. "Please, Shego."
"What is it, Kimberly?" I pray for that voice to recede, for my love to return, even as my legs bear me forward in the throes of trembling agony, dread, and despair.
"Please, do not say what you feel right now; do not give voice to that." I feel as if I am Xi Go as she counseled me, imploring me not to succumb to that irresistible temptation.
"Do not say what, Kimberly?" A perfectly genial and thoughtful tone, alight with a joy that I cannot reconcile with her present fury.
"Please, Shego. You... You love me so much that you prevented me from committing a terrible and unforgivable mistake."
"What was that, Kimberly?" The anguish speaks; jade becomes streaked with a monstrous and impure garnet.
"Please, you know what I'm talking about, Shego. Please." With pure courage, this hellish tableau is permitted to grow larger and larger, each step straining against a fear that is more awful than anything I could have envisioned.
"What is that, Kimberly?"
"Let me go! Let me go! Please! Please! You're- you're breaking me-"
"Shut up!" My love roars with a voice not her own, even as some shivering anxiety lurches through that black violence. "Shut up!"
"It hurts! It hurts!" His screams are more awful than anything I have ever heard from a mortal soul; he truly is an animal, unreasoning and thoughtless with a pain unfathomable. "It hurts! Please, Xiannu! Have mercy upon me!"
"I am not Guanyin, Yueshang, as I have said." A deathly and brutal chuckle that renders the blood hammering through my temples, throbbing through my veins with a furious urgency, liquid ice. "I want you to die."
"No!" That shriek is mine, and unfathomable torment claims me as those nightmare invisible hands grip me in his stead; a furious, shredding pressure that threatens to rend me asunder with a single stroke as my scream rises to a hellish crescendo. The fabric of reality itself seems to distend; my sight becomes streaked with a sanguine, molten crimson that swims and shivers with a torment unspeakable and indescribable; sight evaporates entirely, even as my vision lapses into that terrible gray definition.
I'm being torn apart, it occurs to me with a curiously vague and dreamy disorientation; arms seem to separate from their proper anchorage, my legs tugged as if upon the rack. The pain is so horrific that it transcends any capacity for human perception; it seems to wither into nothingness, so great is the enormity of that agony. I can no longer even scream; so prosaic an expression of my anguish is simply trivial.
As darkness washes across me, glistening motes of stars drifting through that endless night sky, a peculiar and serene smile settles upon my lips, however torturous even that gentle quirking is. I have preserved my love's soul; her spirit will endure without that terrible scarlet blemish; I do bear no grudge, and I hope with a fervent and desperate intensity that she will forgive me.
"Kimberly! Kimberly! Oh, please, do- do not... Not now! No!" Through this terrible and dreadful darkness, peering through this peculiar and cloudless sky within which a vast ocean of stars gleams, her wondrous and sonorous splendor drifts. It seems a dream; perhaps the fulfillment of a final wish, ushering me into another life with the certain knowledge of her warmth awaiting me following that terrible but ephemeral perdition.
"Do not die; I will not allow this, Kimberly. I- I would rather give my life now, no matter how selfish it may be, for you to live. I will not see you die again, Kimberly; I will not suffer this for another eternity." This is not comfort for a looming and unutterably awful separation; her scream, her wailing and nightmarish shriek, shears through this inky and surreal veil as a crushing warmth settles upon me. I cannot bear it; my love is consumed with a torment beyond description, beyond imagination; my soul cries out in an agony that I cannot endure a moment further; my very being quakes with sorrow and suffering.
"I will loose my power to save you, Kimberly. I- I know that it is unforgivable, but I cannot think of another life without you. You... You will perhaps never remember me, Kimberly; you will learn to live a life without me. P-perhaps," a cringing and awful, muffled whimper, "Perhaps I will be led to you again, if the Jade Emperor shows pity. I am so sorry, Kimberly, but this... This is something that I cannot endure again."
Open your eyes. Open your eyes, damn you! Open your eyes! Open them! I wail and howl and sob into this blackness, commanding my body again and again to respond until even this inner voice seems hoarse. I will destroy myself, as well, the instant that I awaken from this torpor; even if I must betray my eternal beloved's sacrifice, better I live not a second further.
"I am sorry, Kimberly."
"No!" At long last, a cry that resounds beyond this terrible and deathly void. "No! No!"
"K-"
"Do not! I'll never forgive you, Shego! I will never forgive you!" I bawl, realizing that true, human sensation, a savage and crippling heat radiating through every reach of my tortured body, has returned to me; my cheeks are icy with a nightmare deluge of tears that continues to inundate skin blazing with a resurgent inner warmth.
"F-for what?" A whisper of the utmost torment, even as she struggles to feign some outlandish obliviousness.
"For what you said; that you were willing to sacrifice yourself for my sake, for your own selfishness. I... I would hate you; I would kill myself the second that I awoke, Shego."
"Kimberly, I-"
"Do not! Don't... Don't say anything." I can merely command this through a dismal haze of tears, wracked with an unfathomable agony at the merest thought of even a single moment deprived of her love, of her tender and nurturing warmth.
"Kimberly-"
"I forgive you, Shego, but... Just- just, don't say anything. Please." My exhortation is that of utter desperation, pleading for her not to confront me with these ridiculous deceptions that raise the unimaginable and unfathomable into further and more terrible relief.
