When Hong'er was a little girl, she fell off a wall, trying to get a better view of a festival. (Viewing the festival had not been her plan when first she climbed. But it was by the time she fell.)
The Crown Princess, Taizi Dianxia Xie Lian, wasn't even a 神女 yet, but she nearly flew across the square to catch a falling child, scruffy and irrelevant and homely and unworthy though she was. Dianxia waved off her attendants to make sure that nothing of a little girl was all right.
A royal cousin unfit to even look at, let alone be related to, dianxia - joins the endless parade of abusers, and there again to play the rescuer is Xie Lian, gentle white magic soothing all Hong'er's hurts. It's worth the beating. It would be even if dianxia didn't take her up the hill to where she practices sword forms -
- where she's promptly kicked out again, but that's not dianxia's fault.
Hong'er's not welcome at home - well, even less welcome, she's never been especially welcome - and anyway she feels safer, better, curled up behind a statue of Taizi Dianxia Xie Lian, holding her flower and her sword, wrists wrapped in her magical ribbons, smiling beatifically out at the world while sheltering a little Hong'er behind her.
She won't eat the offerings. They're for dianxia, and Hong'er's not going to steal dianxia's things.
The parade of bullies picks up again, this time invading the peace of the shrine, and the statue can't do anything but look on -
- but the real thing can.
The assailants are whisked away, pulled off Hong'er aglow with white light, and she scolds them and sends them running, and kneels beside Hong'er - she shouldn't kneel, she's the princess -
"- dianxia, this one is not worth such attention," murmurs Hong'er.
"Don't be silly. You're hurt, and I can heal you. - you look hungry -" She pulls a bowl of fruit from the offerings, holds it out to Hong'er. There's a red umbrella in it, too, and paper money and incense.
"- those are your offerings, dianxia!"
"I don't need them. You do. If they're mine, I can give them to you." She presses the fruit bowl into Hong'er's lap. Runs her hands over bloodied lips and bruised ribs, healing as she goes. "If you don't eat, how will you live?"
"Dianxia, is it so important that this one live? What for? I have - I have nothing and no one and I wish over and over for the strength to end it, every day is misery - what should I live for?"
"If you have nothing else, live for me," says Xie Lian. "If you don't have anything else, I will be your reason. Will you live for me?"
"As taizi dianxia wishes," murmurs Hong'er, and she eats the fruit, and Xie Lian leaves.
War comes. Hong'er is thirteen years old and a girl, but thirteen year old girls are a force to be reckoned with. If you put them on the battlefield sometimes they pop up after an injury with enough power to wipe out a legion. They give her a sword and send her to fight Yong'an. Yong'an, which is pathetically ungrateful for everything dianxia has been working so hard to do for everyone. Dianxia is trying so hard, they say she never sleeps, and these assholes dump more problems in her lap? Hong'er is happy to kill them.
All that and dianxia still has to hunt. Witches are attracted to battlefields, but fighting them still takes time away from the field, and they can't have her commanding them all the time.
Hong'er can see the entrances that dianxia goes through.
When she takes longer than usual to come out of one -
- Hong'er goes in.
Hong'er has never been in a witch before but she's heard about them. This one is a jungle, hot and dense; fruits burst at the least provocation, dripping sickly-sweet juice, and flowers bend in phantom wind to turn their faces to Hong'er's while she bushwhacks through the understory. It stinks of a hundred perfumes. Her sword is soon sticky and encrusted with the guts of bug familiars - giant beetles, centipedes, ants and flies and wasps - and with sap and nectar and fruit sugar, dripping and dripping and dripping.
She has the umbrella dianxia gave her, and it's catching what tries to fall on her skin while she fights off the bugs one handed.
Xie Lian, it transpires, went in without an umbrella.
She doesn't look too badly injured, but she's crumpled on the forest floor, shaking, while a flower, belled in a suggestive shape, like a woman's, leans over her.
Hong'er runs over, beats the flower back with her sword. "Dianxia, dianxia are you all right -"
"I, I, I, you should get out -" Her ribbon is snaking around her, scrubbing at her skin where witch juice has splattered her, but it doesn't seem to be helping. "Dangerous - you're not magical -"
"Dianxia -" The flower monster approaches again and Hua Cheng flies at it. She kills more familiars while she's at it. They can't touch dianxia.
"You should - you should leave. I'm - the sap -"
"No! You could die here!" The witch is hard to keep up with, but she can do it. But if dianxia doesn't get up and hightail it out of the barrier soon Hong'er might run out of stamina and fail her. "You need to get out!"
"I'm not sure I -" Xie Lian almost reaches for Hong'er. Does reach for her, then snatches her hand back. "- you could go get Feng Xin, tell her where I am -" Feng Xin's weapon is a bow, she'll be better able to navigate the dangers of the forest without getting anything on her.
"You aren't able to stand! If I go for help you won't be here when it arrives!"
The flower is still circling them, going in for the kill and having to be swatted back. It's not that hard for a nonmagical thirteen year old with a sword, it must rely almost entirely on the poison - what is it doing to dianxia -
"Can you come out with me, if you lean on me -"
"I don't think I'd better try.
Will you do me a favor?"
"Anything."
"Take my gem and my sword to Feng Xin or Mu Qing."
And dianxia picks up her sword and thrusts it through her own heart.
"DIANXIA!"
Well, she said 'anything', so. She picks up the gem, a beautiful white pearly earring, and the sword, in her umbrella hand, and she fights her way out of the witch and brings the precious items to dianxia's friends.
"What happened to her? - don't answer that. Get out."
Xie Lian is commanding the army again the next day.
Hong'er should never have doubted her.
