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It is not the first time that Morax has gone into another god's adeptal realm after their death: he does not think too closely on the last, just outside the threshold of this particular realm, to not tie the memory of glaze lilies and peach blossoms and lost, eternal spring breezes too closely to this profanity in his perfect memory. Even standing on the threshold is stifling, the heavy, oppressive stillness of a summer day before a storm weighing down, air heavy with water and resentment - and if it is difficult for him to breathe, how much more difficult must it be for Xiao?
"My lord?" Xiao asks from beside him, eyes lowered, and goes silent, waiting for permission to speak. The longer Morax spends in his company, the more he wishes that he had used more rocks in the forest of stone that he had buried his old master under. Xiao is difficult to read, stoic and subdued, but he already very mislikes what he's been able to puzzle out in addition to what he knows about his service under his old master.
"Go on," Morax says, gesturing permission for him to speak. He is not Guizhong, who would certainly have known what to do and say, how to make her intentions known, and in this moment, he is keenly aware of his own inadequacies.
"This unworthy one-" Xiao begins, hesitantly, and Morax frowns, again, as he does each time Xiao refers to himself that way.
"Do not debase yourself," he says, a gentle reminder (or as close to gentleness as he knows how to come, which isn't close enough), but says nothing more, waits for Xiao to continue speaking. Ingrained habits such as this one will take a long time to break, especially those reinforced by a master who misused him, and Morax knows how woefully unequipped he is in how to deal with this. All he knows is contracts, strategy, and the strength of stone, and the best that he can think to do for a starting point is make the lines that he already will not cross clear.
"This-" Xiao begins again, stops, and Morax waits patiently. "I," he continues, after a moment, eyes fixed firmly on the ground but the slender line of his back is straight, unbending and unyielding. "...surely this is unnecessary, master?"
Perhaps this might not have been strictly necessary, by the very strictest definitions, but Morax had never considered otherwise from the moment he'd learned of the existence and whereabouts of Xiao's feather cloak. Perhaps it might be safe, now, hidden in the depths of an adeptal realm belonging to a dead god, that would pass out of memory, in time, but he does not like either the idea of leaving it there and trusting that the realm would be lost, or of Xiao being without it any longer. It had been stolen from him along with his old name by his former master, used to imprison him, and it was only right that it be returned to him.
"No," Morax says, firmly, though unable to put his thoughts into succinct, clear words, cannot form them into a shape that will make Xiao understand just why he won't just let this lie, why this is important. The shape of them feel wrong in his mouth, whenever he begins to try: he can only manage poetry or contracts, and neither begins to help him here. If this was a contract, he could do it, but this is not.
"I could go by myself?" Xiao offers, and Morax frowns even more at the suggestion. He likes that even less than the idea of Xiao's cloak remaining in the realm: allowing Xiao to go by himself into his old master's adeptal realm - into the realm belonging to a dead and resentful god who had abused him while in his service- would be a spectacularly bad idea, and he will not allow it.
"No," he says, unyielding.
Xiao lowers his eyes, mute and submissive in the face of perceived divine displeasure though he is not angry with him, and Morax frowns, even deeper, even more aware of his inadequacies. Thinks of his first clumsy attempts to raise songbirds, when Guizhong was still alive, and how effortlessly she had coaxed them to fly to her hand, while they had refused to go anywhere near him, even when she had laid out their favorite birdseed on the ground in a trail towards him, even when she had filled his awkward hands with their favorite seeds.
You have to get them to trust you, Morax, she had reproved him. Gently. Gently.
Gentleness was not something he had been able to learn in the long years since her death, not with the Archon War still ongoing, a luxury he was unable to afford. He does not know how to be gentle, does not know how to make his intentions clear if they aren't in the form of contracts, and only now does he regret his inability, because he does not want Xiao to be afraid of him.
"I am not angry with you," Morax says, a moment later, and hopes that someday, someday, Xiao will believe him.