"I... I understand." The awareness that her voice no longer caresses my ears is a blissful epiphany; a straining and radiant certainty that our souls have not been sundered, that our beauteous and incomparable bond continues to writhe and ripple with that transcendental link. "I'm sorry, Kimberly. I... You had heard the terrible thoughts of my soul. Not- not for an instant were we parted; my very fears were given voice, even as I knew that you would survive." I do believe her; that frenetic, urgent, jumbled stream of thoughts cried out in a cruel and dissonant polyphony of screams, each rising at once into a roar of wrenching dread.
"Thank you, Kimberly." That ghosts through every nerve as if the most achingly tender of caresses; an intimate stroke along the very fabric of my soul, alight with a rich, radiant, and ascendant rapture. "Thank you. You... Your courage, your strength, I... I am in awe of you, as always. You have saved me; again, you have preserved my very soul."
"You... You did not kill him?"
"No, my Love. I... I could not; you absorbed that final, terrible blow; you suffered such anguish for the sake of a demon, merely so that I would not be bloodied. I... I am so gracious to you, Kimberly; even if you had forgiven me, I fear that I would never have felt worthy of touching you with hands so stained, with a soul so corrupted by that evil."
"It is as I felt, Shego; and you preserved my own spirit." Startlingly, a mild, wretchedly feeble ghost of a laugh actually trickles from my lips, galling at a throat arid and raw with the relentless, galling fury of a desert wind. "You had saved me as surely as I had you, and yet I had not once thanked you, Shego."
"Kimberly, I..."
"I know how desperately awful that compulsion is; I could actually feel it; I could see it, Shego, massive and raw and positively mad, clamoring for release. I'm... I'm astonished that I could actually survive that."
"Do not ever, ever even suggest otherwise, My Kimberly." A harsh and leaden command, bereft of even the subtlest trace of humor. "Do not ever, ever even think of the possibility. I... I live for you; you are the reason for which I exist, for which my spirit and body persevere even when I fear that I cannot endure a further day awash in that agony. And, when we are united again, you consume me with a joy and love that becomes deeper and deeper with every passing instant.
"I would rather die than see..." A harsh, ragged, panting whimper as that most unfathomable of nightmares plays across her mind, shivers through this jade thread, as if some hellish, shuddering phantasm. "Than see you parted from me again, Kimberly."
"We never will." A solemn and earnest vow, one sealed by the wondrous, blissful warmth of her lips settling upon me; a kiss that seems to throb into a glorious and transcendental eternity, soaring through the heavens as a beauteous and incomparable sense of perfection mends and revives tortured and broken flesh. And I am whole again; life lurches into that surreal, gray definition before it is consumed with a lively and glorious color that resolves into the image of divinity beyond rival. "Shego!" A cry of utter bliss vaults, rising into the glorious infinite, as anguished and bitterly protesting limbs are forced around her, crushing her to me with a seething passion born of desperation unimaginable.
"Shego!" Again, through the veil of death, however frail and ephemeral, we are reunited.
"I never left, Kimberly; I promise you that." A low and comforting murmur; everything has vanished from my thoughts, from my sight, but Xi Go, my lover and my eternity. The seemingly inexorable onset of that darkness, a cruel and black hand that would not be stayed in its relentless grip upon my spirit, has receded with the radiant flare of our joined souls; and yet its taint lingers, an awful and almost tangible smear of shadow that endures as some monstrous visitation that refuses to quit that beauteous core of my being. "I promise you, Kimberly; I... I was with you; I never once thought of departing, of abandoning you, even if it were for your sake. What- what you felt-"
"Didn't I ask you to be quiet, Shego?" She starts at the sudden, wry rustle of a whisper from between my lips, before they join with her own again. "I forgive you."
"Death had you in its grasp, Kimberly; it was only with the force of your will that it released you." And I'm convulsed with a shuddering and terrible horror at that; I know it to be true. The blackness, that awful and all-devouring void, grinned in those final few instants; its hideous jaws closed, favoring me with but a torturous, cruel smile of the utmost patience as my unrelenting struggle drove it away. It has marked me as surely as Xi Go's jade luster, and the savage, urgent certainty that I must deftly perfect myself has risen again into awful and unendurable relief.
"I know, Shego. I..." I had never envisioned that death, Death, would be so tangible; that it would arrive as some abomination cloaked in shadow, even of the delicate and gauzy tenderness of finest silk, to swallow my spirit; to usher me away from this joy again with its relentless and vindictive fury. It seemed enraged with my perpetual escape, even as it writhed with a palpable delight at claiming me in its grasp. "I saw it; I felt it. What... What was that?"
"Death, Kimberly; but, you have escaped it. You are more powerful than you ever have been; more than I could ever hope or believe. What... What I would have inflicted upon Du was something that would have torn him apart, and yet you weathered it with barely a whimper. You're so strong." Convulsed with an enduring agony that has yet to recede into the nebulous darkness of memory, I hardly am so overcome with that certainty; my arms fastened around my beloved with an unyielding desperation, unwilling to part from this glorious and delirious warmth, strength is not of utmost concern.
I begin to weep; low, whimpering, mewling cries that seep forth from between us; liquid grief that stains without relent the soaring joy that envelops us. Sobs, awful, wracking, and unremitting, begin to flood from me; bawling, I realize that I seem a wounded child, wailing and shrieking with a rending anguish that consumes me more fiercely than any physical pain. I had not even realized how near I had forced myself to that cruel precipice; the epiphany that I stood upon the brink of that unfathomable loss, teetering above the void, envelops me in a sanguine mist of tortured grief and regret. I have preserved her soul, and yet I have clashed with Death in a battle that should never have been entered for the sake of a soul beyond redemption, beyond perhaps even mere perdition.
