When Xingxi was nine, the Long River flooded and half of Qiao Village’s houses, including her own, were destroyed. She remembered the night she spent on Uncle Jin’s roof, huddled together sleeping on salvaged blankets. She spent most of the night watching the stars move across the sky, closing her eyes for a few moments only to wake with a completely different tableau above her.
This was to say she had seen her community in crisis before. She had witnessed the adults organize into groups and to clear the flooded houses of valuables and the village larder of food. Families were crowded inside the houses that remained untouched by water, sleeping alongside bushels of grain.
Once the water levels had receded, the Qiao rebuilt the damaged homes. No one was harmed, and so no one mourned. All that was lost, Tangyou had maintained, were merely things.
The adults sometimes told tales of war, but it was as a faraway concept as Heaven. Xingxi could not imagine an army numbering in the hundreds, much less the thousands. The Qiao did not number even one hundred. The thought of a legion of Heaven’s army descending upon a small village in Clear Water Mountain seemed like something out of a shadow puppet play, rather than the reality she was currently experiencing.
Like during the flood, the adults mobilized quickly. Weapons were distributed among those who could fight. Those who could not were told to hide with the children inside the most reinforced building in town: Prince Wenrong’s archives, built to protect his precious records from water and wind. In the face of total obliteration, every adult chose to take up arms, even if what they wielded was simply a rake.
It frustrated Xingxi to still be included with the children. She had seen her father fighting as she flew back to Clear Water Mountain; his eagle form was a shadow against brilliant gold, his position only visible because of the trees he uprooted and flung at Heaven’s army. She wanted to join them once her message was delivered. Instead, she was instructed to go with the children into the archives. To guard them, her mother had instructed. So she remained at her post, holding little Liya’s hand. Even the fox girl’s gentle poet father had grabbed a spear to everyone’s surprise.
Her other arm was wrapped around Qiping, who rested her head against Xingxi’s shoulder. Despite her attempts at outward calm, Xingxi felt like her heart was pounding out of her chest. Could Qiping hear? The girl was listless, withdrawn into her own mind as she is wont to do in times of stress.
Outside, the world was red. The air was filled with the screeching of metal on metal, metal on wood, and metal on flesh. Above the staccato of weapons were arias of moans, the initial battlecries giving way to primal screams, the final breath escaping from lungs.
In the midst of the destruction and cacophony, Liya started to sing. Xingxi squeezed the girl’s hand to shush her.
“I’m scared,” the fox child whimpered.
“I know,” Xingxi said. “But we need to keep quiet.”
“I want my mommy.”
“Mommy’s doing her best protecting you.”
The children hid amidst the dusty scrolls, holding their breaths to disappear within the ink in the scrolls. Xingxi, taller than the adults who huddled with them, hovered over everyone like a brooding bird.
She kept an ear towards a doorway, half to guard against intruders, half in a desperate hope she would hear her father’s voice among the din. She was already on high alert when someone knocked at the door.
Xingxi moved swiftly to put herself between the door and the others. With practiced speed she knocked an arrow and aimed her bow at the door. She glanced back at the children, signaling them to remain quiet.
A fog began to creep through the cracks in the door. Xingxi was about to release the arrow when a familiar voice sounded from the other side.
“It’s me, children. Open the door.”
“Mother!” Qiping ran from Xingxi’s side to open the door, despite the older girl’s caution.
“Qiping, wait, it could be a trap!” Xingxi kept her bow trained on the door as it opened, but it wasn’t a trap. There was Bixian, unchanged as she had always been, be it the five years Xingxi had known her or the two years she had been missing.
Qiping paused for a moment, trying to process the person before her. A moment of pure surprise, followed by a yell without word or meaning as the girl leapt into her mother’s arms.
Bixian held onto her daughter tightly, swaying gently so her long hair cascaded down between them like a curtain. “I’m sorry it has been so long,” Bixian said. She took a step back to look at Qiping’s face. “You have grown so much.”
Xingxi’s shoulder relaxed as the weight of responsibility was lifted from her onto an actual adult. “What do we do, Auntie Bixian? Is the fighting bad out there?”
“Are our parents okay?” One of Xiongmu’s sons asked. In the dark, Xingxi could not tell if it was the human or the bear.
Bixian let go of Qiping and led her back to Xingxi’s side. “It will all be over soon,” she said. “Please, trust me.” She beckoned Liya towards her and knelt down at the girl’s side. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
Xingxi watched with horror as Bixian drew a knife from her belt and with one clean motion made a cut along the girl’s spine. Golden light spilled from Liya’s back and filled the dark archive. Bixian reached into the incision and after some searching began to pull. Liya screamed, high pitched and primal, then fell unconscious as Bixian pulled a red pelt from the girl’s back. Xingxi stared at the mass of fur until it hit her: Bixian held Liya’s fox form in her hands.
