Chapter Text
The most momentous occasion in both of their lives starts with a knife.
~
Shenhe
The first thing Shenhe does every morning is pull the dagger out from under her pillow. Holding it up to the rays of early morning sunlight streaming through the window, she watches as it gleams in white and gold, the symbols carved into the hilt glinting between her fingers.
The knife belonged to her mother. She left it to Shenhe in her will, hoping that her daughter would one day follow in her footsteps and become a great exorcist. Shenhe has not yet been taught how to use it, but she always carries it with her regardless. It is her prized possession, and all she has left of her mother.
And what of her father? All she had, until recently, was a fading image of him: letters from his travels, that decreased in frequency the longer they were apart. Shenhe had almost forgotten the harsh line of his jaw and the bump in his nose by the time he returned, only a few days ago - and now all she has of him is a hollow shell.
He isn’t himself anymore. She is only six - too young to remember what he was like before her mother’s illness descended upon their family like a black cloud, dark and suffocating - but she knows he was full of life. He smiled a lot, back then. Now, it’s been so long since she saw that look upon his face that Shenhe can’t help but wonder if she dreamt it.
She finds him in his study, poring over an old, leather-bound tome, his forehead creased in concentration. He has rarely left this room since his return, and those wrinkles seldom disappear. Shenhe didn’t think it was possible to age a decade in less than a year, until she saw the weariness etched into every line of her father’s face.
He sees her before she can say “good morning”, and she smiles when his face lights up, basking in the odd familiarity of his expression. It feels… different, somehow, in a way that she can’t place, but all that matters is that he’s happy.
How long has it been since he was happy?
“Shenhe,” he says, his voice rasping in his throat. “Good, good, you’re finally awake. Baba has a surprise for you!”
Shenhe gasps in delight. A surprise? It’s been a challenge to get her father to hold a conversation with her, let alone have a whole surprise prepared just for her - but then again, she thinks, maybe that was because he was preparing something stupendous, to make up for all the months he was away.
He leads her out of their village, cradling the leather-bound book in one hand and holding Shenhe’s palm in the other. They walk until the path disappears beneath their feet, the vegetation unkempt and overgrown, before they arrive at the mouth of a cave. The entrance yawns wide before them, inviting them into a space so deep and so dark, Shenhe thinks a perpetual night might really exist.
“What are we doing here, baba?” she asks, huddling close to him. A spider scuttles along the far wall, and she eyes it warily.
She doesn’t expect an answer - she’s been asking him where they’re going throughout the trek here, and his responses have been nothing short of vague and indecipherable - but this time he says, “I can finally do it. I’m going to bring her back.”
“You mean mama?” she asks - who else could it be? - but as she says it, she knows it can’t be true. She remembers the way her life dissolved into turmoil after her mother’s body fell still and her father disappeared. She had stayed with Uncle Mingjun and, with a world of pain in his eyes, he had explained what death was, and how it had arrived at her mother’s doorstep prematurely.
Shenhe knew, then, that she was never coming back. Uncle Mingjun said so himself, and he would never lie to her.
Her father shocks her by saying “yes”, his voice laced with the desperation of a madman. Shenhe startles as he drops her hand and flips open the book, rifling through it until he comes to a bookmarked section, the pages wrinkled with overuse. She can only watch, mystified yet uneasy, as he pulls various materials from his bag and begins setting them up. Even as a sense of foreboding creeps over her, Shenhe can’t help but wonder: is it possible?
If their family can banish evil spirits from the mortal realm, can they also bring good ones back?
Uncle Mingjun isn’t an exorcist, she realises. He isn’t even really her uncle. So how would he know what can and can’t be done?
“Shenhe, baobei,” her father says, after several minutes have passed and he seems satisfied with his setup. “You won’t see me again after this - but she’ll be back, and she’ll need you to tell her everything that happened, okay? Make her smile for me, and… tell her I love her. Tell her she deserves the world.”
Shenhe nods, trying her hardest to keep up. The world is spinning in her disbelief, her father’s face warping before her very eyes. She’s never seen this expression before - is it sorrow? Desperation? Excitement, even?
And why won’t she see him again?
“...And take her home. You remember the way, don’t you?” He’s still talking, but Shenhe is hardly hearing any of it.
She nods again, just to placate him. He hasn’t looked this alive in years.
(She doesn’t actually remember the way home, through that maze of overgrown plants and invisible pathways, but she doesn’t want to disappoint him now.)
Satisfied, her father returns his attention to the book and begins chanting, his voice low. The words falling from his lips are unintelligible; Shenhe recognises the lilting, melodic tones of their mother tongue, but none of the phrases are familiar.
