waterman
TMF Regular
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2006
- Messages
- 251
- Points
- 43
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The night they took her away, Yin smelled of rain and dried blood.
In the inner courtyards of the palace, metal had screamed for days, and stone had drunk more than it should. Since Daji had taken her place beside King Di Xin, executions were no longer acts of governance: they were displays of pure cruelty, deliberate, refined in their own savagery.
Those who fell from favor did not simply disappear. Their end was public, a spectacle forced upon the people.
Qin Shu had watched his brother turn into a warning.
Zi Ren, court diviner, a man who spoke to the ancestors through ox scapulae and turtle plastrons, had carved a question he should never have asked. The fire had run along the incisions, and the crack had opened forked, sharp, insistent. Zi Ren had not said “fox.” He had said “a presence not born of a human womb.” He had said that the king no longer decided alone.
Daji had listened without blinking. The next day she suggested to the sovereign that diviners can lie out of ambition. What followed was spectacle.
Qin Shu remembered the smell of flesh on heated bronze. He remembered his brother’s silence as skin tightened and split. He remembered a soft, satisfied female laugh.
From that moment he no longer walked the palace corridors as an officer of ritual security. He walked as a man waiting for an opportunity, and others would look the other way at the right moment.
He found it when the king departed on a diplomatic journey to the western clans. Yin remained without its formal center of power. The guards were weary of senseless cruelties.
The handmaiden came with lowered eyes and hands stained with millet wine. She told Qin Shu that her mistress drank each evening before retiring. She said she knew herbs that could weigh upon the eyelids without stopping the heart. Good pay and the promise of a new life, once the plot was done, persuaded her.
They entered the women’s residence when the torches burned low and shadows stretched long. Wooden panels filtered the wind. Ritual bronzes reflected a muted glow.
Daji lay upon a low bed, red silk fallen aside. Her hair gathered with jade pins. She did not look like a threat. Yet her beauty, sensual and disarming, was dangerous even at rest.
Ropes tightened around her wrists. A gag was secured over her mouth so the viper could not hiss.
They carried her out of Yin before the sky paled. They crossed damp fields and side paths, avoiding the main roads. The chosen village was loyal to Qin Shu, a handful of earthen houses and a grain storehouse isolated enough to avoid attention.
They bound her to a rough wooden chair. The cords marked her wrists. Her bare feet touched the cold ground.
When she fully woke, the first thing she did was pull against the bindings. She was not strong enough to free herself. Then she raised her gaze to her captors, who watched in silence.
“Do you have any idea,” she said slowly, “what the king will do when he finds my place empty?”
One warrior swallowed. Qin Shu remained still.
“It will not be the king who decides,” he answered. “Not if he no longer rules.”
She tilted her head, then let out a short, cutting laugh.
“Ah. Now I recognize you. The brother of the burned prophet. He was weak. I merely showed him how fragile he was.”
She pulled again at the ropes, this time with genuine fury. The chair creaked.
“If you so much as touch me,” she hissed, “I will make you beg to be burned upon bronze as the diviner was. I will have the king flay you slowly. I will hang your heads at the gates of Yin.”
One of the warriors stepped back.
Qin Shu stepped forward.
“My brother saw more,” he said. “He saw a shadow with more than one tail.”
For a heartbeat something flared in Daji’s eyes that was not mere anger. The aristocratic mask slipped, revealing a flash of something feral.
Then she smiled again, joyless.
“Be careful what you meddle with, little man. There are realms of torment whose gates you have not yet crossed.”
The light filtering through a crack in the wall flickered. The wind should not have entered, but it did. The shadows behind her stretched along the earthen wall.
Qin Shu stepped closer.
He had no brother left to lose. He no longer feared heated bronze.
He needed only to know whether he spoke to a woman… or to something wearing human skin like a robe.
He did not take his eyes from her face. He watched her lips.
Always closed. Always composed. Even when she threatened, even when she smiled, even when she laughed at Zi Ren’s death. She had never shown her teeth in open laughter. She smirked. She whispered. She murmured words that seemed to slip out without her mouth truly opening.
Zi Ren had told him about a sphere.
“They cannot part from it,” he had said one night, before his arrest. “It is the core. The vessel of their strength. When they assume human form, they must hide it somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Close to the breath.”
In the storehouse the silence thickened. Daji continued to promise death, her voice sharp as a blade.
“I will have you skinned alive. I will make you beg to be thrown into ditches like dogs.”
Qin Shu slipped a hand into the folds of his robe and drew out a long peacock feather. Iridescent colors — deep green, dark blue, a golden eye at its center — caught the light from the wall.
