Consort Dowager Si breathed in the fine morning air. Even from her chambers she could smell the flowers of her garden in bloom, and she thought of what was to come with relish. It was a comfortable life she led in the inner court, waking up late and tending to her garden. It was by sheer luck she befriended the young Consort Wu, now the Empress regent. Her son had finally stopped his transcendental foolishness atop the mountain and was trying his hand at politics, with the help of his shrewd wife.
She still clearly remembered the day the pair came to ask for her blessing. Her son speaking in comically stilted formalities, while the women at his side held a separate conversation with their eyes. Consort Dowager Si recognized Liuying at a glance. It was hard to forget the face of the woman who saved her son’s life. The traveling alchemist did not seem to age at all, which did not startle Consort Dowager Si as much as it should. She had long suspected that a spirit had intervened that night, and it didn’t take much prodding to find out Liuying’s true nature.
Birdsong interrupted the old woman’s reverie, and she took time to dress simply for the day. One of the benefits of being a consort dowager rather than a consort. Humming idly, she noted that her collection of shells and bones needed dusting. As she examined her shelf of oddities, something stirred near one of the carved antlers. Approaching slowly, she saw a dappled green and yellow snake coiled around it.
Picking up the antler without fear, Consort Dowager Si offered the snake her hand. Hesitantly, the snake abandoned its perch to rest on her wrist.
“What brings you here so early, my daughter-in-law?”
Liuying tearfully recounted the events of last night: Bixian’s betrayal, the fall of the Qiao village, and her forced exile from Chang’an. Halfway through her tale of woe, Consort Dowager Si called for a servant to bring wine.
“May we have one last drink together, then?” she asked the snake.
“Forgive me, Consort Mother, but I have used up almost all of my magic,” Liuying sighed. “I cannot drink wine in my current state.”
“I will drink to you, then, as a farewell. Thank you for saving my son.”
“I am leaving Liuruo without a mother. Will you—”
“Of course. She is my granddaughter, after all.”
Liuying gave a sigh of relief and laid her head down.
Once Liuying finished her story, Consort Dowager Si brought the snake up to her lips and kissed her head. She comforted her, starting with the same words she had spoken to the young couple two decades ago:
“I have already promised you my son’s hand in marriage. And you were true to your word. You brought him joy and nourished his soul. I am glad to have had you for a daughter.”
Consort Dowager Si looked out towards her garden, where the noonday sun shined upon the lush leaves and blooming flowers, a mosaic of summer about to pass. She placed the snake at the base of a willow tree and watched as the snake disappeared within the scintillating shadows of the trees. She wished her daughter a safe journey. No, she corrected herself, a safe life, for this may be the last time the two of them meet.
-
Consort Si summoned Chen Di and told him of the fall of the Qiao. The next day, he saddled up a horse and rode with urgency towards Clear Water Mountain, with barely enough rations to last him halfway through the journey.
He made it to the base of Clear Water Mountain in record time. Were it not for the merchants remembering his face, he would have been turned away as a beggar with how tattered and mud-stained he looked.
“It’s been quite some time, Brother Chen!” the traders called from their stalls as he replenished his rations. “We thought you’d left for good.”
Chen Di smiled and greeted faces he had not thought about for years. With surprise he realized that, even if he had forgotten the names, the essence of the people remained. The fishmonger still had a tremor to his hands; the butcher’s children were now grown and helping their father at the stall. Time marched on but some things stayed the same.
Once again he was the fellow with the capitol accent; the vendors remarked on the sheen of his taels the same way they did the first time he passed through on the way to Clear Water Mountain. He bought noodles from a man who balanced two buckets on a pole on his shoulder; the first bucket filled with noodles, the second filled with broth. The noodles were chewy, the broth fragrant with mushrooms gathered from the forest.
Chen Di did not want to leave. It would be so easy to remain in this village, where things moved but stayed relatively the same. People grew older, but the village in his memory was the same as the village in real life.
