Content note: torture

 

Imawane has lost track of time, hanging in the chains—everything contracting to the pain in her legs, the pull of the chains on her wrists, the broken ribs, the breath that rattles in her chest, the encroaching darkness that hovers at the edge of her field of vision but refuses to take her—the laughter of the demons, the patient and relentless questioning of her interrogator as the knives are applied, again and again.

Where are the Five Spiritual Weapons? Tell me where they are and you can rest. Where are they?

And she can’t breathe and she can’t talk, and she’s clinging onto the locations of the Five she hid as the war between the celestials and the demons engulfed province after province—hid them because the wholesale destruction they brought when wielded scared her to her bones. She holds that hiding place close to her, as close as the memory of Ayorae and the evenings strolling in Thian with blossoms on the trees, and Ayorae’s hand in hers—in the days before the demons overran Thian and Imawane herself was captured, taken for interrogation in this darkened room…

“You. Will. Stop. Now.”

Ayorae? It sounds like her voice, and it doesn’t. It’s ice cold and something in Imawane’s battered body jerks away from it—some primal urge to try and hide somewhere it won’t notice her, but the only thing it does is make the chains clink and dig deeper into her flayed wrists, and she screams then, bracing herself for the low laughter of the demons. Instead she feels the coldness and the darkness rise in the room—a deep and savage anger that threatens to drown everything.

“My lady, we’re not done with questioning the celestial smith—”

A scream from the demon, and a crush of bones, and Ayorae’s cold voice. “I gave orders not to harm her.” And Imawane tries to jerk away again, but she’s too exhausted, too spent.

The chains release, and she flops—and someone is holding her, cradling her. “I have you, my love. I have you.”

Love. She tries to speak the word but only blood comes up. “Ayorae—”

“Ssh.” Ayorae’s eyes are odd—redder than they should be, and not just because they’re glistening with tears, tears that smoke and evaporate the moment they touch her skin. She’s burning hot, but it’s not the burning of a fever—it’s roiling, all-encompassing, a fire larger than Imawane’s forge—a fire that would burn the world to cinders. She’d scare Imawane, if Imawane had any fear left—but all she can think of is that she’s being held, and that the pain is receding—something is holding it at bay.

Someone is holding it at bay. Ayorae.

She tries to speak again. The words scatter in her throat.

“I have you. It’s going to be fine, love. You’ll heal.”

“My lady.” Another voice, and something is dragged, briefly, into her field of vision—Imawane catches a glimpse of blood, and dull eyes. A corpse. A celestial’s corpse, someone that Imawane doesn’t recognise. “What you requested.”

Ayorae’s attention turns, briefly, to the demon who has spoken. “She’ll do. The build and the hair are right, and anything else can be mimicked.” Low laughter from her, but the anger is still underlying it. “Mutilate it. Make sure the face can’t be recognised and hang it on my banner.” Her voice is harsh and matter-of-fact, and there’s nothing left of the person Imawane remembers—the lover who whispered sweet nothings in her ears, the one that fucked her until they both cried.

“Ayorae, what are you—doing?”

Ayorae’s hand rests, briefly, on her cheeks, wiping away the blood. “Making sure my own side thinks you dead. Some would rather know where the Five are to use them in war against you and wouldn’t take kindly to my showing mercy.”

“Why?”

Soft, low laughter from Ayorae. “Because I came to steal or corrupt the Five you were crafting and found something I never expected instead.”

“I—don’t—under…” She tries to say more, but everything is coming crashing down, the darkness held at bay for so long finally coming in.

“Oh, love. It’s you I found, and I’ll safeguard you. Ssh. It’s going to be fine. Wait for me, love. Heal. I’ll come for you when this is all over, and the world has been remade anew and fairer.” Ayorae bends over her, then—and Imawane sees in her eyes the gleam of fire, the gleam of darkness—but her face is gentle as she kisses Imawane, slowly and deliberately and like someone who is letting something infinitely precious slip away from her. “Wait for me, love.”

And then everything goes dark.