One warrior frowned. “Commander…?”
Qin Shu did not answer.
He knelt before her.
Daji regarded him with disgust. “What do you think you are doing?”
Her silk and leather shoes were still on her feet. Qin Shu removed them calmly, one at a time. Her toes flexed faintly when the cold earth touched bare skin.
“Do not dare,” she hissed.
He took one foot firmly, not cruelly but without hesitation. His voice was flat.
“If my brother was right, and you have taken human form… then there are sensations you are not prepared to endure.”
The men exchanged puzzled glances.
The tip of the feather brushed lightly across the sole of her foot.
Daji did not react at once. She continued speaking.
“You are digging your grave, Qin Shu. The king—”
The sentence broke. A slight catch in her breath.
The feather slid again beneath the arch, slow, insistent. The fine strands bent against her skin.
Her toes curled.
“Is this your plan?” she said with disdain, though her voice had lost a thread of certainty. “To tickle a woman?”
Qin Shu did not hasten. He continued with measured movements, watching her face, not her feet.
A tremor ran along her leg. She clenched her jaw.
“Pathetic,” she spat, though a nervous note crept between the syllables.
The feather moved higher, then back, quicker. Daji inhaled sharply. Her shoulders stiffened against the rope.
“Only the king may touch my extremities,” she said, striving to keep her imperious tone. “You will see, do— eheh!”
A short, strangled sound escaped her pressed lips.
Qin Shu increased the rhythm.
The feather’s fibers now danced beneath both soles, alternating light strokes with firmer sweeps. Daji’s toes curled tightly, her legs tensed, the chair creaked.
She tried to continue her threats.
“I will… I will ohoh!—”
A smirk slipped free against her will. Dry. Forced.
She bit the inside of her cheeks, eyes flashing with fury.
“Stop him!” she snarled to the men. “Stop him!”
No one moved.
Qin Shu let the feather fall.
For a moment Daji believed she had prevailed. She inhaled, ready to regain control.
Then Qin Shu’s fingers settled directly beneath the soles of her feet.
A violent jolt ran through her body. Her shoulders strained against the ropes, her legs tried to withdraw but were restrained.
A sound burst from her throat, wider, more open.
“No— OHOH!—”
She tried to close her mouth, to return to her controlled smirk, but his fingers moved swiftly, unpredictably. Her sensitive skin betrayed every effort at discipline.
“AHAHAHA! Nooo!”
Her face twisted with the loss of control. Tears welled in her eyes, sliding along her temples. She tried to press her lips together, but each attempt was swept away by another wave.
“S-stop! You IHIHIH! AHAHAHA!—”
The syllables shattered into laughter, higher, fuller, utterly unlike the sharp palace smirks.
Her mouth opened wide.
And Qin Shu saw it.
A glow between her teeth.
A light that did not belong to the day beyond the wall.
Violet.
Intense.
The laughter snapped into a scream as something rolled out, hovering before her lips: a luminous sphere, pulsing like a heart that did not beat to any human rhythm.
The storehouse trembled.
The shadows behind her tore apart.
From her body emerged streaks of light that solidified into shapes. One. Two. Three.
Tails.
Thick, furred, white at the base and darkening at the tips, they spread like fans behind her, tearing away the illusion of humanity. Nine in total, thrashing with rising fury.
The laughter warped into a guttural sound, no longer human.
The warriors recoiled. One stumbled backward.
Daji raised her head, tears still on her cheeks, but her eyes burned with ancient hatred.
“You will pay, dogs!” she snarled, staring at the hovering sphere. “I will return and burn you alive! You will see!”
The nine tails dissolved into streaks of milky light, thinning, losing solidity. Her skin turned translucent, like mist lit from within. Her face elongated, cheekbones stretching into something no longer bound to a human skull.
She unraveled into a pale vortex, the vast outline of a fox made of vapor and violet light.
For a moment the creature hung suspended, eyes like embers.
Then it passed through the earthen wall as though it were smoke.
The storehouse remained standing, yet the air had changed. The scent was no longer human.
One warrior fell to his knees. Another made the ritual sign to invoke the ancestors.
Qin Shu rose slowly.
The sphere still floated before him, pulsing like a heart torn from a god’s chest. He took it in both hands. It was warm. It vibrated against his palms, as if trying to return.
“It cannot go far,” he said, steadier than he felt. “This is its root.”
The men approached cautiously.
“It has fled,” one murmured.
“It needs flesh,” Qin Shu replied. “A female body. Near. Immediately.”