If he made his way up Clear Water Mountain, the Qiao Village of his memory would be replaced by whatever destruction Heaven wrought.
He rested in the village for a day and then continued his journey up the mountain.
The village below spoke of a forest fire that blazed about a month ago. There were some survivors who passed through soon afterwards, but nobody dared to climb the mountain to investigate. Years ago, an impenetrable fog had settled along the trail to Qiao Village; after the fires, it had apparently cleared, but the mountainside was different than it once was. Ghosts haunted the mountain now, the villagers warned Chen Di.
“Perhaps,” Chen Di answered, “but ghosts would not startle me.”
Entering Qiao Village was like entering a bad dream. Chen Di often dreamed of falling, waking once his body impacted with the ground. As he neared the village gate, where the tattered remains of Lady Liuying’s golden flag fluttered sadly in the breeze, Chen Di brought a kerchief to his face to shield it from the smell of dust, and to keep down the bile crawling up his throat.
In his time in Chang’an in service to the emperor, he had seen his fair share of battlefields. Bodies strewn across the ground, dismembered limbs and moans of poor souls one second away from death. The ground wet with blood, steps taken in the mud filled with dirty water the color of rust.
There was no blood on the ground of Qiao Village. Either the demons had escaped, or the blood had already dried up. Instead the eaarth was scorched black with ash. Stumps rose out of the ground, remnants of the buildings the Qiao had erected over ten years. Chen Di closed his eyes and remembered the layout of the village; he had every foundation, every family’s memory committed to memory.
Chen Di made his way to what remained of the archives. That would have been the most important thing to his prince; would have been, if the prince didn’t move around as if his head was stuffed with cotton, glassy-eyed with little recollection of his life in Clear Water Mountain.
There were a few scrolls that had survived the flames. The ink had burned through the pages, making most of the ledgers illegible. Still, Chen Di tucked them aside. Even if they could not be read, these books were the last proof that the Qiao existed.
At last, he heard the familiar sound of hooves behind him, and he let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. Through their absence along the road, Chen Di didn’t know if Shuangtou had been annihilated alongside the Qiao.
Always direct, their first words to him were, “You’re back.”
Chen Di turned and looked at the deer demon. They looked unchanged from their last farewell; their wide, brown deer eyes and the hair spilling from the small ribbon he had gifted them so many years ago.
“Hello, Shuangtou.”
“You are too late.”
“I was never meant to be the cavalry. Only the witness.”
The deer demon raised their head and sniffed the air. “Witness to what? Nothing remains here but ash.”
Chen Di held out the books he had salvaged. “Not just ash. Some things, however small, may have survived. Proof that the Qiao were here.”
“What will happen if you take them?”
“What?”
“If you take them,” Shuangtou said with more force, “then nothing else will remember them.”
“You remember them,” Chen Di said.
Unable to hide the wounds she had sustained from the fight, Shuangtou collapsed onto the ground, posing the same way she was when they first met. From somewhere she produced a small glass vial.
“I had traveled east to the kingdom of women, to seek water from the spring that grants the drinker a child.” Their hand clenched, and the vial shattered, the water spilling onto the ground.
Chen Di rushed to examine their hand. “Why did you do that?”
“I had entertained the idea of having a child. Your foolish Qiao infected my mind with that thought.” They laughed bitterly. “How kind of Heaven to intercede before I brought another being into ruin.”
Chen Di cupped his hands in order to catch some drops of water. Knowing no other way to keep the water from falling onto the ground, he brought his hands to his lips and drank from the spring.
Shuangtou looked at him dispassionately. Their other hand produced a scroll that, after a few seconds, Chen Di recognized as Ao Luming’s mother.
“What happened to him?”
“The dragon and the phoenix were crushed beneath a tower. The tower then cracked, and a bronze sword flew out, chained by a scabbard of blue scales. An eagle flew down and stole the sword.”
“Which way did the eagle fly?”
“I don’t know,” Shuangtou said “Nor do I care. Your lot should not have come to Clear Water Mountain.”
