Chapter 90 - The Wolf, The Witch, And The Audacity Of This Bitch (Patreon)

Paradigm shift baybeee

I'm actually really nervous about this and want to take some time to step back and more carefully build up the power systems of the setting, but the foundation is strong enough that this fits. Might post a wittle doc later showcasing the differences and powersets of some of the ideas I have! Either way, enjoy a new lovely!

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It’s a different scent than before, but that’s not important.

This is the room that she shares with Maen. This is the room that she sleeps in, that should be just as warded as everywhere else, in the Imperial gucking Palace of the city. It shouldn’t have any scent she does not expect, much less the scent of someone similar to the last living person to threaten her.

Her first thought is, characteristically, violence. Overwhelming, fast, and as efficient as she can make it, crushing the first stranger she sees, and damn the consequences so long as Maen is safe.

Then she smells citrus and sharpened claws and her breath leaves in a huff.

Maen is here, somewhere in the room. The cavernous fucking room full of dead angles and places to hide. She floods her mind, dropping the gates blocking off her senses and letting the information drown her for a moment as she tracks each and every heartbeat in the room.

There are four. Two are hers. One is Maen’s, recognizable instantly from how familiar it is to her. And the last one should not be here, and is standing over Maen’s sleeping form.

The instinct of violence is strangled within her as she forces her mind to focus, to drag systems fully drenched in adrenaline from her additional glands to be still, until the roiling of flesh and bone subsides and she is human again. At least on the surface. Beneath the skin, invisible to the naked eye, she keeps moving, keeps shifting, ribs adjusting, joints flexing and muscle fibers coiling.

Priority one is making sure Maen is alright. She can’t do that if a fight breaks out, not from here.

“I see the tales of your senses are not exaggerated,” says the figure above Maen.

Maen is on the bed, asleep, exhausted from cultivation, the scent of sweat and exertion and relief tangible to Raika. There’s still a bit of sunlight left, but the day is ending, the tail end of the solar body beginning to dissolve against the horizon again, and in the shadow of that stands a woman and a staff.

She doesn’t look like a cultivator. She doesn’t smell like a cultivator. But the reek of foreign Qi in the room is almost overpowering, nonetheless.

It’s… strange. Raika can smell that same underground scent, the still waters beneath dark shadow, but the woman herself has her own, distinct impression. It’s like the Qi is a cloud around her, altering the world with its weight but not actually born of her.

“I hadn’t realized there were tales about me,” Raika says, letting her natural voice through. It rumbles, like the air itself is vibrating in tune with it, and she can hear Dink reacting in its own way, letting a small ringing sound begin to fill the room. “I’m under the impression that I’m no one special, really.”

“No one special?” the woman asks, still cloaked in shadow, reeking of dark waters (and beneath them, something powerful and bright). “I have it on good authority that the three of my men that you met were near the best I had to offer on the stealth front. Imagine my disappointment to hear you unveiled them seemingly without effort. To ask for a smoke, no less.”

She holds out a hand. Said hand is the only part of her that seems real, that stands out from the shadows and gains any definition from them. Held between two figures is a small, rolled cigarette, the leaves crushed in it a bright blue.

“This one would find herself happy to share with you a gift, made to your liking.”

Raika stays still for a moment. Then, slowly, she walks across the room to take the cigarette.

The whole time she feels watched, like there’s eyes all around the room. She can see the arm, see the silhouette of the woman standing next to the bed, even smell her, but somehow the scent of the dark waters fills the room.

And, as Raika gets close enough to take the cigarette from her hands, she realizes that she can’t smell the person. Just their Qi, and the cloud of alien energy they bring with them.

Her skin is cool and vaguely dry as Raika takes the cigarette.

Immediately the woman rolls her wrist, snapping, the sound small but sharp and traveling up her long, slender fingers to ignite as a small flame at the end of it. White and gold-hued fire. Just like Raika’s.

Her biology pumping blood all through her, riling up clusters of her Qi, muscles locked and ready to leap and transform… Raika accepts the light, and takes a long, slow drag of the smoke.