Imawane loses track of time, again. She’s in a bed this time, with soft sheets, and a shadowed ceiling, such unexpected things—and demons who don’t laugh or delight in her pain, but come to change bandages and apply soothing salves to her body, and magic that feels like fire, scouring her from head to toe—they hold her down as she convulses, the eldest of them saying gently that they’re very sorry, but they have to get the corruption out or she’ll die.

And it wouldn’t be so bad to die, would it? Except that Ayorae told Imawane to wait for her.

In the brief intervals when she’s lucid, Imawane thinks of Ayorae. Of the Breaker of Mountains and Rivers—because that has to be who Ayorae is, really, beneath the tenderness and the fairness and the smiles. The demon sorceress biding her time until she could sally forth from the barren land of Khiyu, her army of demons behind her, sweeping over the world and burning everything in her wake. A myth, Imawane thought—until the vanguard of the demon army crossed into Thian—and her cousin Pherasai, dissecting the corpses of their prisoners after interrogation, saw that they weren’t celestials or mortals. Until Imawane’s spiritual weapons turned from hunting and farming tools shared with the shorter-lived mortals, to weapons in an all-encompassing war.

Imawane thinks of the demons and of the spiritual weapons, and of the war. Of where she’s supposed to stand, on the side of the celestials and of the Light. On the other side from Ayorae.

When she’s better, the demons help her, and her food becomes pickled vegetables and white rice instead of thin, liquefied porridge. The elderly one—who is called Remai—supports her as Imawane takes her first faltering step in a garden beneath skies of raining ash. The trees are bare, the branches sharp and thorned. Imawane stares at them, and weeps.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m far away from home,” Imawane says. She could lie—she should lie or show more defiance, but she’s in the midst of a blackened, dead land, with no escape she can see. “Because I don’t know what happened to my kin.”

Remai is silent, for a while. “I don’t know how the war is going,” she says. “In the heart of Khiyu, we don’t get news of what’s happening. And even if we did, they wouldn’t focus on the fate of celestials. They’d be about who lives and dies among us. But you could leave, if you wanted to find out.”

Imawane stares at her. “Your mistress made sure I wouldn’t.”

“That’s not what she said.” Remai’s gaze is thoughtful, the fangs overhanging her thick lips. “She told me to heal you and get you back to full strength. She didn’t say you were a prisoner here.”

It’s like a dash of cold water in Imawane’s face: a confused flaring of an emotion she’s not sure she can name, half anger, half something else, something that twists in her chest—something too strong, too flayed raw to be called love. “Your mistress is the Breaker of Mountains and Rivers.” The Corrupter. The ruler of the demons, the ones who tortured Imawane until she almost broke. Why would she even bother to come to Imawane—to have those long slow meals, those walks in the darkness with the stars above them, those conversations about the future—about the welfare of their loved ones? Why would she—

Because I came to steal or corrupt the Five you were crafting and found something I never expected instead.

It’s you I found.

“Yes,” Remai says. “But she wants you to be well.” A sigh. “I know what the others did to you.”

“And wouldn’t she do the same to others?”

“To her enemies. Are you one of them?”

Imawane stares at the dead tree in the centre of the garden. “I should be.”

“She’s our leader,” Remai says. Her voice is low, and sad. “The one fighting with us for our future.”

“Your future?” An uncomfortable reminder of Ayorae getting more animated, more angry than usual when they spoke of the future—of how she’d argued that the celestials didn’t give anyone a fair chance. Imawane had thought she was talking about the mortals, but that wasn’t what she’d meant at all. She’d meant the demons.

Remai spreads her hands, pointing to the desolation all around them. “Our right to live and to blossom.”

“Demons.” Imawane stares at her, and it occurs to her, then, that why should demons not have their own dreams, their own hopes for the future? “You tortured me,” she says, but she knows celestials—such as her cousin Pherasai—have done the same to demons, and what does that make of either of them?

In the silence that spreads, Imawane finally says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re not the worst of what your kin did. It was unfair. And unkind.”

Remai’s laughter is low and amused. “Come,” she says, and walks closer to the tree.