The war gets uglier, and uglier, and uglier, and dianxia is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful through it all, and somewhere in there a teenage girl gets injured -
- and pops up again -
- but it's too late. Xianle has fallen, the capital is overwhelmed, the royal family is missing.
People are looking for them. Not friendly people, either.
She looks too. If she can't find them, that's good: it means they are hard to find. If she can find them, that's good: it means she can protect them.
That was the plan, anyway.
She failed, she failed, she failed, it is worse than she could possibly have imagined, she isn't the one being hurt and she still feels like she's dying, her gem goes as dark as a mundane cabochon, she should be dead, she should be dead rather than endure this failure.
But that was not what she wished for.
So she's still there, when Bai Wuxiang leaves well-fed. She's still alive and still seething.
No one survives the fire.
She has no magic left. She can't heal her beloved, can't put more magic back into her. She can go hunt, with dianxia's sword, because her own scimitar needs more magic than the none she has. (Why isn't she dead?) She kills a witch and it feels like cutting through butter, after the way Bai Wuxiang cut her down. She takes its seed to dianxia. She goes out looking for another one.
The witches feel different. She thinks at first it's something about not having magic, or borrowing dianxia's sword - she gives it back, where dianxia's lying asleep with her half-restored gem, once she has enough brightness to summon her scimitar again - but it isn't either, it's something else. Something about how the air inside them sits on her skin has changed, something about the way she finds their barriers is new. She didn't even notice, when she hunted down the first few, that she wasn't dowsing - you can't dowse, with a night-dark gem; there's no light to flicker. They just drew her in, like the sea draws rain.
She can kill them the normal way. She can use their seeds the normal way.
She can also -
- she's not sure what else she can do, but there's something.
She sits by herself, meditating on the subtle changes in how she orients to the world, to her body, to her gem.
The gem, not the body, is the girl.
Her gem can go all dark and she can still operate. Is her gem still where she lives?
She - throws it, straight up, high enough that she ought to lose connection with her senses for a moment while it stalls and begins to drop again toward her.
She does lose contact with her body, but only for a second, and then, before the gem has turned in the air and begun to fall, she feels -
- it's sort like dissociating. She is not quite in her body, which she knew but now feels, and instead she's
not the gem, the gem is not her any longer,
instead she's somewhere outside of space entirely.
When she can see again, her body has collapsed onto a carpet of flowers, lit with sourceless silver radiance, surrounded by walls glistening with blood. The gem falls onto her chest, bounces off, lands on a chrysanthemum. She collects it and puts it back where it belongs on her hair.
The flower-place feels unlike a witch. She can't quite put her finger on it, but witches have begun to feel different to her, and this is different still. Also, there are no familiars in it, which could just mean that a brand new baby witch hatched right under her while she was conducting her experiment but -
- what has become of her? Is she, somehow, a witch? Is she dangerous? Should she go jump in a volcano, lest she somehow harm dianxia?
What is she?
She puzzles over this for a pretty long time. Keeps track of dianxia from a safe distance, while she figures out what she can do and if she's liable to lose control of any of it.
Maybe she's like Bai Wuxiang. A witch who can speak. But Bai Wuxiang doesn't have a gem, and doesn't use a barrier; if she and Hong'er are both partway between the two, it's in different ways.
She is sure enough that she won't hurt dianxia, at least sure enough that it's not better to leave her alone, and so lonely, abandoned by everyone who should have worshipped her and stood by her side.
When dianxia needs someone, no matter what for, she'll be there.
She catches up to dianxia. She puts on a mask - not half-laughing-half-crying like the one on Bai Wuxiang, she never wants to resemble Bai Wuxiang, but a plain, simple smile.
"- what's your name?"
"I don't have one."
"All right. Wuming. If you want to help, fine."
(Wuming helps.)
(Wuming helps begin, and Wuming helps end, when dianxia has changed her mind.)
(Dianxia can't handle that many witches on her own.)
(Wuming rushes ahead of her with no idea whatsoever what she's planning to do about it. Can dianxia handle half that many witches?)
(Probably not.)
(But Wuming can.)
She doesn't know how long it takes before she's conscious again, after that.
She drifts, maybe dreams.
She promised - she wished - to never - never ever -
She comes back to herself in stages.
She is someone; there are times, one after another; she is somewhere.
Not "she is located somewhere". More "somewhere is her".
Somewhere is her. There's no body, no bones and arms and eyes and suchlike. But she has a dim awareness of it. No, not dim; indistinct but by virtue of inexperience. She thinks she can learn to be somewhere.
Is she a witch? She doesn't want to be a witch, unless dianxia happens to be in dire need of a seed. If she is a witch she supposes the priority is to make sure she can lie down and die in the event of such a thing. Does she have familiars?
The answer turns out to be "not yet". But after a long time - it's hard to tell how long, with no days, no nights, no heartbeats - she learns how.
She is full of butterflies, the ends of their feet sticky with the taste of blood, their wings flashing silver in light she fills herself with from nowhere once she's re-learned to see, images of dripping flowers brought to her in millions of insect-facet glimpses.
And one day, some of the butterflies pile into each other, forming a shape, a figure. A body, with bones and arms and eyes and suchlike.
She finds her gem not too long after that. It's dark, but it doesn't matter, something else tethers her to this world. Her own inability to join the ranks of those who abandoned Taizi Dianxia.
Where... is Taizi Dianxia.
She doesn't know. She doesn't even know how to find out. It's taken her years to put herself this much back together, she finds when she emerges from herself - years in which dianxia could have gone in any direction, suffered any fate.
And she's still not sure she's safe. She's something like a witch; she has some sort of witch powers. She doesn't know how to use them yet, and if any of them were out of control -
- she'll look, of course, for her beloved, but it will be best if she finds her only when she's ready to be of use.
Hua Cheng gets to work.