Chapter 834: Heavenly Demon’s Confession [Bonus - ]

Chapter 834: Heavenly Demon’s Confession [Bonus Chapter]

The cool spring water lapped against Morwenna’s knees, dark and silver under the moonlight, undisturbed except for the slow rings spreading outward from the center of the pond.

Morwenna froze.

Her calloused fingers stayed locked in the damp freshly cut strands of black hair, holding the three-part weave against the nape of Rèn’s neck.

The water running down Rèn’s pale shoulder blades was cold, but the heat rolling off her skin was staggering, still humming with the erratic pulse of a dantian that had cracked open into a new layer only a moment ago.

...Rèn was staring up at her.

Her dark crimson eyes were wide, the pupils swollen until they nearly swallowed the red, and heavy tears spilled over her lower lids in continuous, trembling tracks.

Her lips twitched in small silent spasms, parted as if every drop of air in her lungs had been replaced by river silt.

"Senior Sister... Qiu Ling...?"

The name hung in the night air, fragile and small, so soft it barely carried past the rustle of the silver-leafed Spirit trees overhead.

Morwenna’s stormy gray eyes widened.

Her breath caught in the back of her throat, and her knuckles stiffened against the wet braid.

’Huh...?’ Morwenna thought, the crude retort she always kept loaded on her tongue dying before it reached her teeth. ’Qiu Ling...? Who the hell is that...?’

She searched through centuries of memories for the syllables and came up empty.

No corsair from the northern archipelagos, no sea-witch from the sunken trenches and no merchant’s daughter from the mainland ports had ever carried a name like that then she looked down into Rèn’s face.

She looked past the black horns curving through the wet bangs, past the crimson runes etched into the bone, and past the toned, scarred shoulders of the woman who had tried to tear the Captain’s throat open the night before.

She saw raw naked terror in those crimson eyes, and underneath it, an adoration so desperate it clung to Rèn’s whole face like a drowning sailor clinging to a splintered plank in a hurricane...

Whoever Qiu Ling was, Rèn held her closer to her chest than the marrow in her own bones.

Before Morwenna could open her mouth to curse or pull away, Rèn broke.

SPLASH!

The water surged as Rèn twisted around and lunged forward, her knees dragging through the sand of the pond bed.

She grabbed Morwenna’s wrist with a trembling dripping hand.

Her grip was bruising and desperate, and her fingers were shaking so violently that the tremor rattled up through the bones of Morwenna’s forearm.

"Senior Sister..." Rèn sobbed, the sound tearing out of her chest in a ragged flood with no pride, no demonic cadence and no dignity left to shield it. "Senior Sister, I’m sorry... I’m so sorry... I forgot..."

The words tumbled out of her in a breathless rush, stumbling over each other like stones rolling down a cliffside.

"I forgot your face," Rèn wept, shaking her head back and forth until water and tears flew from her chin into the pond. "I tried to see it... Every time it rained, every time the heart demons clawed at my eyes, I tried to see you, but there was only gray mist... I remembered the red ribbon... I remembered the comb... but I couldn’t see your eyes. For years, Senior Sister... for decades, I couldn’t remember what you looked like... I let the blood burn it away... I let the cauldrons swallow your voice. I’m sorry... please don’t look away from me... please don’t leave me in the dark again..."

She tightened her grip and pulled herself closer, kneeling naked in the shallow water with her face tilted up, and she confessed everything in one wild messy outpouring.

It was the confession of a child who had broken every porcelain cup in the house and thrown herself at the feet of the only person in the world whose disappointment she feared more than death.

"You used to sit behind me on the veranda every morning," Rèn whispered, her voice going small and soft for a moment, as if she were afraid the memory would hear her and run away. "You smelled like camellia oil... You pulled the comb through my hair and scolded me for having knots like a wild badger, and then you’d tie the red ribbon at the end and kiss the top of my head... You snuck me extra rice when the Master wasn’t looking. You let me crawl into your bed when I cried... and I forgot all of it. I forgot you, Senior Sister. How could I forget you...?"

Morwenna’s lips parted, but nothing came out.

She had no idea what to say to that, so she said nothing at all, and Rèn kept going.

"They came at night," Rèn gasped, her chest heaving in violent hitches. "The lanterns... the white robes... I swept the steps that morning, Senior Sister, all three hundred and twelve of them, and then the white robes walked up them... The Master knelt on the stones and begged for us... He begged them to take the mountain, to take the vein, to take everything and just let the children go... and the white blade took his head. It took his head right there in the courtyard..."

Her fingernails bit into Morwenna’s skin, and Morwenna didn’t pull her arm away.

"You pushed me into the water barrel," Rèn choked out, fresh tears blinding her. "You told me not to make a sound... not one, no matter what I heard... So I held my hands over my mouth. I bit my tongue until the blood filled my throat. I heard the chickens... I heard the others screaming... and then I saw you fall in the kitchen doorway, and your braid came loose across the floor... You fell, and I stayed inside the barrel... I didn’t come out... I didn’t save you... I hid in the dark like a dog..."

Morwenna sat motionless on the submerged slate, the cold water soaking through her trousers with her stormy gray eyes fixed on the weeping woman in front of her.

She’d heard pieces of it already...

Everyone in the Keep had heard the rumors about the horned woman who’d walked out of the gateway soaked in someone else’s blood, and Morwenna had made her own crude guesses about what kind of life produced a woman like that.