It was not a guess. It was what Zi Ren had explained over smoking bones.
“When it loses its core,” he had said, “it grows hungry. It cannot wander long. It will seek a womb to house it.”
Earthen houses filled with shouts and questions. The women were brought to the central square under the terrified gaze of husbands, fathers, brothers. Qin Shu had no time for gentleness.
“Which of them has behaved strangely?” he demanded. “Whose mood has changed? Who has spoken to herself?”
Answers came through hesitation and guilty glances.
Three names.
Three young women who since that morning had alternated silence with bursts of rage. Questioned, all three blamed their monthly pains.
They were led to the center of the square, trembling in simple garments, eyes wide with fear.
“We are not possessed!” one cried, her voice breaking. “It is only—”
“Bring the mastiffs,” Qin Shu ordered. “We will know the truth at once.”
The village dogs — large beasts bred for guard and hunt — were brought in heavy chains. They growled, unsettled by the agitation.
“They hate the scent of foxes,” Zi Ren had explained. “And the foxes hate their breath.”
Qin Shu ordered their shoes removed. Their bare feet touched the packed earth, dusty with straw.
A sweet paste of honey and millet flour was spread upon their soles. The women protested, weeping, but under the threat of spears they remained still.
The mastiffs were led forward.
The first lowered its muzzle to the woman on the left. It inhaled. Hesitated. Then began to lick slowly.
She flinched at the unexpected contact, emitting small gasps that turned into nervous smiles as the rough tongue scraped the sweet paste from her soles.
The second dog approached the woman in the center. She stiffened, holding her breath, then burst into hiccupping laughter when her foot was eagerly licked.
“Aahaha… please, I have… ah ah… done nothing…”
The third mastiff was brought before the last.
The dog lunged at her feet, not biting, but licking with fierce insistence. Its tongue moved swiftly across her soles, forcing her to jolt.
“You cannot… you cannot… ah… you… ih ih AHAHAH!”
She exploded into ringing laughter, clutching her head as though trying to force the sound back inside her body. A violet glow filtered between her teeth. Her pupils ignited with unnatural light.
“Ridiculous mortals IHIHI!—” she began, but the phrase shattered into convulsive laughter.
Her back arched violently. A shadow tore free from her body like a ripped mantle.
An enormous ethereal figure rose above her: a nine-tailed fox of violet light, eyes blazing with fury.
The woman’s body collapsed, unconscious.
All stepped back. Some fell into the dust. The mastiffs whimpered.
The fox hovered above the clearing, semi-transparent, terrible.
“Return what is mine!” it thundered, voice like wind through stone. “Return my essence!”
The nine tails lashed the air. Its shadow covered Qin Shu.
He did not retreat.
He raised the sphere.
It vibrated violently, drawn toward the creature.
“Is this what you seek?” he said, tense but steady.
The fox emitted a guttural sound, half plea, half threat.
“Give it back, mortal, and I will grant you a swift death.”
Qin Shu let it fall.
The sphere struck the packed earth and rolled aside, still pulsing.
In one sudden motion he seized a guard’s halberd and lifted it overhead.
The fox screamed.
The blade fell.
Metal pierced the sphere.
A burst of violet light tore through the air. The ground shook. A shockwave staggered the men.
The sphere cracked like glass.
A second blow.
Its surface shattered. The light scattered into a thousand sparks that dissolved like ash in the wind.
The fox unleashed a shriek so piercing it seemed to draw blood from ears.
The nine tails writhed, thinning.
“Father—!” it cried to the sky. “Father, no—!”
A column of violet light descended like an inverted vortex, enveloping the creature.
Its form twisted, stretched upward, as if pulled by an unseen force.
For a single instant its eyes met Qin Shu’s.
The arrogance was gone.
Only eternal hatred remained.
Then the light closed upon itself.
The sky returned to blue.
Silence. Only the ragged breathing of men.
The guards stared at one another, unbelieving. One by one, they approached Qin Shu.
“It is finished,” one murmured.
“You have freed us,” said another, still pale.
Someone knelt, touching the earth as though he had witnessed a divine rite.
Qin Shu let the halberd fall. His hands trembled faintly.
He looked at the dark dust that had been the sphere.
Father.
The word rang in his mind.
What entity could sire such a creature? What abyss could produce daughters capable of bending a king?
He lifted his eyes to the clear sky above the village.
The king was still in Yin.
The throne was still vulnerable.
If one demon had sent a daughter, another could be sent.
Qin Shu clenched his fists.
He would not lower his guard.
Not while he breathed.
Not while the memory of Zi Ren continued to dwell within his heart.
