“It wasn’t a trick,” Mei Huang repeats, smoothing a hand down her belly. It is smooth again, no scarring beneath the fabric.

“I am still hungry, Littlest Sister. It is cold here and none of my children have desire to spare.”

Mei Huang blinks the salt from her eyes, vision adjusting to the penumbra. There are other people here in the bones of Hong. A throng of shapes, each and every one draped in carmine. Head bowed, they are anonymous, inscrutable, unidentifiable. Only She Who Waits draws the eye, stark in her myriad extremities, her grinning scrutiny.

“It wasn’t a trick,” Mei Huang says for the third time, inspecting now the rungs of her ribs. There. Relief throbs through her, even as she digs nails beneath a panel and tugs. Mei Ying, she repeats in silence. I’m here. Finally, I’m here.

“Then what is it?”

A violent motion: fabric tears and her flesh unhinges, pivoting on gears of enamel. With a gasp, Mei Huang unsheaths the dagger—it is bone, only bone, but a sister’s grief can sharpen anything, even a sliver of a femur, lovingly preserved against one’s heart—and flings it at the crowd, trusting that it will find its way home. Blood calls to blood, bone sings to bone. Like death, like life, you always find your way to yourself.

She Who Waits does not scream, only tilts her head as the dagger buries itself not in her divine chest but the belly of one of her red-dressed acolytes. The figure slumps forward, palms curling around the hilt of the blade. They slip onto their knees, crumble, and fall with a sigh that is not unlike relief. There is no worse burden than immortality, Mei Ying had told her sister, those rare days she was allowed to speak, to be less than a deity’s avatar, to be more than a mouthpiece.

A ming-ren cannot provide fortune, but they can sometimes author a better death.

“There.” Mei Huang sighs and shuts her gaze against what must come next, a future as red as the glow outside her eyelids.

monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end

I wanted to tell you, in case opportunity absents itself forever, that it doesn’t matter. That your magic is algorithmic, that mine is an abstraction of reality. That yours demands cartographic soliloquies, every verse a phrase and a phase of mathematics and momentum, every word you speak a part of the map, and you build the rules as you recite them. That mine is raw sensation, synesthesic, sinewy as sex, worthless with context, worth everything on the ledge at the end of time.

Hold.

We have to hold the line.