It’s…

There’s a moment where it travels past her lips, slow and sinuous down her throat, filling her lungs and dancing in their strange altered space, like incense through a temple. The smoke is of a dark purple color, and it slithers and rolls as it floats from the tip of the cigarette, as it coils and dances out from her mouth. It smells like something floral, long dried, hints of beautiful decay and ash and deep, dark, hidden things made to dance and roil and writhe.

It’s the best smoke she’s ever had, and for just a moment, it overwhelms her other senses. For just a second, without needing to put up her walls or compartmentalize, all she can feel is the smoke, the heat contrasted with the coolness of the air, the taste and the scent. No hypersensitive skin, no dizzying visual detail, no overwhelming sound. Just her, and the smoke, and the moment of ignition between the two.

She takes a second pull, letting the smoke out in a long, slow breath. It’s heavy enough that it roils about her before drifting off, like a fog all her own before it dissipates.

“Shit,” she says. “That’s…”

The woman shrugs. “I’m good with plants.”

“Mmh.”

Raika takes another drag of the cigarette, watching as its tip lights up indigo-bright for a moment before fading again, standing out as the sun dips darker and darker against the edge of the world.

“Alright. You haven’t hurt Maen. I’m not dead. What do you want?”

The woman smiles, teeth glinting in the shadows.

“I wanted to meet you, of course. It took a while to find out anything about you. Weeks, cooped up in here, behind all these wards. But you… you just smell too damn good to leave alone without at least saying hello. I wanted to know what one of your kind is doing working for people like these.”

“Define ‘my kind’, if you would.”

The smile grows wider.

“Well I’m not sure what the Imperials call you,” she admits, “but among my kind, you’re called a few names. Uruk-Bal. One of the Hungering. Black Sheep. Red Wolves. My favorite, a Flesh-Witch, for reasons that might be obvious.”

“Obvious how?” Raika asks. “Witches are a myth.”

The woman’s smile fades. It is only now, halfway into their conversation, that Raika realizes, even with her enhanced sight, that she cannot see this woman’s eyes.

“Oh. Oh no, my love. No no no. You shouldn’t say such rude things to a guest.”

Raika snorts. “So you’re a witch? Eager to snatch children away into the night, secretly old and dying? One of the hags of the wilds?” She smiles, sharp and predatory, emphasizing the thrum of her voice. “I hear your kind whispered of alongside the monsters long gone of the second ring, dear. If that is what you’re implying.”

All around, from every direction, from every shadow, from every possible angle and corner, eyes open.

All black. All pupil, save for the slightest sliver of white around their edges. All looking at Raika very, very intently. She stays very, very still as her senses tell her of the moisture of them, of the shape of them, of the sounds they make as they move, even as she maintains the facade of confidence and quiet danger. The eyes are real.

And then they blink shut again.

“It does you no favors to be rude, love,” the woman whispers.

“It does you no favors to threaten those under my protection,” Raika whispers right back.

They stare at each other in the growing dark for a little while, the cigarette burning trails of smoke between them.

The witch backs down first.

“I apologize, love. Didn’t mean to offend, but I’m hardly so simple I’d start this conversation without at least implied leverage. I’d never hurt the poor thing. Your kitten is safe.”

“So she is,” Raika agrees, taking another inhale of smoke. “I don’t think I have answers you’ll like, witch. Not really. Got crippled, got better, got caught. Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here.”

The woman sighs. “Your story isn’t new, really,” she admits. “I suspected as much when I first caught wind of you. Your kind were in vogue a few centuries back, when this “Division” of yours was new, but it’s been some time since I’ve seen one of your kind out and about. Or sane, for that matter. Usually the pain drives you all mad.”

Raika smiles. “Who says it didn’t?”

The woman laughs softly. “Who’s to say. Consider this an introduction, then. One abomination to another. The Empire doesn’t have a monopoly on all of us quite yet.”

“You keep speaking as if you know exactly who I am, what I’m turning into,” Raika interrupts. “How? I’ve never heard of a cripple regaining their cultivation like I have. It’s not even cultivation, not really. But you’re telling me the Empire has more like me?”