"Kimberly..." The low, soothing strains of her voice seem, amidst this strangling and breathless mist of pure, clenching terror, little more than a few droplets upon a roiling inferno; the blaze will not, cannot, be stilled, and yet still she holds me. Powerful and sleek arms tense around me with a pressure that feels as if it will buckle my very body and collapse me into her transcendental warmth, and I embrace it; even the most crushingly savage embrace is but the subtlest prickle of discomfort, imperceptible as a whisper amid an angelic chorus. "It's all right, Kimberly; I promise you that. I promise you."
"I love you. I love you. I love you." A frantic, garbled mantra that spills from what feels the ruptured dam of my spirit; an inundation of pure, shuddering emotion without restraint, without the possibility of restraint, coursing around us. We drown within its gleaming enormity, and yet are not washed away from this world; we remain steadfast, a gilded splendor rising from that brackish murk of fear and doubt.
"You've saved me, Kimberly."
"And you have me, Shego. You... It was your voice that called me back; it always will. I will never leave you, Shego; I will never allow myself to go."
"Everything will be all right." A whisper, emphatic and hot, of the utmost certainty and finality. "You have never been more powerful, Kimberly."
"More than Bao Li?" A sense of utter incredulity wells from within me at that, surging further at the tenderest of almost girlish giggles that issues from my love. "W-what is it?"
"You are Bao Li; she is you; you are everything, Kimberly. And, yes, more than you were then. Did you not see that I was still beside you, even fighting with the utmost ferocity? I was barely restraining myself so that Ariadne would not be injured in the battle. You are guided even more gracefully by the Tao than I."
"That's... That's silly." A quiet and bashful protest, striking me with the peculiar familiarity of reddening cheeks, even beneath a scalding veneer of tears. The notion of eclipsing this image of the divine, a true goddess transcending time and life, is inconceivable; I rather revolt at it, and I've no doubt that I will never accept it.
"And always so beautifully modest, my Love." Without the subtlest suggestion of effort, a sense of singular weightlessness overtakes me as I am borne skyward in her embrace; the dismal, penetrating chill of marble recedes before the all-consuming splendor of a warmth that engulfs me wholly in a lovely scarlet haze.
"It's the truth, Shego. I'm... I'm forever in awe of you." Those words, it occurs to me, resound beyond this single life; they throb and roar throughout a history of soaring, glorious delight and plunging nadirs of grief and anguish. "I love you."
"As I love you, My Kimberly; I exist solely to love you, to shelter you in my embrace at every moment of every day." A fine trickle of liquid flame across my skin wrings a startled gasp from my lips, eyes lunging open again to behold a gleaming mist swimming across eyes of the most beauteous emerald perfection. Tears trickle with an aching, cruel advance of diamond radiance as if purest water along alabaster, and I cannot restrain the yearning to again kiss her. Lips brush with deliberate, delicate reassurance across creamy and unblemished skin aflame with a molten anxiety; the seawater torment of tears vanishes beneath them, scoured away at last from her glorious gaze; at long last, pale ruby is claimed with incomparable tenderness, an unhurried and effortless kiss that endures with breathless splendor for limitless eternities.
Regardless of the stilled chaos that surrounds us, we remain interwoven, oblivious to everything; not even the vague awareness of Ariadne's presence can sunder this embrace; a selfish, hopelessly indulgent delight that finally draws me away from the image of that looming abyss. Death trickles away into distant nothingness; that fear and anguish are driven away as if shadows before a raging inferno, scorched into submission with blazing rays of pure rapture.
Even parting, I realize that we remain intertwined with a strength that deepens and swells with every moment that we bask in that radiant perfection; a shimmering bond that has grown ever more powerful, unyielding and steadfast before even the onrush of forces beyond life itself.
"Thank you, Kimberly." A mild and delicate whisper that seeps through my very soul as if a trickle of liquid ecstasy.
"For what?"
"For saving me, yet again. I... I know that you would have forgiven me, but I would perhaps not have forgiven myself for wasting my humanity upon such a wretch." If anything, Xi Go appears startlingly abashed, as though astounded by the depths of her own raging, irrepressible fury. "I... I don't even know what came over me. I felt so much agony from Ariadne, and, seeing this man, I-"
"I understand." I do, without question; however monstrous that cringing, inhuman anguish had been, I cannot deny the vicious and bestial delight that welled within me to witness a man of such power suspended as if some ghoulish marionette, wracked with unimaginable suffering with each twinging tug at his invisible strings. "I understand, Shego. I... I was prepared to do much the same."
"He is alive, however." She reassures me with a flicker of something I've no doubt is the utmost regret. "He is alive, lamentably." An almost petulant suggestion of a smile.
"Where is he?"
"Behind us. I... I feared that even glimpsing him would invite that awful hate anew." Nestled against the lovely, inviting warmth of my wife's willowy and glorious throat, I can perceive nothing but her splendor unfolding before me; nothing but the fragrant, ebon majesty of her locks spilling with a free and wild glory across her shoulders.
"There is something that I would wish to ask him."
"That man?" An incredulous gasp. "Whatever would you ask him?"