The wind picks up, then, whisking through the cave, swirling the dirt at Shenhe’s feet. Goosebumps prickle her skin, so she wraps her arms around herself. Her palms are cold, her fingertips drenched in ice.
“Baba?” she whispers. The air reeks of blood and decay.
He doesn’t respond; Shenhe isn’t sure whether she’s imagining it, but his eyes seem to be glowing red, throwing traces of crimson and scarlet across his cheekbones. His voice is getting louder, roaring over the shriek of the wind, the syllables echoing between cold stone walls. Shenhe throws an arm over her face as dust and dirt swirl around her, the wind growing impossibly strong, a storm beginning to form in the confines of the cave.
“Baba!” she tries again, louder this time, but she can’t even hear herself think. The air is getting thicker, humidity pressing up against her lungs, her breaths like honey in her throat.
They aren’t alone anymore.
There’s a… presence, leaking out of the ground at her father’s feet, all oozing shadow and suffocating darkness, crackling with menace. It rears upwards, its body shimmering ethereally, as though it takes up both an impossible amount of space and none at all. It looks at once like a solid wall of rock and a cascade of water, but the way the storm throws dust and gravel right through its body suggests it is nothing more than a mere shadow, a stain in the fabric of reality. Shenhe feels disoriented and dizzy just looking at it, so she presses her palms against her eyes, willing the world to stop spinning.
Her father is saying something, but the wind is still roaring like static in her ears, making her head pound. Shenhe takes a few deep breaths, counting seconds the way Uncle Mingjun taught her to when she would jolt awake in the middle of the night, those untouchable terrors once again plaguing her subconscious. Most nights, she’d relive the moment the last drop of life drained from her mother’s body. Other nights… well, those were somehow worse, in a way that Shenhe couldn’t even put into words.
And when she opens her eyes, the roaring wind having finally subsided, she comes face-to-face with something that looks like it was ripped straight from one of her worst nightmares.
It isn’t just a black mass anymore. The edges of its form ripple, hazy in the darkness, and Shenhe can feel evil rolling off of it in waves, so strong she can almost taste it. Its maw gapes wide before her, its mouth filled with rows and rows of sharp teeth. It has too many teeth, and too many eyes, its sclera as red as blood.
This is the creature that will bring her mother back?
It is so… ugly, so disturbingly grotesque that Shenhe can’t tear her gaze away. And neither, it seems, can the monster take its eyes off of her. It stares at her, unblinking, those inhuman eyes gleaming with a demonic sense of hunger. A cold shiver runs up Shenhe’s spine, prickling and chilly, as though the monster has dug its claws beneath her skin.
She can’t tell if she’s frozen by terror or by resolve. This almost feels like a battle of the wills - as though she and the monster are daring each other to look away first. At the same time, she feels almost paralysed, locked in place by that steely, blood-red gaze. She is so absorbed in their silent warfare that she almost doesn’t realise her father is speaking to the beast.
“My wife,” he’s saying. “You have to bring her back, please. I’ll exchange my life for hers. A soul for a soul, as is custom.”
The demon is silent for a long moment. Its eyes are still locked on Shenhe.
Finally, it shakes its head, and points one jagged claw in her direction. “The child,” it growls, and its voice seems to echo from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The low hum of it reverberates through Shenhe’s bones, aching in the base of her skull. “She bears… the curse of calamity.” It speaks slowly, deliberately, as though forming the words takes enormous effort. “I want her soul.”
“No!” Shenhe’s father snaps, but something is warring in the troubled waters of his eyes. “You’re lying. My daughter isn’t cursed.”
“Oh, but she is,” the monster says, delight thrumming through the sonorous husk of its voice. “Don’t you know? Our fates… are written by the stars, and hers… her fate…” It pauses, and the air shifts around them, as though it is taking deep, shuddering breaths. Shenhe can see worry working its way into the lines of her father’s face. “Her fate… is to wreak devastation… wherever she goes. Hers will be a life of loneliness… and nothingness.”
Shenhe’s blood turns to ice at the same moment her father’s face drops. The monster’s eyes seem to crinkle at the edges, the ghost of a smile forming on its shapeless mouth.
“Baba?” Shenhe whimpers, finally finding her voice through the paralysing fear. Her father doesn’t respond - in fact, he doesn’t even move, his face frozen in…
Shenhe swallows thickly. She can’t read that emotion, and she isn’t sure she wants to.
“Indeed… your daughter may just be the reason… your wife passed prematurely,” the monster continues gleefully. “Weren’t you aware?”
