Work Text:
Festivities during the Lunar New Year rival those of all other holidays. Shops close, decorations are hung, firecrackers go off, and of course lanterns are sent drifting off into the sky. Friends and families gather around to dine together on the best the restaurants can offer, and the eating and drinking and merry-making last well through the night and into the following morning. Best of all, though, would be the seven days of rest from work or school, somehow both an incomparably long and absurdly short amount of time.
Yelan, however, sees it as just any other holiday — which is to say, any other working day.
If anything, the excessive nature of the festivities troubles her more than it entertains. The explosion of firecrackers drowns out any small, telling noises her prey might make, enabling them to crash through the undergrowth and be rest assured their auditory tracks are covered. Too many lights strung up along even the most narrow and obscure of roads makes it difficult to track her mark. And, though not quite related to her work, the remains of the lanterns will be scraped off the ground or picked off tree branches a day later and stuffed in trash bags and garbage bins. One year had seen Yelan idly watching ragged lanterns float by along a lake while waiting for her interrogation tactics to kick in and her captive to spill his secrets.
Of course, Yelan is not one to care over much — people will do as they like, and she hardly has any authority to tell them to stop celebrating. She certainly takes advantage of the restaurant discounts whenever she happens to pass by a town or village during the festivities. More often she finds herself working too much to indulge for long, though, but today — no, this year — is a special occasion.
“Miss Yao!” one of the village children calls, the whole group of them skidding to a stop from where they had been running along the road; the girl who’d first shouted bounds over to where Yelan’s seated by the food stall. “You’re back! Is it for another—” she lowers her voice dramatically — “monster hunt?”
Yelan hums approvingly. “Ever sharp on the uptake. Yes, exactly that.”
The children all gasp and exchange glances with one another. “But it’s the New Year,” a boy pipes up. “I heard my dad say everyone gets to stay at home instead of work for the week. Not you, Miss Yao?”
“Not me, I’m afraid. Monsters don’t get holidays off, so neither do I.”
Yelan chews on the dumplings she’d ordered from the food stall while the children chatter among one another. What she labels her job as varies from person to person — sometimes she’s a royal advisor, sometimes a military soldier, sometimes a tax collector — but for most children, she goes with monster hunter. It’s simple, easy to remember, and most of all spurs them to tell her every little detail they think might be connected to a monster from their parents’ stories.
True, more often than not the monsters they speak of are little more than rats or raccoons, but more than once Yelan has gotten a valuable clue and a promising lead from what anyone else may dismiss as children’s tall tales.
As she is now, listening to snatches of the children’s conversations: “Should we tell her?” one of them asks in what she’s sure they believe is a low, inaudible whisper. “If anyone can find out what it is, it’d be Miss Yao, right?”
“But my mom says it’s not real…”
“Come on! You said you saw it for yourself, right?”
“T-That wasn’t me. I only thought I heard something…”
Yelan finishes off the last of her dumplings, then decides she may as well order a plate of noodles; this might be her last chance to eat in a while, after all. Then she smiles sweetly down at the children. “What’s this about hearing things?” she asks. “Could you have an interesting rumor or two for me?”
The children all shoot each other reluctant looks, as if willing someone else to speak up for them, before finally the girl who had first called Yelan’s (fake) name answers. “Well… Um… I dunno if this is anything, but…” She lowers her voice, and Yelan indulgently leans closer to hear. “We think this one’s, like… a super-strong monster.”
“Oh, my,” Yelan says, not even needing to feign the interest in her voice. “And why is that?”
“W-Well… Umm…”
The girl looks at a loss for words, at which point a different boy speaks up. “I-I saw what it did! I went out in the forest for firewood one night, and… and I saw…” He swallows, closes his eyes, shudders from head to toe. “A d-dead… dead person…”
“Oh, dear,” Yelan says, though this time she does need to sound more worried than intrigued. “You’re alright? Nothing happened to you?”
“N-No. I called for my dad — uh, after I got the firewood, of course.”
“Of course. Tell me, when did you see this?”
“When? Umm… I guess… it was sometime last week, for sure.”
