Chapter 131#
Of Things Past · V#
Midday. The sun blazed at its height, and not a wisp of cloud crossed the sky.
The first townsperson to lead the way had already reached the top of the cliff face and was waving down at those below.
Yu Feichen and Anfei arrived at the base of the cliff. Two sturdy vine ladders hung down to serve as climbing aids, and the townspeople had also chiseled footholds into the rock. Even so, the ascent was a strenuous undertaking for nearly everyone, and the procession moved with painful slowness. Yu Feichen glanced sideways at Anfei, climbing alongside him.
Fierce sunlight poured down and fell into Anfei’s eyes — and dissolved nothing there.
The young man said not a word, following the townspeople upward in strange silence.
By the time they reached the middle of the cliff, the wind had grown fierce. The vine ladders swayed and shuddered in the mountain gusts; the wind whipped Anfei’s hair loose, and he made no move to tame it, only pulled up his hood so that the tangled strands disappeared beneath it.
Yu Feichen could not tell what Anfei was thinking.
He could only understand it if he knew what role this place had played in Anfei’s past. But that was precisely what he didn’t know — just as he didn’t know what road this person, fragile as a glass figurine, had walked before becoming the chief god of the Eternal Day, known to all.
By evening, every townsperson had at last made it to the top of the cliff.
Yu Feichen was second to last; when he pulled himself up he reached back and helped Anfei the rest of the way. To him, Anfei weighed almost nothing — like lifting a butterfly.
The moment Anfei found his footing at the cliff’s edge he swayed slightly, instinctively gripping Yu Feichen’s wrist to steady himself. His fingers had left deep red marks in the vine ladder. Yu Feichen glanced down at them, and closed his hand around Anfei’s.
The townspeople pushed aside the hanging vines and wound their way into the forest at the summit, continuing on toward their destination.
After a while, the open air brought a cool breeze, and at last they arrived at the site of the ritual.
— The scene before them was nothing Yu Feichen had expected.
Beneath the darkening sky, great boulders were piled across the mountaintop. A worn stone staircase rose through them toward the center, where a grey-white circular altar stood.
Yu Feichen stared at it, confirming that this thing bore roughly sixty percent resemblance to the altar that had appeared in the Plaza of the Setting Sun on the day of the Resurrection. Except this one was smaller, and far more ancient — deep cracks had already split through the stone.
A cluster of townspeople gathered around the village chief and walked with him toward the altar. The rest of the townspeople moved silently to a flat open space nearby and stood waiting.
Walking just ahead of Yu Feichen and Anfei was a mother carrying her daughter, a child of three or four — too small to have climbed on her own, and so carried up in a woven vine basket on her mother’s back.
The little girl murmured drowsily from within: “Mama… sleep… where…”
“We sleep right here tonight,” her mother said. “On this night the spirits of the dead return to the world of the living and spend the night in the town. They give us a night of good dreams in exchange.”
The child was already half-asleep, leaning against the side of the basket, eyes closing. But her mother went on: “We will dream of a great city. The village chief says it is the place where our ancestors once lived.”
On the altar, the ritual began.
Several of the stronger townspeople unstrapped their packs and drew out great quantities of flowers, game meat, berries, and honey, along with many jars filled with water from the River of Things Past.
Once these offerings were piled upon the altar, several elder-looking townspeople began chanting — long, intricate incantations.
They chanted from dusk into deep evening, and still nothing on the altar changed.
With each successive ritual, the spirits seemed to require more and more.
The village chief sighed, drew out a bowl fashioned from leaves, and cut his own finger to let fall a few drops of blood.
He then carried the leaf bowl into the crowd: “As before — let us offer our blood to the spirits of our ancestors as well.”
Beginning from the front, each person contributed a measure of blood.
Yu Feichen watched.
For a ritual to take effect, it required a sufficient infusion of power. The offerings piled on the altar, and the blood now being gathered, were all ways of accumulating enough. In more primitive places, living people themselves were sometimes used as offerings.
The townspeople might not understand the principles at work, but they had learned the pattern through practice.
Each time the leaf bowl filled to the brim with blood, it was carried to the altar and poured over the stone, while the elders resumed their chanting.
Again and again. The blood had reddened the entire altar surface; the elders’ voices had grown faint and exhausted.
On the altar, still nothing happened.
The village chief wiped cold sweat from his brow. In past ritual years, the blood of ten or so people had been sufficient — a hundred at most. Tonight, the blood-gathering seemed to have no end.
While one townsperson was still bleeding, the village chief made a slow circuit of the gathered crowd.
His heart gave a sudden uneasy lurch.
Something felt… different.