"Only he can answer it." A beat as a mild anxiety strains within my lover's jaw. "I'm sorry, Shego."
"No. No. I... I'm merely afraid that I'll need to prevent you from killing him."
"Perhaps." There is no trace of wry humor; I sincerely do not know what my reaction to that abomination will be, even so pitifully stricken. But, I find myself plunging from that graceful, soaring flight, trembling legs unfolding beneath me to support a weight that suddenly seems so intolerably acute in the void of her embrace.
"Kimberly?" A mild and startling tremor ripples through her solemn and quiet voice, but I can no longer be restrained; perhaps it is no longer a black and brutal vengeance that convulses me, but I can no longer abide this unresolved, wracking need for resolution. Xi Go pivots upon towering heels as I negotiate the carpet of the dead and crippled, a sickly and sanguine tang sweeping over me in a putrid tide that raises distant, awful images of the riots.
"Yueshang." That name erupts from my lips as if the bitterest of venoms, spewed with a hate that resonates from the very depths of my soul. "Yueshang." I command again; the wretch lies sprawled in a piteous, whimpering heap, as if a tormented child. Huddled amidst a draping shroud of deep and lustrous, luxuriant silk, it is obvious how enfeebled he has become from the pernicious, corrosive evil of which he has partaken so rapaciously. Surrounded by the death and carnage of his own creation, he nevertheless seems singularly pitiful, as though a wounded and terrible animal confronted with its hunters. My eyes drift along his fragile and pathetic form, falling upon the ghoulish image of a trio of some repellent, shriveled forms knotted to the small of his back, swaying with a mocking exuberance with each shuddering, panting sob.
"Yueshang!" As though amplified, my roar thunders through the hall; at long last, with merely the minutest, terrified whimper of acknowledgment, body consumed by convulsive tremors, this wretch succeeds in throwing himself with a torturous effort upon his back. A gaunt and ashen face is streaked with awful tears of which such a demon is undeserving; they spill with an effortless enormity from eyes widened and unblinking with a mortal anguish. "Yueshang."
"Please. Please. Don' hurt me." He sounds as if an infant, gibbering his exhortation to ears that I fear may soon become deaf to his grief.
"Is it painful, Yueshang?" It overtly is; his very soul writhes with a palpable haze of torment beyond what even the cruelest of Inquisitions could achieve. A vast and malevolent hand has raked through his spirit with rending talons, shearing through a heart and mind steeled and blackened with his accumulated barbarities; what lies in its wake is tattered, broken, but no less dreadful.
"Y-yes. Yes."
"I fear to tell you that you will not die." Dismayingly, his soul has not yet begun to trickle in pathetic currents from his broken form; it will remain anchored to this wretched body.
"W-who are you? Who are you? Are you a demon?"
"Be silent, Yueshang." I've no patience for such a devil; certainly none to be accused of being a demon. "Be silent, or I will crush you; I have saved your wicked and worthless life, and it is my prerogative to take it if I so desire." Never before this instant would I have believed that these words would spill from my own lips, in my own voice, as the harvest of my own thoughts and convictions. This is not the thundering resound of a long-past warrior spirit, of Bao Li and her furious strength; this is Kimberly. Perhaps not Kimberly Dmitriovna, but very much myself; that thought allows a smile to crease my lips as if a rose in fullest blossom.
"I... I apologize." This most powerful of men grovels before a girl. "Please, forgive me, Xiannu. Please, have mercy upon me; take pity upon me. Do-do not kill me, I beg of you. I beg of you. Please. I... I will do anything; anything to soothe your fury. I will- I will hold rituals; I will shower the Taoists with gold; I will give you anything that you want."
"That is why I know that your life is not one worth claiming, Yueshang; why your soul is as heavy as lead, even as it is more worthless than copper. You have not once apologized to me for your cruelties; you have not once begged forgiveness for the evil that you have wrought, Yueshang." And, yet, I kneel beside him as if the Bodhisattva; with an effortless and fluid grace, I fold onto one knee, easing beside this devil cloying with opium.
"Whatever do you mean-"
"Be silent." However I shiver with disgust as the slightest contact with this abomination, my fury cannot be stilled; the crack of my palm upon a tissue paper cheek raises a blazing welter and a fine streak of vermillion that seeps in agonizing trickles along broken and bruised flesh. "Do not presume to ask anything of Xiannu, Yueshang. You have been abandoned; your guardians, your treasonous and vile Russians, have died or lie broken before you; the women that you have enslaved cannot even see what suffering is being visited upon their worthless and humbled master.
"Does it not feel most singular, Yueshang, to know that the women whom you brutishly coveted as whores have reduced you to this? That we have subordinated you; that you are a slave to every desire, every whim. My love, my wife," a gratification beyond articulation ripples through me at his pathetic and gnashing snarl that tumbles with noiseless frailty into the depths of his agony, "Spared you at my request. It is our prerogative to spare you, and I think that is perhaps cruelest of all for you, isn't it?"
I confront complete silence, broken by another slap, as if upon a petulant child.
"Answer me, Yueshang. Does this not humiliate you? Does this not make you desire the embrace of death, even knowing what awaits you? Answer me, or I will see to it that you are delivered unto your enemies in this state, ravaged and inviting their sundry cruelties. I suspect that they would be much more imaginative than I." As this vicious command streams from within me, eloquence stirred by my disgust and revulsion, a silent and serene certainty that he is not worthy of a killing blow stills those fears that I would destroy him without further thought.