“Had. Truth be told, they rarely reached the more interesting parts of your path, not least because it’s not one easily walked.”

The witch pauses, tilting the silhouette of her head as she looks at Raika. Eventually, she sighs.

“As a favor to you,” she whispers, “I’ll offer you a drop. Let it water your growth as it can, and guide you back to me, should you ever wish to grow more.”

“Cultivation, as you call it, is not the only way to gain power. The very Division they hold you in is proof of that. This world is vast, and there have been those who came before or outside the grip of the sects and the Empire. Some of us yet live, down below, in strange places and centers of power. To draw in and survive vast amounts of Anima, even without a soul channel, is to alter one’s body along the path of chaos, of madness and death and agony, but those who survive, like you, can harness that same disorder into flesh and blood, into mind and matter. I’ve seen some of your kind grow to be titans, to be nigh-unkillable. It is… rare, to see a Black Sheep used as a method of power, rather than a weapon.”

“Why?” Raika asks.

“Because your kind all go mad,” the woman whispers. “Sometimes in ways most useful, other times in ways where a leash and chain is all that stands between your end and your continued utility.”

She pauses, and slowly a string of those eyes emerge again, like a spiral around her head, leading down into more blinking, black eyes in place of a face. She smiles again.

“I see you’re already on the way there. Getting closer. The overwhelming sensation, the whispering of voices in your stomachs. The mind of mortals can’t survive long in conditions of abject inhumanity, not without changing, and the most common change is to break beneath the voices of the consumed and the weight of the world on your skin, in your eyes, down your throat.”

Raika takes a long, slow pull of the cigarette and says nothing.

“If it’s any consolation, your older siblings were an interesting tool of the Empire for a while. Brought them some victories and more than a few new marvels. You can feel it if you listen close enough, the flesh shifting alongside the planes, altering with a touch. The First Ring especially feels the worship of flesh and Anima, shaping them as needed, shaping their weapons into new ideals. Your path just… isn’t very efficient past a certain point, one you’ve already passed. Still, your flame, your sanity, they give you options. You impress me, to be sane now, even as the world scrapes against you.”

“These others,” Raika interrupts. “They did as I do? Put their Qi into their flesh, rather than their soul? Changed themselves?”

“Most lost their way before even that. Cancers, tumors, unchecked madness. You’ve pruned well, and it’s clear you consumed a few valuable things before your transformation. Every evolution is unique, every journey singular, and you’re already far from any conventional path, especially if you discovered how to do this on your own as you claim. But yes, dear, you’re not the first to forego the mutation of the ‘Dantian’ in favor of flesh and true change.”

“That’s all I’ll say on the matter. Perhaps you’ll find your way to a new path before the change overtakes you, perhaps you’ll become just another roiling, violent thing of flesh and bone. Your kind were rare even in their heyday, but there are enough similarities to my own style of power that I can recognize you. Someday, when you’re ready, come and find me. Look for She Beneath Still Waters, and the name will guide you to me. Until then… it was nice to meet you, love. You brought me back some memories I’m happy to have found again.”

“Best of luck with your growth, Wolf. May your hunger ever serve you, and may you find your way free the path left in store for you, full of pitfalls and bad ends.”

The shadows begin to coil, to move, even as she senses nothing from the woman’s own Qi. She steps forward, her hand shooting out fast enough to blur even to her vision, trying to grab something, trying to demand answers, solutions-

She’s gone. Like she was never there. The Qi scent she brought with her vanishes slower, dissipating, but without even an ounce of Qi, or any runes she could see, the woman just… vanishes. There’s… there’s a ripple, not dissimilar to what Raika feels when she sees another use their Truth, but it’s subtly different, quieter and more organic almost.

And then she is alone. Maen, softly snoring in bed, doesn’t even stir. In the cold and dark of night finally fallen, there’s a moment where it feels like it could almost have been a dream.

Except for the smell of rotting, living smoke, and a small metallic case, open to a dozen cigarettes, sitting on her nightstand.

“Fuck.”