The butterfly wings that drooped from the trees in the surrounding forest had opened without his noticing — every one of them, their vivid patterned faces now turned toward this place, watching.
Beyond that, a dense black night-mist had risen at some point and pressed heavily over the mountain peaks; the shape of the town far below had been completely swallowed up. In all the village chief’s memory, Yolan had never seen mist this thick.
No — something was wrong. The village chief’s brow locked tight. The air tonight was oppressively thick, saturated with a dark and suffocating feeling; the trees… the trees and stones seemed to have come alive. In the pitch-black night, something was on the verge of breaking through the surface.
Had they offended the spirits? The village chief struggled to recall the ancient sayings and rules that the previous chief had passed down to him — trying to find where the error had been made. But he was old, and his memory was failing.
In the end, he let out a long breath and gave up trying to remember. The blood-letting of this person had finished. The townsperson returned the blood bowl to him, and he passed it on to the next.
The two young people ahead of him were standing close together. Strange — he didn’t recognize their faces. He hadn’t seen them in town before. And now that he thought about it, they hadn’t been standing here a moment ago; they had been much farther back.
Well. His memory was unreliable these days.
When the two young people had each added their drops of blood, the leaf bowl filled again. The village chief carried it back to the altar.
After the village chief stepped away, Yu Feichen looked down at Anfei.
— A short time earlier, when the ritual had stalled and could not proceed, he had heard Anfei exhale softly.
Yu Feichen: “Why?”
“They know I’ve come.”
The moonlight was like scattered dust.
Then Anfei took his hand and drew him through the crowd to the village chief’s side, and let his own blood fall into the bowl.
On the altar, the village chief poured this bowl of blood over the stone. The dark red liquid seeped into the grooves and fissures of the rock, the way a tree disappears into the night.
At last, the stone altar began to tremble softly.
The village chief let out a breath of relief.
The elders’ chanting swelled with renewed devotion.
The trembling grew stronger and stronger. The blood had seemed to awaken something in the void; thick black vapor began seeping out through the cracks in the stone.
— And then, gradually, they took shape.
In the silence, a little girl let out a sharp cry. Her mother gathered her into her arms and covered her eyes, but the crying continued in broken waves.
On the altar, monsters teemed.
Within the black mist, there were thousands of them — each one five or six people tall. Their bodies were like dark elongated cocoons, standing upright from the ground like serpents. Long, slender necks rose from each body, topped by a cluster of eyes, starkly black and white.
Behind them, long and vivid butterfly wings dragged and trailed.
The village chief lowered his gaze, refusing to look at them directly, and intoned: “Go, you dead who have crossed the boundary between life and death — descend to the valley below. Return to the time of the mortal world within our township, and rest there.”
The butterfly-winged monsters did not move. The clustered eyes drifted slowly across the crowd.
On the altar, the black mist thickened further.
Endless cold.
The village chief wiped the sweat from his brow again and pressed on: “Go… descend to the valley…”
They stood in silence, unmoving.
Among the townspeople, whispers began; then, fear spread through them like a slow fire.
“What is happening?”
“How have we offended our ancestors?”
The village chief suddenly sucked in a harsh breath. Like a thunderclap, a sentence the previous chief had once spoken rose up in his mind:
“When… an outsider enters Yolan, something… terrible will happen.”
The village chief snapped his head up, swept his gaze across the crowd, and cried out: “Has an outsider come among us?!”
“Find them — find them! Now!”
At the command, the townspeople began exchanging glances, scrutinizing the faces around them, and drawing back from each other.
Into the roiling, frightened air, a quiet, clear voice suddenly spoke.
Not loud, yet it seemed to sound directly beside each person’s ear.
“This night has nothing to do with you,” it said. “Leave this place.”
The voice held something like the power of a command. Their bodies began to move against their own will, hesitating backward, retreating step by step.
Anfei reached out and pushed Yu Feichen away with the rest: “Get away from me.”
Yu Feichen didn’t move. Instead he caught Anfei’s hand and held it.
The wound on Anfei’s finger had been cut a little deep and was still seeping blood; with their fingers interlaced, their blood mingled together.
Anfei looked at Yu Feichen once, and did not ask him to leave again.
In the moonlight, he looked calmly at the monsters.
Moonlight cast long shadows on the ground before them. The monsters left the altar and began to move toward them, slowly. Those shadows gradually converged. Their cocoon-like bodies dragged softly across the ground, but the scaled butterfly wings on their backs were strangely hard, and as the wings rubbed against one another they produced an eerie sound — like laughter.
The laughter went on for a time, then turned into piercing wails.
Yu Feichen stood slightly ahead and to the side of Anfei, watching the monsters warily.