"Answer me."
"Yes. I... I am humiliated by you. You are women, and yet-"
"I did not ask for explanation, Yueshang." Another blow. "You are a slave; do not speak to your mistress as if you are an equal, or ever could be. I feel sickened to even breathe the air that you have befouled." Xi Go does not interrupt this gloating; it's a relief that she does not, that she trusts that I can restrain those bestial impulses that remain with such furious and brutal presence in the fringes of my mind. They lie cloaked, crouching in stifling shadow, and yet I've no doubt that they would spring forth with an avid malice if afforded the briefest opportunity.
"Ariadne?" It feels as if an eternity has passed since I have spoken her name, and yet she has remained beside us, silent and accepting, as if resigned to her role as but an observer in this drama.
"K-Kimberly, I..." A quiet and tortured murmur, as if consumed by an indescribable anguish; it raises a brief flicker of dismay, but not remorse or regret, for the brazen embrace that Xi Go and I shared. It was not to torment my friend further in her loss, but a cringing knot nevertheless settles within my stomach; a yearning to alleviate that sorrow buoys with a frantic enormity within me.
"Please, come, Ariadne. I... I know that you would never again wish to glimpse this brute, but I desire for you to behold his humiliation, his ruination." I do; a craving for her to savor his destruction is overpowering, a bequest in consolation for the unwitting rejection that I know will torment her in its terrible and enduring loss.
"Kimberly, I will." A quiet, rhythmic percussion of heels upon the grandiose marble, now stained scarlet with ghoulish smears of departed lives, places Ariadne beside me. While I loathe to permit my gaze to stray from the exquisite spectacle of this humbled king, a brief flicker of my eyes yields a tortured storm of clashing emotions flaring through lovely and limpid chestnut pools rendered turbid with swirling currents of hate, fear, dread, and rage; slender fingers quake with an unutterable yearning for violence that boils forth in momentous plumes of scarlet seething with an electric azure aura.
"Do you know who I am?" Astonishingly, Ariadne also speaks Wu, albeit with a halting and brittle tone raw with barely subdued emotion. "Do you know who I am?"
"A whore." That petulant defiance astonishes me; perhaps less, however, than the blow that my enduring friend delivers to his fragile chest. The parting of bone resounds with a savage crackle, and I fear that I will be forced to intervene as Xi Go had with me, and I her. Quiet, piteous gurgles seep with a fine trickle of blood from his pursed and drawn lips, and his hands, shuddering with a wondrous torment, clasp upon his broken body.
"I am not a whore." A stern and steely whisper, of the utmost, elegant dignity that revives wholly my image of the Ariadne of Saint Petersburg; a lady of retiring grace and refinement, almost dainty, even with the stiletto point of one heel lodged in this brute's chest. "I am not a whore."
"Her name is Ariadne, Yueshang." I do not offer her patronymic or surname; they mean nothing with a wretched beast of a father. "She is my friend. Do you understand now why we were so eager to liberate her from this hell?" Eyes widen further with a liquid and beautiful terror that invokes the soaring chorus of angelic delight within my soul. "I love Ariadne very deeply, Yueshang, and I wonder why you were so reticent to release her. Do you not have quite enough women to abuse, Yueshang?" His silken Mandarin's garb has become slick with fine rivulets of blood, and I wince at the contact of that diseased filth as fine fingers become steel anew upon such squandered extravagance. My voice has risen to a severe and malevolent pitch, a twitching, relentless compulsion shivering through my hands that seems to command another blow, and another, and another.
"Answer me, Yueshang."
"She is very valuable." Finally, a whispered and almost abashed reply.
"I am aware of that, you simpleton." I laugh; consumed by this vicious and vindictive thrall, I actually laugh, a terrible, airy, and exaggeratedly languid bark of cruelty. "I am quite aware of how valuable my friend is; but I can see that you are not. But, would you care to explain, Yueshang, why you would not part with her for a mountain of gold?"
"She is more valuable than any amount you could carry." A cryptic wheeze, little more than a monotone shiver of a murmur.
"Kimberly, this-"
"No." I'm astonished that Ariadne would interrupt him, but I silence her with a terseness that conjures a guilty flush into my cheeks. "Why is she, Yueshang? I would imagine that a heap of gold-"
"She is adored by a very special client." Finally, Yueshang cooperates, even as Ariadne is consumed by this unaccountable reticence.
"It does not matter, Kimberly." My friend interrupts again, her lovely tones reduced to a pitiful and almost pleading whimper. "Why- why does it matter? Should we not just leave? I'm- I'm sure that the police-"
"They will not enter." Xi Go, jarringly, speaks. "They will find it quite impossible until we are prepared."
"There's no need to be concerned about that, Ariadne." My eyes briefly relax their triumphant grip upon Yueshang to behold my beloved friend wracked with an unsuppressed dread, fine features ashen and full lips drawn to a taut seam. "Ariadne?"
"Kimberly, I..."
"He's a very wealthy client; he pays piles of money for this one." Yueshang speaks as if entranced, a low, slurred stream of syllables trickling from broken lips.
"Kimberly, he's-"
"Won't have anybody else; always needs this one. I asked him why, he told me that she's 'mportant; dunno why." Yueshang is not dying; he teeters upon the cusp of incapacitation, however, weighty lids drooping miserably upon glazed chips of onyx.