“Lies!” Shenhe’s father snaps, but she can tell by the rough edges of his voice that he isn’t sure what to believe anymore. “You’re lying. You have to be lying.”
“The stars… don’t lie, mortal fool.”
Shenhe suddenly feels like she’s drowning. The air is too thick, and her lungs feel at once impossibly full and hopelessly empty. The low hum of the monster’s voice fades into white noise, and the edges of the cave blur as her eyes prickle.
Even as everything fades out around her, Shenhe feels one thing in perfect clarity: the way her heart shatters into a million tiny pieces, the same way it did the day her mother died.
She didn’t think it could break any more than that.
~
Rosaria
Rosaria fumbles to catch the knife, her fingers so cold they can hardly move. She adjusts her grip on it, the worn leather of the hilt soft against her palm. The blade trembles in her hands like a leaf in the wind, but she isn’t sure if it’s because of the frigid cold or the terror.
The bandit who tossed her the dagger - Serle - is still talking as he pulls out a knife of his own.
“Fleeing makes you a traitor,” he growls, “and traitors can only earn their freedom through victory in combat.”
Rosaria swallows thickly. She knows this ritual - prisoners of the bandit gang are forced to fight one of the gang’s finest until either one of them dies. If the prisoner emerges the victor, they can choose to either flee into the howling wind and bitter cold of the mountains, or take a place among the bandit gang.
The prisoner is never the victor, though. Rosaria can’t remember the number of times she’s watched the bandits brutally slay innocent people, their knives slicing through flesh like butter, until the prisoner’s body is no longer recognisable and the snow is soaked with blood. It always looks like someone has carved a wound into nature itself.
She never expected to find herself in this position.
All she had wanted was a warm meal. Even something as simple as a solid roof over her head would have been enough. In her desperation, she had fled from the bandit camp, thinking she had snuck out unnoticed, and dashed away as quickly as her freezing legs could take her.
She knew it was a risk to run away. But it was just as much of a risk to stay, where the bitter mountain cold chewed through her clothes, chilling her down to her bones, and where her stomach was always hollow with hunger.
~
“Give me that!”
“No, snow-brains, it’s mine!”
“Who’re you calling snow-brains, stick-insect?”
“Hey!”
Rosaria huffs indignantly as Tanner pries the small bread roll from her fingers. It’s a poor excuse for food, the crust stiff with cold and the insides hard and stale, but it’s better than nothing.
Anything is better than nothing, but somehow ‘nothing’ is all Rosaria ever finds herself eating. She can only watch, furious, as Tanner pulls the bread roll apart, stuffing one half in his mouth and chewing obnoxiously.
“That isn’t fair!” Rosaria whines. “I haven’t had anything but berries to eat for the past three days. Can’t I even have the tiniest bit?”
“Psh. Berries are already more than you deserve,” Tanner sneers. “Serle should’ve burnt you along with the rest of your village.”
“I wish you got burned!”
“And don’t you remember the rules?” Tanner continues, ignoring her. “Only the strongest of the gang members get food. You’re not even a gang member, let alone a strong one, so what makes you think you’re more deserving of this bread than I am?”
Rosaria’s stomach growls, providing her answer for her. Even so, she knows that hunger isn’t a good enough excuse. Everyone is hungry here.
She turns away despondently, flopping back into the snow. She almost doesn’t notice the chill of it seeping in through her clothes; the hunger is already too much to bear.
~
She leaves when the hunger grows into a writhing mass behind her ribs, as pointed and deadly as a weapon. It pierces her lungs and the hollow cavity of her stomach, leaving her hunched over in pain, nausea swimming through her skull.
The same pain is etched into the faces of everyone in the bandit gang. This winter has hit them particularly hard; even the snow foxes and wild boars have disappeared between the snow-capped cliffs. Plants wilt beneath heavy, oppressive layers of white, and the frigid wind never lets up in its relentless attacks. Rosaria can count her own ribs.
~
Red.
What a beautiful colour. What a disgusting colour.
Rosaria sees red in the blood-soaked sunset, in that delicate, fragile time between day and night when the sky turns to fire, staining the backs of her eyelids scarlet. Dragonspine is a patchwork of land at once cold and treacherous, unyielding to human life, and yet it somehow makes space for such brilliant beauty.
She sees red in the villages they ransack, when she watches humble cottages go up in flames, crimson tongues lapping at the smoke-tinged sky. She sees it in the prisoners’ emaciated bodies, when they fall to the ground with a wet thud, their faces streaked in furious shades of red. She feels it, too, in the stickiness coating her palms when she skins wild boars and lays their pelts out to dry. She’s in dire need of a new winter coat.