More of the children add on after that: unfamiliar tracks on the forest dirt paths, strange sounds at night that are nothing like the usual animal noises, and one other dead body, though this time of a big black dog that had apparently been roasted alive, though Yelan highly doubts the child who reported this had come close enough to actually see any burn marks. Curious… but not unexpected, and certainly worth a look later on.
Either way this is invaluable information, no matter how she came across it, and in return she entertains the children with stories of her own about the other monsters she’s encountered on her travels, and she doesn’t even have to embellish too much. It’s only when the sky grows dark and the street begins to light up with paper lamps that the children scatter back in time for a Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner with their families.
“Bye, Miss Yao! Happy Lunar New Year!” the girl, the last of the children to leave, calls. “Hey, will you stay for longer this time? At least long enough to send off our lanterns together?”
Yelan gives her a smile. “Happy Lunar New Year to you, too. And sure — I just have an errand to run first.”
“Really!” the child cries. “Yay! Then meet us at the village plaza after dinner, okay? We’ll see you there!”
Yelan waits for the girl to leave, then thanks the food stall vendor for his cooking. She stands, stretches, checks to make sure her bow and quiver are secure under her coat — and finally heads for the edge of the village.
Yelan has not always been the monster-hunting Miss Yao the children here know her as; a year ago she was a bird-watcher instead, writing a book on the different species of bird around the mountainous region. There were alleged sightings of the red-crowned crane in the woods around this village, but for that information to be side-by-side with rumors of frequent monster attacks didn’t sound right. So a month before the Lunar New Year she dropped by, asked around for this supposed crane and these supposed monsters alike, and found herself with reports of both.
“Though I’ll tell you now, young miss, I don’t think it’s really a crane,” the old woman selling paper fans by the road said, shaking her head. “Sure, it’s white, it’s got a bit of red, and it moves like it flies… but that don’t mean it’s a crane, or even a bird at all. I wouldn’t go poking around in those woods, if I were you.”
Of course, Yelan had gone poking around the woods. Her interest was piqued, and crane or monster, it might be a unique species she could capture and sell to the kingdom. She slung her bow over her back and set out.
…Even now the memory of that day sends a shiver down her spine. Yelan pauses by the edge of the woods, taking a deep breath as she stares up at the towering trees, the spindly branches, the moon looming high and bright above them all. She’ll have to move quickly if she doesn’t want the festivities of the Lunar New Year to impede her work again — the firecrackers especially will make this ten times harder than it already will be. After a final moment to steel herself, Yelan steps into the forest.
The darkness closes in almost immediately, but this is hardly anything new. Yelan treads carefully, picking her way through the dirt path until the sounds of the village fade behind her, leaving her with only the faint rustling of leaves. When all is quiet she stands still in the middle of the path, head cocked to one side, bow held at the ready.
…As she thought. Not a single animal sound to be heard. No singing birds, no chittering squirrels, not even a cry from an insect. It had been the same last year, though Yelan had been woefully unprepared for it then, how one moment she had been admiring the nature around her and the next she had been plunged into the awful, unnerving stillness of a predator on the hunt. Only she hadn’t realized she was the prey until it was very nearly too late.
The wind whistles. Yelan steps off the beaten path.
In but a few minutes she finds what she had been expecting: more corpses. The stench of rot and decay is strong, hanging heavy over the natural earthy smell of the forest, and Yelan stops short of the bodies just before she would have stumbled on them. Half-buried under fallen leaves and branches is a small group of dead bodies, the air alive with the buzzing of flies, their open wounds crawling with maggots; Yelan crouches down, doing her best to ignore the stink, and does her best to examine their injuries in the darkness.
Again: as she thought. It’s the same as last time, too, only these wounds look just a little cleaner, as if whoever had inflicted them had since refined their skill with the polearm.
Yelan huffs under her breath, possibly more amused than she should be over at least five dead people, then stands back up. Only five short steps away are what looks like the remains of a camp: a collapsed tent, haphazardly scattered bags and clothes, a small pile of wood ash from a fire. Yelan nudges one of the bags with the toe of her boot and is rewarded with the clink-clink of coin sliding against gold coin, the sound deafening in the quiet.
…No. It’s not entirely quiet anymore.