"He's lying. There's- there's no one like that-"
"Why else'd I keep this... This girl," even in his stupor, he seems to dread the prospect of retribution, biting back that vulgar word that would send my fist plunging into a pulverized chest, "'Less someone wan... Wanted her."
"Who?" Who is this monster? Who is this pernicious and unforgivable beast who will fall beneath my fury? "Who is it, Yueshang? What is his name?"
"I dunno."
"Tell me his name, or I'll allow my wife to tear you in half." A savage tension grips him, eyes flaring open with the straining pressure that bulges upon his throat at the further contortion of his costume, and yet he refuses to answer. "Who?"
"T-tellin' you the truth, X-Xiannu... Guy... Guy... Dunno the guy's name; never gives it. He... He 'dores that girl."
"You know nothing about him?"
"Big-big man. Startin'-startin' to go from the dragon, though."
"What?"
"O-opium. Startin'... Startin' to lose it from opium, Xiannu. He- he's massive. Really, really big guy. I- he comes with this girl, and... I dunno what they do with her, but..."
"What is his name, Yueshang?"
"Why?"
"If you don't tell me anything, everything, you will not survive the night."
"Can't tell you 'is name, 'cause I dunno it..." Yueshang's lucidity has begun to dissolve again; even the fiercest, asphyxiating tension yields little more than a mild flicker of awareness.
"Does he call himself anything?"
"M-Mister V. That's it. E-even 'f you kill- kill me, I can't... Can't tell you anything else."
"Do you promise me this, Yueshang?" My gaze locked furiously with his, I'm overcome with the sense that his very thoughts are bared to a stare that penetrates into the very depths of a diseased and pernicious soul. With the narrowest of focus, I struggle to confine myself merely to this; to glimpse, in the wild and disoriented whirl of his sightless eyes, any effort at deception. There is none.
"P-promise, Xiannu. I-I promise."
"I..." However that vengeful, blazing savagery may have ebbed to a cool nadir, the notion of abandoning this bestial creature to life, ensconced amongst his odious luxuries and consumed by the pernicious and cruel satisfaction of his vulgar depredations, ignites a renewed flood of swollen and insufferable torment. It does not seem so much a matter of vengeance, of retribution, as it is mere justice to rid this world of so abominable an evil as this; perhaps compassion to sunder him from his own blighted and vile compulsions. It seems liberation from whatever demonic presence has possessed a once pure and untarnished soul, warping gentle and serene childhood into such monstrous, wanton barbarity.
"He will suffer a life of wretched pain from these injuries, Kimberly; no physician can mend them." At once, as those pathetic, glassy beads finally vanish beneath a curtain of caramel flesh, this fierce and savage focus, this throbbing and vigorous conviction and steely intensity, evaporates; a welter of enervation swims through me, a relentless and insatiable predator that devours with avid and hungry rapacity every trace of that singularly supernatural strength that had once suffused every tendon with a quaking ferocity.
It is as if my love's words have wholly quenched the lingering embers of a fiery compulsion for retribution that once raged and howled with infernal enormity; now, sagging with an exhausted rush of breath from a throat ragged with snarling hatred upon the icy chill of the marble, I feel nothing but a fervent yearning to be rid of this waking nightmare. I crave an immediate distance from this charnel house, awash in the nightmarish, metallic tang of blood and the swelling, sense-scouring odor of fading life; those that continue to draw breath in unhurried, eerily serene gasps exude an aura of taint more awful than the dead.
A yearning to evaporate from this; for, with that curious, blinking celerity, Xi Go to usher us away from this earthly glimpse of some bloodied hell.
"Shego?" The gentlest of caresses lingers upon my bare shoulder, a glorious warmth settling across skin chilled with this abominable, dead palace's arctic evil.
"Yes, Kimberly?"
"I'd like to go home, Shego." A sentiment that's perhaps as desperately childish as it is irrepressibly urgent, clamoring for release from this.
"Of course, Kimberly." And I'm borne aloft again with an effortless and easy grace, though we do not take flight away from this; my mind at once drifts to Ariadne, deep and tortured eyes glazed with some impossible and indecipherable emotion as they bore into the fallen and crippled form of her captor.
"Ariadne?" A beat, extending into an insufferable eternity of silence. "Ariadne? Are-are you all right, Ariadne?"
"I have nowhere to go, Kimberly." Gaze anchored unyieldingly upon Du, she refuses to shift in even the slightest degree; her heels do not rise by a single inch; she seems bound by some demonic spell to this awful hall.
"W-what do you mean, Ariadne? You..." That sentence dies a death of utter ignominy in the depths of my throat. Would I desire to return with a woman that I loved with a passion blazing with Apollo's fury and her wife; would I wish to be tormented eternally by the unutterable cruelty of that wondrous and beauteous, natural adoration between lovers that would now escape me?
"You must want to rest for even tonight." A feeble and awkward conclusion.
"With you?" My thoughts are painfully transparent, I realize. "With you and Miss Shego, Kimberly?" The mildest quiver of a laugh, anguished but without any enduring bitterness or malice, eases from within her; it's a terrible, cruel parody of mirth, a poisoned dagger into the black heart of an uncaring universe and its awful sense of irony.
"I..."
"You are in love, Kimberly; I cannot begrudge you that, as I would hope that you would not me."