She tastes it, in the hard collision of Tanner’s fist against her jaw, when he knocks her back into the snow and steals her hard-earned food from right under her nose. She spits a sticky glob of red into the snow at his feet and hopes, silently, that he one day falls off a cliff.
Or wouldn’t it be better, so much better, if she could find the strength to make him taste the iron tang of scarlet instead?
~
She flees, because no matter how much she tries to harden herself to it, the bloodshed still makes her heart hurt. She is already being taught how to kill - Serle has shown her how to wield a knife, and pointed out all the weak spots on the human body, leaving her to commit them to memory - but no amount of practice seems to make the senseless murders more acceptable. She sees a vengeful vermilion whenever she looks at people like Tanner, with his bloodied knuckles and permanent sneer, but the others…
Rosaria’s parents burned alive in a boiling sea of crimson and scarlet. Those colours still make bile rise in her throat.
~
This time, she can’t tell if the pain stems from hunger, frostbite, or the long hours of hard labour she’s forced to endure.
She rubs her hands together, hoping in vain that they’ll warm up. The calluses staining her palms sting at the contact. A small, partially rusted knife rests in the snow beside her, the blade caked with blood and fur. Tanner caught a wild boar today, and Rosaria was told to skin it, cut it up and cook it. Tomorrow she will split her fingers sewing the pelts she’s collected into a new cloak for Serle.
His eyes have been growing filmy, and his breaths are starting to rattle in his chest. Rosaria worries about him, with his ash-grey hair and age-wearied face. This winter has hit him the hardest of all, so Rosaria makes sure to take good care of him, but she isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to numb her aching hands in the snow at the end of every long day. She isn’t sure what’s going to get her first - the frostbite, or infection?
~
Serle said he’d taken her from a mountain village.
Rosaria has always harboured mixed feelings about it all. He is the man who saved her life; the one who convinced the bandit gang to keep her around. He is the one who raised her.
But if he and the rest of the gang hadn’t touched her former village at all…
Usually, she pushes such thoughts away. There is no point dwelling on what could have been; her village, and every trace of her real family, has already been turned to dust. She can’t remember her father’s eyes or her mother’s smile - she barely even remembers the house she was supposed to grow up in. Whatever her life could have been like in her birthplace, it is nothing more than a distant dream.
But this time, she allows herself to imagine a homely village, a different timeline. She holds the thoughts in front of her like a candle, guiding her as she stumbles through the snow, the sun washing the pine trees in fire as it begins to set. Because if a life like that was ever a possibility… maybe she still has a chance. Maybe she can find another village, another kindly smile and warm embrace. If she can spend even one night without worrying where her next meal is coming from, then–
“Rosaria!”
No. No…
She tries to run faster, but the snow is too thick, icy claws pulling at her ragged boots and biting at the skin of her legs. She zig-zags through the pine trees, trying to lose him in the lengthening shadows.
Any chance she has of escaping dissipates when she trips on the edge of a stone, barely peeking through the snow, and sprawls face-first into the ground. Her nose and cheeks sting with the cold, but nothing is worse than the terror, shooting through her veins like lightning.
“How dare you,” Serle growls, one rough, calloused hand wrapping around her wrist and pulling her to her feet. She stumbles back as he lets go, and the next thing she knows, he is tossing her a knife.
~
And now she’s here, standing across from the man who raised her with a knife in her hand and fear in her heart.
“Well, come on then! Kill me, and you can leave this place,” Serle says, sounding far too jovial. “I’m long in the tooth now, while you’ve got youth on your side. You can do this, can’t ya?”
Rosaria hates that he sounds like he’s joking - like death is just a game of cat and mouse. Even as she cycles through the list of tendons to hit to knock someone out or paralyse their legs, she knows she doesn’t stand a chance. She’s only six years old and barely a third of Serle’s height; even the knife he tossed her looks enormous in her youthful hands. He could kill her in an instant, but instead he’s toying with her, pulling her along like a puppet with broken strings.
She swallows heavily, glancing behind Serle to see several other members of the gang peering through the snow-dusted pines, their faces swathed in evening shadow. Rosaria swallows the bile rising in her throat; not only is she going to die a shameful death at the hands of the closest thing she’s got to a father, but now there’s an audience, too?
Her hands are shaking now, but she draws in a deep breath, forcing her thundering heart to slow down. Today, the last string holding that broken puppet up is going to snap, and Rosaria is going to die.