She dives out of the way just as a silver blur smashes onto the spot she had just been standing — and fast as it had come it’s gone again, disappearing into the overgrowth all around them. This time Yelan really does laugh — she has just enough time to draw her bow and shoot before she has to move again, barely ducking in time to avoid the swing of a lance that would surely have decapitated her where she stands.
Her arrow flies, cutting through the darkness — it catches a flap of fabric, pins a white scrap of cloth to a tree trunk. Again. It’s all the same.
“We meet again,” Yelan says, when a second passes and nothing moves, “red-crowned crane.”
Her only response is another second of silence, and then the gleam of a polearm as it hones in straight for her face.
It was beautiful as a crane, terrifying as a monster. It was what Yelan had encountered last year, in this very same forest, on the night Yelan found herself collapsed by the base of a tree, arm bleeding, leg broken, quiver empty. In that moment she was certain she would die, that she had met more than her match in the woods surrounding this backwater town at last, that she’d been bested by some bloodthirsty feathered beast, its teeth sharper than any weapon. She could hear the very wind part around it as it advanced towards her crumpled form, could feel the rumble of every one of its footsteps, closer and closer…
And then a stream of paper lanterns flew overhead, bright as several hundred moons on that overcast night, and Yelan met a pair of pale, iridescent, distinctly human eyes.
They stared at each other for a second, two. Then it — she — fled, faster than Yelan could move or speak or do anything but lie there, gasping for breath, trying to gauge how many ribs she’d broken when the crane, the monster, the woman had bodily picked her up and smashed her against that tree.
Somehow she had managed to pick herself up and hobble back to the village, but not before passing through where the woman had launched herself down from the trees and Yelan had dove away from her, polearm — well, gleaming white teeth at the time — missing her by a hair’s breadth. Embedded in a tree trunk was the first arrow she had shot, and pinned by the arrowhead was a scrap of white fabric, fluttering in the breeze.
She remained in the village for almost two months to recuperate, but Yelan never encountered the woman again, no matter how many times she returned to the woods to search for her. And now —
Now she’s tearing through the woods, boots sliding across the dirt and grass, as the woman races after her. Yelan’s sure that, if she were anyone else, she would have been caught and presumably torn to pieces by now, but if there’s one thing Yelan can confidently say she bests this monster of a woman in, it’s in speed. Last year she’d been caught unawares and injured from the first hit alone, and that had slowed her down considerably when she resorted to fleeing for her life; now she runs again, not to escape but to find something out.
The woman behind her certainly isn’t making this easy, though. Twice she cuts across Yelan somehow, possibly by taking some kind of shortcut through the twisting woods, and nearly impales her upon her polearm if Yelan doesn’t throw herself out of harm’s way in time — once she actually throws her polearm like a javelin, and Yelan barely avoids stumbling and falling when it soars past her head, nearly bringing her ear along with it. Under normal circumstances Yelan would have swooped in to grab the fallen polearm and laugh in the face of her now-weaponless opponent, but she can’t even do that, because if she slows down even a fraction of a second her weaponless opponent will simply use her bare fists and pummel Yelan into a pulp.
A little more. Yelan can feel herself beginning to tire — normally she’s the one chasing others down, after all, and usually not for this long. But just a little more. This will work. It has to work. Based on the children’s stories, based on what she’d seen and observed for herself —
There!
She skids to a halt right by the edge of the village.
For a moment she wonders if her gamble hadn’t paid off: if she’d bet on the wrong cards, if her opponent had an ace up her sleeve, if she’d read this whole thing wrong. But when Yelan turns around to face the woman behind her, she’s rewarded with those same pale, iridescent eyes from a year before — only this time, as her momentum carries her just a step forward and out of the shadows of the forest, the moonlight illuminates more than just her face.
Silver hair. Silver clothes. Silver polearm — exquisitely crafted too, by the looks of it. And those eyes: wide, intense, and just a little bit stunned.
“You won’t come this close to the village,” Yelan challenges, “will you?”
The woman doesn’t move, so still that Yelan wonders if this isn’t some sort of mystical cultivation art, where Yelan is just looking at her afterimage and the woman has long returned to the depths of the forest. But then she blinks, long and slow, and takes a step back to blend with the shadows of the trees. “You,” she says — and even her voice is like silver, deep and smooth and just a little hoarse from disuse. “Who are you?”