~~~
The air is heavier and even more oppressive just stepping across the threshold, even heavier with water, resentment, and pain, and a heavy mist hangs over the whole area, obscuring vision and swallowing sound beyond just in front of them. Morax already knew, well before setting foot in here, that this god would not rest either in peace or kindly, and his spear is close to hand. The ground beneath is treacherous, stone slick with river water, and while the bedrock far beneath his feet is solid stone, he doesn't trust what is immediately under his feet. Stagnant water pools in hollows at first, but he can see the river slowly creeping up the sides of the path, lapping threateningly - and hungrily- at the slick stone, and especially at Xiao's feet, until the hem of the gauzy, translucent qixiong ruqun that he is wearing is soaked through.
"Where would he have kept your cloak?" Morax asks as the two descend deeper, away from the light: Xiao is the one who knows the way, but he opens his senses to the earth beneath their feet, unable to trust their sight with the deep fog shrouding the area, as he follows him.
"In his bedroom, somewhere." Xiao answers, after a long moment, but with the uncertainty of someone who never had the opportunity to search for it himself.
Morax is about to answer, when his attention is caught by the minute trembling of unstable rock beneath his feet: so minute that Xiao, a pace or two ahead of him, does not feel it, but it does not go unnoticed by the Lord of Stone. In another god's adeptal realm, the stone is not under his dominion and resists his commands and his shaping, no matter how he reaches out instinctively to try to stabilize it. Instead, he has just enough time to gather energy and shape it outward into a jade shield around both of them and begin to call out a warning, just before the unstable stone collapses beneath their feet and drops them both into the river below.
The water is cold as winter and heavy with resentment, current swift and treacherous. Morax is only a passable swimmer, but he claws his way back up to the surface desperately, tries to grab for Xiao, tries not to let them be separated, but can't keep hold of him before he's pulled back under again. The resentment is even thicker beneath the water, tries to steal what's left of the breath that he is holding, and there is still enough left of the god whose domain this once was, even dead and dissipated in the river of his realm, far too newly dead to forget who had killed him in the first place, to still direct hatred and rage and thwarted desires, and those emotions cling, stifling, smothering, as the river pulls him down, hungrily-
(The water just wants to steal the breath from his lungs, drown him, kill him, drag him into the dark. the water wants Xiao, and Morax knows, with a certainty, which one is worse-)
For a moment, as the current drags him, his feet slide across cor lapis bedrock, and abruptly, abruptly, he is wrenched sideways, into the fragments of someone else's memory, cruelty laced all through it-
("Little bird," possessive cruelty, laced through every word. Hushed, breathy sobbing, barely more than exhaled breath, but so sweet. A riverbank, afternoon sun slanting down, and a stolen feather cloak out of reach. And the slight youth, curled in on himself, seed drying sticky on his thighs, trembling. Golden-winged bird that will never fly away from him. Never escape. "Give me your name."
He holds the youth under the water when he refuses. Again and again and again. Either he will give him his name or drown, and he almost thinks that the youth has chosen to drown instead, but he forces his name out of him at last.
It's the last moment of resistance that he allows him.)
The memory lets him go abruptly, like the shock of being plunged anew into frigid water, and he claws his way back to the surface, reflexively shaping a stele from nothing. Pulls himself up onto it, gasping for breath, disoriented and furious and a growl threatening to escape from between gritted teeth: he'd already known that Xiao's former master had taken all choices from him (will never forget the single tear of gratitude, trembling in long lashes but refusing to fall, when he'd drawn the second line in their contract: that Xiao will never be required to kill mortals), but even knowing, between what little Xiao has told him and what he could piece together from his behavior, could not have prepared him for this. The sheer horror and casual sadism of that one memory sinks into his skin and his bones with sickening clarity - and even in death, the shadow of his former master had taken even another choice from him, because this should have been Xiao's to tell, or not, as he chose.
But there is nothing that can be done about that, and the only option now is to go forward. Morax closes his eyes and listens through the stone, not trusting his ears with how heavy the fog is, still dampening sound. Familiar vibration echoes through the stone from somewhere in the distance: Xiao's light footsteps against stone, the particular tapping rhythm when he's fighting. A demon haunts this place, and Morax will not leave Xiao to face this shadow of his former master alone.
The stele dissolves, and he drops back into the water, current carrying him forward as he tries to keep his head above water long enough to take in a deep lungful of air before he's pulled under again, the cor lapis bedrock solid beneath his feet as he's dragged forward, but otherwise doesn't resist the flow. Unlike most adeptal realms that he has been in, which lead upward, this one leads downward: down, down, down, deeper and deeper beneath the river: that is the way he must go, and he does not flinch at the thought.