They were grotesque and unsettling to look at, but they appeared to have no usable appendages for physical attack — not even hands. If physical attack was not among their methods, then it would be venom, sound, or some form of psychic assault.
The sound grew louder and stranger — half crying, half laughing, like an accusation torn from the chest.
Yu Feichen: “What are they saying?”
“They are asking me,” Anfei said, each word deliberate. “— Do you still remember?”
In the sound that shattered every sense, the world around them quietly changed.
The sound cut off.
They were standing in a bright and bustling city. The streets were full of shops, and people moved through them in great flowing currents.
Butterfly totems were everywhere. Every person had a long, slender neck, and behind their shoulders hung a pair of vivid, patterned butterfly wings. Their skin was covered in luminescent markings.
People came and went, and no one could see them — bodies passed through them like mist through mist.
“I remember,” Anfei said.
“This is Mount Jonah. The capital of the Butterfly People. They loved berries and honey. They were shy sometimes, and rarely left their own kingdom. They loved trees and vines; all their buildings were made of wood.”
“Then one day they discovered that the paths leading out of their kingdom to the wider world had stopped working. No matter which way they walked, they always returned to where they started. But it didn’t trouble them much — they went on living as they always had.”
It sounded like the birth of a fragment world.
Yu Feichen: “And then?”
Anfei turned and looked back the way they had come, down a road that wound out from a distant mountain.
His voice was soft — as soft as a sigh: “This was… so very long ago.”
Yu Feichen looked.
On the empty road, a figure appeared.
Measured by human appearance, he had only just left boyhood behind.
Golden hair. White robes. Such fine features were rarely seen in the world, and such cool, empty detachment rarely wore them.
A solitary stranger from outside had appeared in the kingdom of the Butterfly People.
Years had passed without a visitor from beyond; the people had lost all connection to the outside world. They were full of curiosity about him. They invited him to stay in the most beautiful inn, and asked him about things from outside.
“Outside is the same as it always was,” the visitor answered.
And they were reassured.
“Then, dear visitor — please stay awhile. Eat some berries and honey, and enjoy a pleasant time among us,” they said.
The visitor said: “Thank you.”
Though they welcomed this rare guest, the Butterfly People were still shy by nature — and especially so, for this visitor seemed cold and difficult to approach. They only watched him from a distance, curiously observing his every move.
On his first day there, the visitor read many books about the Butterfly People’s kingdom. He seemed to do so carefully, and the Butterfly People liked careful people.
On the third day, he sought out the shaman and asked about certain matters of magic. Afterward the shaman told his students: I only wish your gifts were half as strong as that visitor’s.
On the fifth day, the visitor called on a well-known craftsman in the city and commissioned a bow and a set of arrows. The craftsman looked at the design and was pleased by it; he asked the visitor whether he might make several more to sell to others. The visitor was quiet for a moment, then said: “You may.”
On the seventh day, the visitor climbed to the tallest building in the city. Across from it rose the grandest palace of the Butterfly People, constructed entirely from fragrant wood.
In the bright sunlight, the visitor set three arrows to his bowstring.
He must be testing his aim, thought a Butterfly Person who had been quietly watching.
The taut bowstring suddenly released. Three arrows flew like shooting stars toward the sprawling palace.
At their tips, fierce magical flames erupted.
Fire roared through the palace.
Screams broke out everywhere. Two shamans came running from the burning building and began to speak the words of a water-magic incantation.
The visitor’s eyes were still as detached as ever. He nocked another arrow.
The sound of the arrow cutting through the air was so light.
The feeling of it entering flesh was so heavy.
Two arrows pierced both shamans through the heart, nearly simultaneously.
The Butterfly Person who had been watching stood blank and speechless, voice trembling: “…Why?”
The visitor turned around.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said. “This is the twenty-third world I have come to.”
That day, in the kingdom of the Butterfly People, fire rose from the center and burned the sky red.
At first, screams were everywhere. Crying was everywhere. Then came cries of agony. And then the roaring of fire and wind swallowed everything else.
When at last it was silent, the world was nothing but charred, blackened ruin.
A faint crunching sound. The visitor walked through the wreckage. Wind lifted the ash around him, and yet his white robes remained white.
A body lay in the street. Life had left it in the moment of struggling — one arm still stretched toward the sky. On a face burned beyond recognition, the expression of a last, unheard cry had been preserved.
The visitor looked at it. He looked for a long time.
Then he knelt on one knee, folded the outstretched arm gently back down, and arranged the dead person’s hands to rest, crossed, over their chest.
“I make a vow,” the visitor said. “You will be reborn in a realm that will never shatter.”