Bixian dove down to hold Qiping’s body. For the first time her expression wavered, but it still did not break. Her hands ran across Qiping’s full cheeks and lifted her eyelids, which stayed open, revealing cold lifeless eyes.

“Child,” she said, her voice low as Yildun and Xingbei approached. “Wake up.” Mother and son gave the crane a wide berth as a body that could no longer cry struggled with the incomparable grief of a parent losing their child. Hands that maintained their steadiness even under torture now fumbled through her robes to find a small stoppered gourd, from which she shook out a golden pill.

“Pills of immortality, refined by Taishang Laojun himself. Your immortality was one of my conditions. I thought you would have taken it. You, child, who have witnessed so much pain, some by my hand. I thought you would have chosen to live.”

Whether rigor mortis had already set into her jaw, or if Qiping’s body held onto enough of her soul to refuse, the pill would not take. After her last futile attempt, Bixian crushed the pill in her palm and let the wind scatter the dust.

A traveling poet returning to the local inn caught sight of a crane in flight and remarked on the auspiciousness.

Yildun and Xingbei washed Qiping’s body and buried her in the hard winter earth. In a moment of sentiment, Yildun tied a collar of white rabbit fur around the corpse’s neck; the same winter muff Xingxi and Qiping had fought about so many years ago.

-

The Phoenix-Feather Sword broke through the Heavenly Pagoda with such force that all who witnessed knew its power. Tangyou the phoenix, creature of reincarnation, sharpened her hatred into a blade that would sever souls not just from their bodies, but from the cycle of reincarnation altogether. Animosity so fierce it brought about complete annihilation.

In the brief moment of waking as metal pierced her flesh, Qiping welcomed oblivion. She had known it before, in short bursts inside the Baihu Sage’s meditation chamber. Or even before then, the quiet deaths her personhood experienced when she was passed from her birth family, whose surname she no longer even knew, to the Baihu Sage in a ploy to gain favor from blood relation to a cultivar years down the road.

She was never meant for cultivation. She struggled and chaffed at her new life, and when she could not escape, she chose to die instead, little by little as her voice faded to nothing. The lightless meditation chamber, which had become a familiar punishment, inadvertently spared her suffering the same fate as the rest of Tianping Temple. She had spent two days within the chamber before Bixian opened it once more, and once more a young girl died and was reborn with a different name.

But this time she was convinced to keep living. And she did, with a woman she eventually came to call Mother and a friend who helped her reclaim her voice. She should have known that such happiness was not meant for the likes of her. If she were more adept at divination, she might have been able to glean the reason behind her misfortune; what terrible past life did she lead to warrant such hardships? It was a kindness, then, to not worry about the next life. Better to step back into the pitch black meditation chamber—the meditation chamber Luo Xingxi now occupied, somewhere between the living and the dead—and become nothing for one final time.

She had expected oblivion to be either stark white or pitch black, and colder than the longest night of winter. Instead, the world around her was filled with warm browns and ambers, with lingering warmth on her shoulder where she was stabbed.

Qiping opened eyes she didn’t know were closed and saw Tangyou smiling down on her. She was resting on the phoenix’s lap, and all the world seemed to be contained there, caught within the curtain of Tangyou’s hair and the fraying edges of her robes.

It took some time for Qiping to find her voice. Tangyou waited patiently, as she had always done, until Qiping finally had words to say. “I’m still here.”

Tangyou leaned down and kissed Qiping’s brow. “Know that regardless of your mother’s wrongs, know that you are still deeply loved.”

“But the sword…” Qiping said. “It obliterates souls.”

“What are souls but bonds? And I can choose which bonds to cut.” Tangyou moved her hand as if strumming a pipa’s strings, and Qiping could see clusters of thread coming out of her from every direction. Bursts of light from a fire when seen with eyes half closed. She was fraying like Tangyou’s robes. “Here, I’ll sever just one–the one connecting you to a mortal life. So you may return to the world of the living, that you were taken from before your time. I’d cut the threads connecting you to sorrow and grief, but Luming says those emotions are necessary to make life worth living. Just as foolishness is necessary to make love worth loving.”

She sat still as Tangyou brushed and braided her hair, detangling her from the cycle of life and death. Once she was done, someone else came, and a pair of cool hands took away the vast ocean of her tears. The dragon and phoenix guided her through the six realms back to her body, in a journey that took centuries and was over in a blink of an eye.

Qiping awoke, alone and cold. The living world was filled with snow and night, but she did not shiver; not from chill and not from fear. Her body moved without pain as she dug herself out of the grave Xingbei and Yildun had dug for her, buried just before the start of the new year. She was beginning to understand sensation in a body neither alive nor dead, and as she began to take in the weight of the clothes she was buried in, she sensed something tickling her chin as she took each unnecessary breath.

She raised a hand to her neck and felt the soft rabbit fur of a gift given long ago. It was the only burial gift she took with her as she left the family that had taken cared for her for five years.

see! she's okay! kinda.