(This is the shape of the boundary, even here in the drowning deep-)
Morax will not leave Xiao here.
(Either he leaves with him, or not at all.)
~~~
Stone remembers, and cor lapis has a perfect memory: Morax, too, will remember every memory burned into the slick, cold stone. (the first time his former master had forced Xiao to kill a mortal; the first time he had made him eat the very hopes and dreams out of someone to leave them a husk. Violation on top of violation and sheer malevolent pleasure in how completely he owned Xiao that he could make such a gentle creature kill and torture against his own will and nature, reveled in that, as he kept himself clear of all karmic debt.
Owned Xiao so completely that there was nothing that belonged to him, not even his own body. Both his master's weapon and bloodhound, made to kill and harm, but also his master's pretty bird and bedwarmer-)
Stone remembers, and he will forget none of this.
(When Morax had fought Xiao on that battlefield where he had killed his master, several things were immediately clear. Within the first few exchanged strikes, he'd known that he did not believe in the cause or the master that he had fought for. Skilled, swift as the wind, and deadly, but lacking the decisive certainty of one who truly believed in his cause, well-concealed hesitance. Afterward, he'd stood over Xiao - small, exhausted, resigned- and known, in that moment, how easy it would have been to kill him, slender throat bare to his blade. Like he'd killed so many others, before him.
Instead, he'd spared Xiao, let him live. He is enduring in the face of all that he has suffered, and it would not have been a mercy to kill him. To take even that last choice away, when he has had so few in his life-)
~~~
The stone still echoes with the rhythm of battle, deeper and deeper still, even further under the river, even further away from the light. Morax kicks open the nearest door to him, and the elaborately-gilded wooden door hangs open, shattered, on useless hinges. The room's furnishings are elaborate, and the most elaborate of all is the platform bed in the center of the room: in an adeptal realm, especially one this deep beneath the surface of the water, there is no need for gauzy curtains to keep out the mosquitoes, but even without need, it has them.
Fading wards somewhere in the room are a torrent against his senses: as he turns his head to try to pinpoint where they are, a glint of metal resting in the disarranged bed-linens catches his eye. And then he realizes what he's looking at, and Morax can feel his blood run even colder with rage, especially once he pulls the cloth back to get a better look: it's one of a set of four delicate chains, attached to the posts of the bed, with a small cuff attached to the free end. Only Xiao alone, among all the servants of his prior master, had had wrists and ankles that small.
And then his hand brushes a piece of water-shaped cor lapis, tucked into a corner of the bed frame, and he falls into one last memory-
("Little bird," that same possessive, casual cruelty, as large hands settle on slim, narrow hips. "Did you ever have a lover?"
Golden eyes are tightly closed, long lashes trembling, as the youth shakes his head, even prettier when he's on the verge of crying. "N-no. This unworthy one never had a lover."
"Tell me," he says, and pushes long hair out of the youth's eyes, not even letting him hide behind the curtain of his hair. "What you dreamed of, when you still wanted a lover. Before me."
It's a very sweet, prosaic fantasy: gentleness, mostly, to be held and taken gently, the half-formed desires of a bird-maiden who had barely known what desire was, inchoate half-formed longings more than anything else. When he's done talking, his lips are a pretty red, from biting his lower lip and tongue, to try to keep even this useless thing from his master: he can't, of course, because he can't resist any orders, but he'd tried, anyway. He'll have to be punished, of course, and what better way than to take even this from him, so completely that he will never desire it ever again?)
The moment that the memory lets him go, Morax immediately curls his fingers around the stone and crushes it into dust. Unlike the bedrock, which had simply witnessed these horrors and remembered what they had witnessed, this stone had been deliberately created, shaped with water and imbued with this memory. Memory stones, using the natural property of stone to remember what it witnessed and the perfect memory of cor lapis in an attempt to preserve a single memory against the erosion of time. He had never had need to make such a stone himself, but he is familiar with the work of others - and this is an abomination.
