Chapter 130#
Of Things Past · IV#
Anfei repeated it quietly: “The ritual day?”
Xia Sen had mentioned it in that last call too, but neither of them had paid it much mind at the time.
“The ritual day is — it’s when—”
Another girl chimed in: “It’s when everyone in town goes to climb that mountain over there! Outsiders aren’t allowed. We spend the whole night on the summit, and the town is empty, and lots and lots of big monsters come walking through — it’s so scary.”
She made a face as she said it.
Ancient peoples always had their strange festivals, rituals, and tales of monsters. Ordinarily it would mean nothing — but Yu Feichen caught a flicker in Anfei’s gaze, there in the dusk. The easy smile that had been resting at the corners of his eyes since they arrived in Yolan quietly vanished.
“Are the monsters real?” he asked the child.
“They are!” another child said. “Last year I snuck a look from up on the mountain. Something really was walking around down in the town.”
Yu Feichen, rarely, felt a prick of genuine curiosity.
Elsewhere such things would be unremarkable — all manner of events were possible in the Eternal Night, and strange occurrences throughout the divine realm had their own parade of Paradise arrivals dispatched to handle them. But this was the sacred land of Landenwollen — the place legend described as eternally peaceful and still. What business would monsters have appearing here?
Anfei said nothing. He ruffled each child’s head in turn and said his goodbyes. On the way back he asked the innkeeper for a map of all of Landenwollen, then spread it open in their room and read it alongside the customs book.
Yolan was a destination that had only been discovered in the last two or three epochs; before that, its people had lived quietly within the embrace of dense forest, unreachable by outsiders.
A quill dipped in ink — Anfei sketched another map on a sheet of white paper, its outline faintly echoing the shape of Landenwollen. He marked a name here and there as he went: all ancient words. That was the Landenwollen he held in his memory.
At last the two maps were laid over each other, centered on the Temple of the Setting Sun. On the older map Anfei marked a point where Yolan now stood and wrote its old name beside it: Mount Jonah.
In the river of time, people, names, customs — all things change.
Perhaps he was the only one left who still remembered how things had been. And even he, passing through this place, had not recognized the landscape of an older day.
— And yet fate had brought him back here.
By the window, Yu Feichen watched Anfei.
In those jade-green eyes, the relaxed and easy expression that had been there since they arrived in Yolan was gone. In its place was that faint, detached look Yu Feichen had seen before in the chief god’s eyes — the look of someone watching from a great remove.
As though the happiness of these past few days had been a dream, and the first light of morning had abruptly ended it.
But that expression on a slight and delicate young face looked, somehow, cruel. As if this person should by rights have lived inside a fairy tale — bathed in light for a lifetime.
“What’s wrong?” Yu Feichen said.
Anfei only sent the old map out through the window.
The mountain wind was strong. He let go, and the thin white paper drifted like a butterfly with a broken wing, carried off by the wind to somewhere higher and farther away.
“On the ritual day,” he said, “I need to stay here.”
Yu Feichen didn’t ask why. Something in Anfei’s bearing made him think of grief worn smooth — cool and remote, as though it had been carried a very long time.
That night the lights went out, but Yu Feichen knew Anfei wasn’t sleeping. He was staring at the ceiling.
A dim phosphorescence glowed on the ceiling — like dust from butterfly wings.
In the silence, Anfei suddenly said: “Yu Feichen.”
Yu Feichen reached under the blanket and took his hand. It was its own way of saying I’m here.
Anfei’s hand was very cold.
Another stretch of quiet.
Then, softly, Anfei said: “I am not a true god.”
Yu Feichen had no idea what wound the so-called “ritual day” had opened in him, but it had apparently moved him to start saying strange things.
Say this to anyone in either Paradise or the divine realm, and they would suspect something had gone wrong with his mind.
“That kind of talk,” Yu Feichen said, “save for your believers.”
Anfei seemed to acknowledge the point. In the dark, he let out a soft, quiet laugh.
But the voice that followed was still thin and cool, as if describing someone else entirely.
“What I mean is — I may not be the kind of god you imagine me to be.”
Yu Feichen’s voice, unusually, carried a faint note of something — a thread of curiosity. “What kind of god do I imagine you to be?”