"Still-"
"No, Kimberly." A quavering sigh. As my beloved friend turns, I am confronted by a gaze wrenchingly ancient; consumed with a grief and misery transcending her years, it threatens to raise a horrid, acid mist of tears into my eyes anew. "No. I'm sorry, but I cannot endure that. It... I do not understand what had happened, but seeing you and Miss Shego, I..." Dark eyes retreat beneath pale and quivering lids, enormous eyelashes dampened with an excruciating moisture. "Even a kiss is more than I can bear, Kimberly. It is not your fault; you are not to blame for falling in love, and I cannot even begin to imagine what has become of you. But, you cannot expect me to be happy for you more than this; I cannot stand by your side as your friend and pretend that all life is wonderful and perfect for the joy that you have found."
"I'm sorry, Ariadne." A harsh, hot, and woeful whisper; my gaze flickering to Xi Go, I discover that she can offer me merely the mildest of smiles, sloe gaze consumed with a guilty grief. "I am so sorry; I cannot even begin to tell you how-"
"Why, Kimberly?" She interrupts with a fierce and blazing intensity. "Why would you apologize? Why would you hurt me more with this?"
"I don't-"
"You should understand, Kimberly. This is the worst hell I have ever suffered, and yet you're apologizing for the love that has created it. I... I know that it must be difficult to understand, but it should be obvious; do not apologize for this love, and do not regret it. If it must cause me so much pain, then I expect that you should live your lives without shame and reserve; it would be a waste of my tears, an affront to them, if you were to be sorrowful for that." And she does weep; sorrowful, gleaming beads of molten torment, an angel's grief that thunders in silent cascades across her cheeks.
"I love you, Ariadne."
"I am glad for you and Miss Shego, Kimberly; what you have is... Is something that only those in love could understand. It makes me as happy to see you together, to know that you are so overjoyed, as it crushes me, Kimberly; I do not dissemble. I would not lie about that. I wouldn't be sobbing like this if- if..." A harsh and dreadful sniffle. "If I were only angry, if I were only consumed by this envy that will never be relieved."
"What will you do, Ariadne?"
"I... I don't know." A whisper of ingenuous misery. "I do not know, Kimberly; perhaps there is nothing left for me. I... I have no worthwhile education; I have not even a maiden's chastity to call my own. I do not desire a husband, and I am too tarnished for marriage, in any event."
"You..." A nightmare epiphany strikes me, and I find myself beside her at once, my fingers fastening with a renewed strength upon one slender, fine wrist. "Please, do not."
"Why, Kimberly? Why? Is it because you don't want the guilt of..." Raising unseeing eyes to the towering ceiling, my friend seems to implore the universe for an answer; she finally speaks when it seems as if one will never emerge from the divine. "You have no need for guilt; you have no need to grieve for me, Kimberly. You should have a clear conscience."
"Don't be stupid, Ariadne; please. Please, don't be stupid."
"I am seventeen years of age, Kimberly; I have already suffered more misery than anyone should. What do I have left?"
"Your life; the friendship and love of two that care so much for you."
"And whom I cannot bear to see. No, I think-"
"Do not be so foolish, or so short-sighted."
"Kimberly-"
"We have fought and killed for you, Ariadne; we have struggled, and... And I am covered in blood; my hands are awash in it, as is my soul, even if it had been for our own protection. And, now you tell me that none of that matters?"
"I will die free; that is what matters to me. I will die happy."
"Don't be an idiot." I, at long last, can no longer restrain my anger; those words emerge as a harsh, rending snarl, raking across my raw and tortured throat. "Don't be so stupid. What do you wish for me to say, Ariadne? Oh, please, take your life so that you won't need to think about Shego and me being together, being happy! Is that what you want to hear from me, Ariadne?" I browbeat her as I never have, as I never would have envisioned, with an anger surpassing anything that has ever claimed me in its furious grasp. It is not a warrior's rage; it is a hysterical, fulminating passion, a womanly and overwhelming and awful, knotting anger that churns within my stomach, that raises horrible, fearful prickles of tears into my eyes.
"What do you want to hear from me, Ariadne? Tell me. Be- be that selfish, and I'll obey you without a second thought. You've taken that knife, haven't you?" I know that she has; its luster glares through my soul, some terrible and pernicious asp prepared to claim a life that has so recently been saved.
"Kimberly-"
"No!" I interrupt a low and plaintive moan. "Tell me. Tell me straight to my face that you want to kill yourself, that you want to bury that evil man's knife in your throat like a martyr to our love; anoint it with your blood." I wail in Russian, no longer able to contain myself. I realize that, once before, I had screamed at Ariadne in this fashion; I understand, at long last, for what reason her rejection that had writhed through my breast with a seething electric torment, and why she would have been so cruel. She feared for her soul, and for mine; now, she fears for being a burden, and I feel virtually as if I could kill her for that pernicious, selfish parody of altruism.
"Isn't that what you would ask of me, Ariadne? Damn it, why won't you just tell me that, if it's so important?" I cannot flush at my obscenities; I cannot feel shame at this howling, histrionic madness. I cannot bear to suffer this loss; for Ariadne to quit me now, following so much anguish, would be the most terrible blow I have ever suffered without feeling as if I would vanish from Xi Go's embrace.
Claiming the blade from her grasp, I feel its heft, the solid, sleek chill of the terrible metal against my palm; it is a serpent's fang, bloodied and monstrous upon my skin. The grip whispers with a subdued malevolence as it turns of its own accord; the blade finds her throat, hovering upon an ashen and yielding canvas to be reddened in sacrifice.