Morax steps away from the bed, in the direction that he can sense the fading wards, and snaps them with stone. For a moment, the air ripples like waves across the surface of a pond before the illusion breaks, revealing an alcove hidden behind ostentatious wall hangings. Long strides carry him across the room and he sweeps aside the hangings to see a single equally-ostentatious camphor-wood clothing chest hidden here the entire time, and Xiao had never known how close. How close, yet so far, his freedom had been, all that time. If he had been able to take his cloak back, then he would have been able to escape, but his master had hidden it from him, through wards, illusions, and command.
It's the work of only a moment to open it, to a bundle of translucent cloth. The chest contains additional translucent qixiong ruqun, similar to what Xiao wears, more of the filmy, gauzy clothing that his former master had dressed him in for his own pleasure. Controlled his appearance - what he wore, how he styled his hair - so strictly while not even allowing Xiao access to the clothing that he forced him to wear. Something will have to be done about Xiao's clothing, when there is time to arrange for new for him: Morax has no intention of controlling how he dresses or chooses to keep his hair, but even he had noticed Xiao's quiet discomfort.
(Morax had recognized the style when he'd first seen him, from Guizhong and Madame Ping's wardrobes, though Xiao's clothing is far more translucent. Impractical, he'd assessed, in the first moments before the first exchanged blows and he'd seen what Xiao's fighting style looked like. It didn't hinder him - Xiao is more than skilled enough to ensure that - but impractical.
What would Xiao wish to wear, instead, if he had his choice? A small choice, among many, but for someone who has not had any choices in a long time, and only now is being allowed to choose again-
Morax doesn't know, and he suspects Xiao doesn't, either.)
Purely by chance, Morax finds the object of his search, buried deep inside the bundle of cloth that he's holding. Folded into the dresses, blending in and likely with the help of more now-dispelled illusions, rippling briefly across the fabric like light on water, is a diaphanous, delicate cloak of white silk and feathers. And even without touching it, he can feel that the cloth is almost as light as anemo itself. In the stories of another world, there were tales of bird-maidens kidnapped by would-be husbands who stole their cloaks while bathing, forced to remain with them until able to take back their cloaks and leave.
(Xiao's former master had taken both his cloak and his name and stolen his freedom: Morax tries to replace what had been taken from him, though he knows there are things that he cannot give back, cannot replace, cannot return-)
Morax is careful not to touch the cloak - it is not his right to do something so intimate, especially in Xiao's absence and without his permission - as he folds the clothes around it once more, hiding it from view. It also doesn't feel right to close it back up in the bundle of cloth, but he has to transport it without touching it. He can leave the entire chest inside his adeptal domain for now, but he makes a contract with himself to give the cloak back to Xiao at the earliest opportunity. He lowers the bundle back into the chest and closes the lid.
(He will not hold onto it, even for the intention of keeping it safe, unless Xiao specifically entrusts the cloak to his care. )
Morax wrenches open the entrance to his own adeptal realm, with great effort as this adeptal realm fights him at every turn: he is an intruder here, and the water pressure is immense, this far beneath the river. Forces the doorway to materialize, wrests open the doors open inch by inch, just far enough that he can push the chest through before letting it go, doorway disappearing as this realm reasserts its hold on the surroundings.
The only thing left is to find Xiao. Morax listens again to the stone, but the vibrations are silent, and he swears under his breath, turns, and runs. Xiao is strong, and skilled (and the thought of him dead grieves his heart), and this is a battle he should never have had to fight alone. And one way or another, he is not leaving without him.
~~~
Morax finally finds Xiao, in the midst of a room that had once been a water garden and had become a battlefield, blood and ichor staining the water. He floats among the fallen and shredded petals of water lilies and lotus, and the shattered remains of his spear lie across the bottom of the pond. For a long moment, until he reaches his side, Morax is afraid that Xiao is dead, had died alone slaying the demon that had haunted this realm. But, no- his chest still rises and falls, if shallowly and labored: still alive, though hurt, and even through unconsciousness, he makes a soft, pained sound.
He does not know how to be gentle, though Guizhong had tried to teach him. He does not know how to be gentle but wants to be, for this boy who has known so very little of it in his life. Easily lifts him from the water, even with the sodden, soaking weight of his clothes and hair, even with his limp, unconscious weight, and cradles him in his arms. He is leaving with Xiao, one way or another, no matter what might stand in his way: another master might have abandoned him here, but he is not another master.
Turns to go back the way he had come, and begins to walk upward, towards the distant light.