“Perhaps not. But who are we to change the past?” Chen Di tucked the scroll securely at his side; a memory not only of the dragon prince but of their first night spent at Clear Water Mountain.
Looking down the mountain, Chen Di remembered the first journey up the mountain. Even though the river’s course had been changed, the sight brought him immense nostalgia for the first few days on Clear Water Mountain. The first time he spoke his story aloud; the time his prince clapped him on the back and called him equals.
He took a deep breath of cold autumn air and let himself be one with the mountain itself. One with the demon who oversaw it all. "Will you not come with me, Shuangtou?"
“Where?”
“Away from here. There are Qiao who survived the massacre; they must need help building new lives.”
“And what of you?”
“I do what I have always done. Go where I am needed.”
“There is no prince ordering you to do this.”
“It is my duty as a member of the Qiao.”
Shuangtou laughed bitterly. “Again with duty.”
“I say duty when I mean love. The Qiao loved me, and I must repay in kind.”
The deer demon kept looking at him but did not move. The wind swept their hair, tangling the strands in their antlers the same way they looked when they first met. Slowly, as he would approach a wild creature in the woods, Chen Di made his way to the deer's side and gently brushed the hair out of their eyes.
“Come with me, Shuangtou.”
The deer demon shook their head, moving their lips against Chen Di’s palm. Up close he could feel damp tears on their face.
Shuangtou's skin began to harden, their body stiffening until they became a gnarled juniper tree, their antlers barren branches in the autumn.
Chen Di grabbed a tassel on his belt and loosened it. With more patience than skill, he wound the red rope around one of the branches, so that this small twisting tree could compete with the surrounding autumn's splendor.
From the branches Chen Di retrieved the ribbon he had given them so long ago. The cloth was worn, and instead of tying it around his arm once more Chen Di tied it in his hair, where it fluttered in the breeze in a duet with the tassel on the tree branches.
“I will make sure the tree is well tended,” a familiar voice sounded behind him.
“Hello, Tudigong,” Chen Di said, turning and giving the small god a bow. “I am glad to see you survived as well.”
“It is easy for small gods like me to be forgotten by Heaven,” the Tudigong said, tugging his large staff from the ground. “Forgive me, that I could not help more. I did warn them. They never stood a fighting chance.”
“There are some survivors?”
The Tudigong nodded. “The traitor of theirs brokered a deal. The demons who survived had their pelts taken and are going to live among the mortals, as mortals.”
“Tell me where they have gone.”
The Tudigong pointed with his staff, extending across the horizon to point like a compass. Chen Di began to walk down the mountain in that direction, the Tudigong scrambling to keep pace with his short legs.
“Your presence was welcome on my mountain, lord. Your people loved the land, even if many of them threatened to eat me.”
“I am not a lord,” Chen Di said quickly. “I never have been.”
The Tudigong barked out a laugh. “That’s why I’ve enjoyed your presence the most.” He took a couple of deep, heaving breaths, as if the laughter had exerted him, and continued. “The world needs more of the likes of us. Someone to come in after the fact and pick up the pieces,” he said. “Isn’t there? Always a need for the likes of us.”
“Like mushrooms after rain,” Chen Di agreed. “Sprouting upon the corpse of wondrous things.”
“All mortal things return to the earth in time. Some demons forget this fact.”
“How foolish, to dream of the sky.”
The Tudigong shrugged. “How foolish indeed,” he said, as he disappeared back into the earth. “I’ll make sure the tree is well cared for.”
A cold wind blew, rustling Chen Di’s untied robes like a flag. A chill ran through his body, and his stomach grumbled uncomfortably. Cinching his cloak within his undergarments, Chen Di took one last look at Clear Water Mountain before departing, what documents he could salvage tucked in a satchel at his side.
In the spring, the juniper tree began to bloom.
This marks the end of Part 4. We're in the home stretch for the Rise and Fall of the Glorious Qiao. Thank you for reading so far!