When he had first come to know Anfei, this person was already the chief god who governed the Eternal Day — compassionate toward all suffering, forgiving of all wrongdoing, with people under their care who lived well and happily, worthy in every way of the praise that the god showed mercy to the world. And in all their time together, this person had been gentle, calm — forever presenting themselves with the manner of a kindergarten teacher.
“Like today — desperate to make sure every child gets a scone?”
Anfei: “Perhaps you could choose a more tactful way of putting it.”
Yu Feichen smiled slightly.
“That’s you,” he said. “But it’s not the god I assumed.”
The very moment he had first heard of the chief god’s existence in Paradise, the image that rose in his mind had not looked anything like Anfei.
“Tell me,” Anfei said evenly.
Describing to an existing god what one had imagined a god should look like — it had to be said, it was a peculiar thing to do. Rather like announcing your criteria for a spouse after the engagement was already settled. Yu Feichen felt a mild, distant sense of danger.
“I don’t want to. But if you keep dwelling on these thoughts—” his fingers closed around Anfei’s shoulder, voice unhurried — “there’ll be no getting out of bed tomorrow either.”
Anfei silently turned over, facing away. After a moment Yu Feichen leaned over to check on him and found the man had, this time, fallen asleep quite quickly.
The next morning, Yu Feichen looked outside.
When they had first arrived there had been a fair number of visiting travelers; in just two days, the drop was visible to the naked eye.
He asked the innkeeper about the ritual day.
“Oh my,” she said, “you two already gave flowers — I thought you were locals. You’re from outside? Then off you go, quickly. You can’t come up the mountain with us, and if you stay in town there’ll be monsters. We go up the mountain to spend the night — we leave the town for the monsters to have for one night. That’s how it is.”
“What are the monsters?”
“How would I know — you’d have to ask the village chief about that. Now go on, hurry.”
Yu Feichen, as if it were perfectly true: “We have nowhere else to go.”
“Then spend the night in the forest,” the innkeeper sighed. “If you really must stay in town — when the day comes, you stay in your room and go nowhere. Pull the blanket over your heads, and whatever sounds you hear, don’t move. Remember: don’t move, whatever happens. Better to suffocate than to look. A few years back there were two outsiders who saw the monsters. Scared to death, both of them.”
Yu Feichen asked again: why was it called the ritual day?
The innkeeper sighed.
“The monsters — when you think about it, they’re rather pitiable too. The village chief says they are beings who cannot find rest.”
Yu Feichen grew thoughtful.
The ritual day came quickly. Within the town, all trace of visitors had already disappeared.
On that morning, every person in the town gathered at the place where the bonfire had been lit. Everyone wore the same style of garment; everyone had the butterfly-wing tattoo on their cheeks. The village chief was an elderly man with a walking stick; he made a strange religious gesture toward the left cliff face, and then several strong young townspeople lit enormous torches and led the procession toward the sheer rock face to begin the climb. The dark column of people wound upward like a long snake.
Yu Feichen and Anfei joined at the very end of the procession. They had changed into the locals’ wide robes, and their faces bore imitations of the vivid butterfly markings. All the way up the mountain wind keened, cold and desolate. As the procession drew near the cliff, those at the front began to scale the rock face.
Yu Feichen looked up at the petroglyphs.
As one of Yolan’s far-famed attractions, the rock paintings did have something singular about them. For one thing, these were not something Mofei could have made.
Blood-red incisions cut deep into the pale stone — lines of extraordinary complexity, drawn in an ancient hand, tracing a strange scene.
More than a thousand enormous butterflies fell from the sky like a cascade of tumbling leaves. Some still struggled in the air; others had already dropped to the ground, their bodies pierced through with arrows.
From the bodies of those fallen giants on the ground, countless human shapes had grown — or shapes that might be human. These figures stretched their bodies and necks long, pulling themselves into cocoon-like forms, all of them straining to look toward another point in the air.
There, a figure was painted whose face could not be made out. They looked down upon everything below. They must have been someone of great importance — Xia Sen, when introducing the sights, had mentioned that the cliff face depicted the appearance of the world at the moment of creation.
Only, Yu Feichen could not see what any of it had to do with creation. He could see the butterfly — that element that was everywhere in Yolan — and if anything, it seemed more plausible as a record of the origin of the Yolan people themselves.
More disconcerting still was how unlike other creation paintings this was. Those tended toward the grand and luminous. This one was cold — unsettling — steeped in malice.