Xingxi screamed and lunged at Bixian as she gently laid Liya on the ground. The eagle child was able to grab the blade with her hand, clenching her teeth as it cut through her palm. There was no warm spray of blood. Instead, golden light glowed from the wound, and beneath that were scattered feathers: her demon form slipping through.
Bixian wrested the knife from Xingxi and held out her hand, and Xingxi was suddenly frozen in place. Like the day they first met, Bixian summoned a wind to hold the eagle girl in place. She tried desperately to lift her hands, to scream, but she could not overpower Bixian’s will. She glanced over at Qiping, who stood still as stone. She thought Bixian had frozen her own daughter, until Qiping took a shaky step back.
The other children huddled behind her as Bixian walked towards them. Even as she held the knife, Bixian spoke softly. “Please, this won’t hurt a bit. It’s for your own good.” The same tone used to calm pigs before their slaughter. She glanced over at Qiping, desperation betrayed in her eyes. “You know this knife, Qiping. It doesn’t draw blood. It’ll just take away your demon half.”
Qiping shook her head and took another step back, her arms spread to protect the others.
“You’ll be killed otherwise,” Bixian pleaded. “There is no place in the world for the likes of you. This is the only way you’ll get to see your parents. Qiping, help me!”
Qiping did not speak. She stared into the red night behind Bixian, wishing the wind would come in and rip the nightmare away.
She was the first to see a shadow behind the crane, and ducked as a great gale blasted through the door and Bixian was assailed by a giant eagle.
Xingxi felt her limbs go lax as Bixian’s concentration was broken. She was free, but she still stood in place, watching her father attack her best friend’s mother. He was clearly wounded, half of the feathers of his right wing stripped away and his right leg missing entirely.
He glanced back briefly. “What are you doing?” he cried. “Fly away, Xingxi!”
Xingxi broke the remaining bonds holding her in place and ran. There was no time to glance back at Qiping and the others, no time to feel joy that her father was still alive. Her body was powered by nothing but fear as she ran past Bixian and flew into the red night.
-
Luo Feiyi lay dying in the archives, helpless as he watched Bixian take the demon children’s pelts.
There was no question he was going to fall against her. He was heavily injured after fighting Heaven’s army for hours. All she had to do was corrall children.
He had barely made it back to Qiao Village, and rested in a juniper tree, keeping an eye on Yildun as she let fly arrow after arrow against the red sky. He was about to leap into the fray again when he spied Bixian entering the archives, where he sensed his children were staying. He watched in horror as the first pelt was taken from the fox girl, as Xingxi, brave till the end, had tried in vain to wrest the knife from the crane.
It was worth it, this last stand, if it meant his daughter could still fly.
Xingbei, his younger son, rested protectively on his chest. It made it difficult for Feiyi to breathe, but he didn’t mind. Not if he could spend his last moments with his son.
Bixian approached with the Knife of Sublimation in one hand, and a fistful of animal pelts in another. Luo Feiyi weakly tried to push the knife away as she aimed it at Xingbei’s back.
Xingbei buried his face in Feiyi’s side. “Baba, I’m scared,” he cried.
“Don’t be,” Feiyi said as he stroked his boy’s hair. “You have to be brave. You’re the man of the house now, and you have to take care of your mother. Xingbei,” he looked into his son’s eyes as Bixian extracted the eagle from the boy, “remember that you are an eagle. Never forget what it feels like to fly.”
He held onto his son as the boy collapsed, glaring at Bixian as she tucked the eagle pelt onto her arm with the others. “How dare you make children choose between life and death. How dare you cut them up. They were beautiful whole.”
Bixian clenched her teeth and lifted her chin proudly, ignoring the tears streaming down her face. “It was the only way Heaven would allow these blasphemous children to live.”
Luo Feiyi clutched at his bleeding stomach to keep his innards in as he laughed. “Maybe so. May you live with your choice.”
He slowly faded in and out of consciousness as Bixian took the remaining childrens’ pelts. As she extracted the pelt from the last of the Qiao's children, she turned to Feiyi once again.
Kneeling beside him, she held the Knife of Sublimation up to his neck. “I gave Heaven a census,” she said.
“Of course you did.”
“They will know one of the pelts is missing.” She moved the knife over to his chest.
Luo Feiyi understood her intentions. “Take it,” he spat. “But sparing her means nothing. She will still hate you. Sparing her does not make you kind.”
Exhaustion and exsanguination finally caught up to him, and as golden light poured from the wound the crane cut in his chest, Luo Feiyi gave in to oblivion.
Bixian held his eagle skin in her hand. “I know,” she said.
Is Bixian a villain now?