None of her guesses had included a little girl holding her breath inside a water barrel while everyone she loved died on the other side of the lid.

Her free hand curled slowly into a fist under the water.

’She was a child...’ Morwenna thought, staring at the thin white scars crisscrossing Rèn’s wrists, so old and so many that they had faded into the skin like grain in wood. ’She was just a little kid sweeping steps on some mountain, and they did all of that to her...’

Rèn’s voice climbed higher and cracked into a broken shriek of self-loathing.

"And Wei Heng... Senior Brother Wei Heng pulled me out of the barrel," she wept, her breath coming in short agonized wheezes. "He cried and hugged me, and he carried me down the steps on his back the way he used to. He promised to take me somewhere safe... and then he sold me on the road at night to the red robes for a pouch of coins... That was what I was worth to him! They put an iron collar on my neck and threw me in the pens, and they bled me into bronze bowls every few days until my tongue turned to leather..."

She looked down at her own scarred wrists, and her whole chest convulsed.

"And the pit... the Blood Gu Trial..."

Her voice dropped suddenly into a flat, hollow whisper that made the hair on the back of Morwenna’s neck prickle.

"They threw all of us down into the stone," Rèn whispered, staring through the dark water at something only she could see. "They locked the grate over our heads. Little Shu... he gave me half his bread every time they bled me. He laughed like hiccups. I taught him the form with a stick so his arms wouldn’t shake..."

She looked up at Morwenna, her face twisted in an agony so complete it seemed to still the wind in the trees.

"Only one of us could climb out, Senior Sister," Rèn sobbed, her knuckles white around Morwenna’s wrist. "On the third day, it was just the two of us. He was holding the stick I gave him... and he looked at me and told me it was okay. He told me to do it properly, the way I taught him, so it wouldn’t hurt and I did... I killed the only boy who ever gave me bread, and I used the sword the Master carved for me to do it. Then they lowered the rope, and I climbed out and left him down there..."

The tears washed the last traces of the Heavenly Demon from her face, leaving only the bleeding husk of a stray who had devoured a whole world to keep from dying.

"After that, I couldn’t stop," Rèn cried. "I killed everyone... I burned the sects one after another... I hunted the Son of Fate for six years... I killed his guards and his friends and the women who hid him, and when the heavens ran out of miracles to save him, I drank his blood and his fate along with it... I tore the Heavenly Demon open with my bare hands in his own hall and devoured him, and these horns split up through my skull... I became the exact fiend the white robes said we were! I betrayed the Master... I betrayed you... I betrayed every single thing you ever taught me... I ate people for strength, Senior Sister... I’m a monster... I’m a filthy disgusting monster..."

Then, as if struck by a sudden panic, she let go of Morwenna’s wrist.

She scrambled across the shallow water on her hands and knees, splashing toward the mossy bank where her belongings lay in the grass.

Her fingers clawed through the weeds, shoving the notched iron blade aside, until they closed around the hilt at the bottom of the pile.

She pulled out the mountain-ash wooden sword.

It was gray and chipped along the edges, and its sharkskin wrap had gone dark and smooth with decades of sweat, salt and blood.

Rèn turned back toward the pond and fell to her knees in the shallows.

She held the wooden sword up with both trembling hands, lifting it toward Morwenna’s face like an eight-year-old desperately presenting her homework to an elder.

"B-but I kept it!" Rèn pleaded, her voice rising into a frantic, weeping stutter. "Look... Senior Sister, look! I never lost it! I carried it through the pens... I carried it through the pit... I practiced every single day! A thousand swings, just like the Master said! Step... guard... cut... I never learned another form! I mastered it, Senior Sister... I made the cut level... My arms don’t shake anymore! Look at it, please... Please tell me I did it right..."

She held the gray sword out with her arms trembling, her face lifted toward the moonlight, waiting for praise that had died twenty-six years ago in a kitchen doorway.

Morwenna sat very still.

The night breeze stirred the silver leaves of the Spirit trees and sent a shower of faint, glowing motes drifting down across the pond.

The water went silent.

Morwenna didn’t speak, and she didn’t move.

She sat on the submerged slab with her hands resting flat on her wet thighs, her stormy gray eyes fixed on the chipped, weather-worn piece of wood being held out to her by those shaking fingers.

...It was a lot.

She had sailed the outer rifts.

She had watched leviathans breach through astral storms and carved her way through divine boarding parties, and the weight of the grief kneeling in front of her still knocked the air out of her lungs.

’Ah...’ Morwenna thought, a heavy quiet ache settling behind her collarbones.

The feral wildcat that had dropped out of the Dawnspire Gateway with bared fangs...

The blood-drenched demon who had tried to take the Captain’s head before her boots even touched the marble...

She didn’t feel strange to Morwenna anymore. She didn’t feel foreign, and she didn’t feel like a monster.

This woman was suffering.

She was suffering so badly that it had hollowed her out from the inside, leaving her trapped in a freezing lightless pit where the only things keeping her heart beating were an old wooden sword and the half-remembered face of a girl who used to braid her hair...

Morwenna looked at the trembling hands, at the tears, at the desperate frightened eyes begging her not to look away.

She had seen that exact face once before.

It had been a long, long time ago, on a burning deck in the middle of a golden sky, and she had spent half a millennium trying to drown it at the bottom of every bottle she could find.

Her chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.

’Just like Lyra...’