“Why?” Imawane asks. Pointless defiance, a show that even now drains her. She’s not well, and certainly not well enough for travelling through all of Khiyu. The thought of facing the others—Sarmê, Pherasai, Mizecha—of telling them what happened, why she was healed by demons—is an exhausting cliff-wall she cannot contemplate.

“I want to show you something.” Remai points, upwards.

Imawane stares at the tree. “It’s a dead tree. A poisoned tree. Why—”

And then she sees it, silhouetted against the roiling darkness of the sky, the faint, glistening shape of flowers clinging to every branch—translucent flowers with the sheen of pearls. The tree isn’t dead—the blossoms are scattered all around. She’s been walking on them and never realised it.

“It only flowers in darkness, and its flowers are only seen in darkness. Not everything is as it seems,” Remai says.

Wait for me, my love.

She’s not healed. She’s not strong enough. She can wait. A little. Until her wounds are fully gone, until she can travel out of Khiyu. She can wait—and the treacherous part of her whispers that perhaps Ayorae will come back, in the meantime.

When it happens, Imawane feels it. She’s sitting on the bench beneath the ghost-tree, breathing in the sharp, acrid taste of the flowers—when the entire world shudders and distorts, and there’s a scream like a dying person’s, except no scream should resonate this loudly, or make Imawane feel like her own lungs are being wrung into bloody messes. She falls, gasping, to her knees, tears streaming from her face. Above her, the roiling darkness turns a deep red.

When she finally pulls herself up, she’s shaking.

She finds Remai in the library, leaning against one of the soot-stained walls, her face pale, drained of blood.

“What happened?” she asks.

“The mistress—” Remai inhales, struggling to breathe. “The mistress—”

Imawane runs. She’s not sure where—but it’s as if something is guiding her, a magic that’s rising from the heart of the fortress—through the tree, the gardens, the sky, something that feels like it’s going to pull her apart any moment. She’s going to pay for it later, she knows—she’s not healed enough to be running—but it doesn’t matter.

There’s a tower, in the centre of the fortress—and stairs guarded by demons that scatter when they see her, white-faced and dishevelled. She takes the stairs two at a time, breath burning in her lungs, her barely healed ribs shaking, sending fresh waves of pain to her chest.

Ayorae.
Love.
Ayorae.

At the top of the tower is something that looks like a darkened cradle—and beneath it is the shape of Ayorae.

She’s pale, bloodless—wavering under a strong magic Imawane can’t seem to breach, no matter how much she hammers at the invisible wall separating them. Her eyes are closed, her lips not just bruised or purple, but as dark as the tree in the garden. Her hands—the long-fingered ones that lingered on Imawane’s own hands, gently and tenderly—are bloodied, and one of them—the one clenched on a broken sword—is missing three fingers.

“You can’t see her,” Remai says. She’s out of breath too.

“I don’t understand,” Imawane says.

“That’s not the person you knew. She lost her body, and her power. That’s just…the soul, coalescing back here, in a safe place, after she was killed. A ghost of a ghost. Your side won.” Remai’s voice is bitter. “The celestials will seal Khiyu. Kill all the demons they can find. Pretend nothing ever happened, that she’s dead for good.”

“She’s not dead,” Imawane says, clinging to the only thing that makes sense.

“She’s…” Remai spread her hands. “She’s healing. She’ll make herself a new body. New powers. Gather us again, try to give us a future.”

“And how—how long?”

“I don’t know.” Remai’s voice is fearful, worried. “As long as it takes. You should leave. Find your kin, before it becomes impossible to cross the border without being killed.”

Imawane stares at Ayorae. At the cocoon of magic building itself around her. Flowers, blooming in the darkness. Lives given, lives shared. “I should leave,” she says, aloud. The words feel wrong on her tongue.

She remains there, transfixed. Thinking on everything that separates them—on betrayals, on rescues, on questions unanswered. On anger and gratitude and love and everything she’s not sure she can put into words. Of the conversation they never got to have—the one they can have, when Ayorae wakes up again.

Wait for me, my love.

She raises a hand, lays it on the invisible wall separating her from Ayorae. “I’ll wait here,” she says, softly, to the demon who cannot hear her. “My love.”

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Breaker of Mountains and Rivers” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 64B.)

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