"Just tell me, Ariadne, and I will take your life for you." My heart thunders in my chest, my soul screaming for this madness to end; for her to come to her senses, to rage at me, to shriek in mortal and unfathomable terror at the fulminating insanity of this awful, sanguine dragon's fury.
She weeps; not with betrayal, but with an agony of terror and doubt and suffering that has mounted for years. Still, rigid, quivering with the enormous awfulness of this monstrous embrace, her eyes swim with a molten haze of raw torment. Rouged lips trembling, she nevertheless cannot muster a single word.
"Ariadne! Damn it, tell me what you want! Do you want to die? Do you want to live? What do you want? I won't let you leave me on your own terms; just as before, I will never, ever let you say goodbye." I, too, am sobbing; much like that afternoon, voice convulsed with a directionless and grief-stricken anger, staining her fine silken gown with my tears as I buried my face upon her shoulder, refusing to release her. I astounded myself with my strength that day, a brief flicker of that warrior's fury consuming me.
She had vowed that we could no longer be friends, that some secret I would never understand would sunder us; that it would be best if we were to be separated. I could not abide such a notion, such silliness, such fatuous and inarticulate folly. I was never assertive before that day, and never again, but I would not allow Ariadne to leave me. Even now, as I know that the love I feel will never be of that hot and savage and craving passion that devours me with Xi Go, I will not permit it to seep through my fingers as if some elusive mist.
"Tell me!" Again, I scream; without restraint, I howl and bay as if a demon.
"Kimberly." Finally, Ariadne speaks; her voice rings with a sudden and resounding clarity, even as this mad and rolling, heaving bewilderment swims around me. It feels as if reality has been set into a shuddering and impossible, jarring motion, drifting and rocking as though a tempest-tossed clipper, with the anguished emotions flooding through me. "Kimberly. I love you."
"I love you." Lips shivering, jaw straining, my eyes overflowing with harsh and savage tears, I pray to everything that this is not the natural flow of this life. "I love you."
"I will not leave you. Not- not in spirit, Kimberly." At those words, her gaze alighting with a radiance that truly awes me, my hand relaxes; a desultory clamor is all that announces the passage of the blade from my grasp, and I throw myself into her arms, my own devouring her.
"You are so stupid, Ariadne. You are such an idiot. You- you shouldn't terrify your friend like that." Though it is not the embrace that she craves, my lips nevertheless fasten upon her cheek, again and again, a rain of gentle and chaste kisses upon shivering skin dampened with a sickly and chilled sweat.
"I... I could say the same to you." Her answer seems nearly wry, even through wailing sobs of sudden and extraordinary absolution.
"I'm sorry." I... I was prepared to kill my friend, to kill Ariadne; to murder with a hot and angry agony my sister, a woman that occupies such a powerful place in a soul that is also of Kimberly Dmitriovna. "I'm sorry."
"Do not be. I- I was foolish. I... I could just think of nothing but that pain, that it all might be for nothing."
"You will live, Ariadne. You will live. I promise you that."
"I... I will. But, I cannot bear to be with you and Miss Shego. I'm sorry. Not now, in any event." I do understand; it does not pain me perhaps as intensely as I had feared. "You and your beautiful wife have lives of your own to live." Merely the vaguest, unsteadiest suggestion of a tormented smile.
"What will you do, then, Ariadne?"
"I do not know." A sullen and uncertain shake of her head, fine auburn locks whispering across her shoulders. "I don't know."
"I can help you, Ariadne." And Xi Go materializes beside us.
"W-what do you mean?" She stiffens in my arms, her gaze flickering between Xi Go and me.
"Here." And, at once, with that marvelous and impossible prestidigitation, bereft of any trace of a magician's fanciful techniques of conjuration, there swells a mountain of bills beside my love; whispering heaps of paper that bear in their curious, hollow faces a value for which so much has been ruined. "I... I know that it is so very little, but... As foolish and pathetic as it is, one must have money to survive."
"That..." Sorrowful chestnut pools cloud with a conflicted swell of truly palpable emotion. "That is so kind of you, Miss Shego. I... I do not know what to say." A deep and quivering breath. "I hate this dreadful, filthy money, but I do know that it is needed."
"It is yours; every pound, Ariadne." Beside it, conjured from the ether, is a trunk; stout leather, it springs open at a gentle breath as though in the throes of a pummeling hurricane, the bulging heap streaming into its infinitely capacious bowels. "It is a tiny shard of the magic that you will find for yourself; I know this." My love speaks those words with a solemnity that raises a renewed flood of tears before my sight.
"This is farewell, isn't it?" Those words are my own; a sudden and wrenching epiphany that forces me, once again, into Ariadne's arms.
"Only for awhile, Kimberly. Don't- don't be so silly." A lingering embrace, savoring, once again, that familiar and yet so very singular, distant warmth; it is not that sensual, seething love, but it bears with it the whisper of quiet and beauteous nights amid the porcelain chill of winter, praying and pleading for a future that had yet to arrive.
I realize only that we have parted when a curtain of awful and scalding mist reveals a beloved friend retreating into the distant darkness, her voice resounding through an eternity that I hope will see me through until our next meeting.
"We'll meet again, Kimberly. Invite me to your wedding. I will always love you."
"I love you, Ariadne!" I cry out, the love that defines me claiming my hand as the love that once had vanishes from sight.