“I’m not a thief or bandit or fire-breathing monster, if that helps.”
“You are no ordinary human.”
“Yes, well, I suppose no ordinary human would be stupid enough to go looking for the same monster that almost killed them last year, no?” Yelan asks. When the woman just stares at her, those eyes the only visible feature in the darkness of evening, Yelan sighs. “Let’s just say I work for the kingdom.”
Realization flickers in those white pupils. “Are you here to, ah… hang me?”
“What — no? Why would I do that? No, I may work for the kingdom,” Yelan huffs, “but I’m not here on behalf of them. This is a personal score I had to settle with you. Now tell me the truth,” she briskly adds, before she can get any more off-track. “You’re no crane and you’re no monster — though you certainly fight like the latter. No, you’re some kind of vigilante, aren’t you?”
Silence, long and uncomprehending. Then, at length: “Vigi…lante?”
“Yes. Someone who does good by defeating evil,” Yelan briefly explains, realizing a woman who apparently lives in the woods might not understand more than a few basic words. “Those people you killed were thieves and bandits who were planning to — or already had stolen from the villagers here, weren’t they? For their drab animal-skin clothes, they certainly had quite a few pouches of gold lying around.
“And the black dog I heard you killed wasn’t roasted alive — it just smelled of smoke, because it was a huodou. A dog that brings fire wherever it goes. Most likely those bandits use it to frighten or kill their victims before robbing them blind; worse, though, an animal that can set its surroundings on fire would only bring disaster upon a forest and the town it surrounds. So you did away with it.
“A small village wouldn’t have much to steal from in the first place, but crime rates always skyrocket during this time of the year, when everyone’s busy partying and drinking to notice their surroundings or pay attention to their pockets. You wouldn’t have seen the need to protect the town during most months of the year. But I thought something similar might happen again on the Lunar New Year… and that’s why I knew when to come back and find you. Aren’t I right?”
Yelan falls quiet, still a little out of breath from both their earlier chase and now her little speech. The woman still hasn’t spoken, but perhaps she’s simply surprised someone smart enough to see right through her has arrived. Surely Yelan’s reasoning is correct and logical, and surely the mystery of the monstrous woman that left her for dead last year will be brought to light…
A moment, two. Then the woman blinks again, this time even longer and slower. “Well… You’re not… wrong.”
“Hah—!”
“But you’re not right either,” the woman cuts in. “These are the woods I live in for meditation. True, it is empty but for myself and the animals most days of the year, and the arrival of those… bandits, you called them? Disturbed my peace. So I killed them. And that dog with its incessant barking and yapping… even noisier and more disruptive than all those men combined. So I killed it, too.” She pauses. “But I did also kill it partially for its meat.”
Yelan stares. “Its… meat.”
“Yes. It smelled of smoke, so I wondered if it was already perfectly roasted.”
“…The meat of a huodou.”
“It did not taste very good,” the woman informs her. “Much too burnt.”
For one inane second Yelan suggests seasoning next time, then remembers the situation she’s in and holds her tongue. “Now… wait a second,” she says, struggling to process all of this. “You didn’t kill those men and their dog because you thought they might hurt the villagers? You were just… annoyed… by them?”
The woman nods, a barely perceptible dip of her head. “And,” she adds, “I was hungry.”
“You were hungry — right. Of course. A reasonable reason.”
“I’m glad you understand. Now will you leave?” the woman abruptly asks. “I’ll allow you are less of a bother than the children who run around screaming in the woods everyday, but that does not mean you are not a bother at all. If you have no further business with me, get out.”
Yelan can’t help a wry smile — if this woman hadn’t killed the village children for being as noisy as children can be, then obviously she isn’t as cruel and cold-hearted as she sounds. Still, though… “If you’re hungry,” Yelan says, “why not just get some food from the village? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, and you’ve got plenty of leftover gold lying around in those woods.”
For a moment the woman visibly falters, but her eyes go dull again. “Would they not be suspicious of a strange new woman in their midst?”
“I was, technically, a strange new woman in their midst. Surely even cultivators need to eat.”
“The herbs in the forest are sustenance enough,” the woman replies, though Yelan definitely doesn’t miss the hint of distaste in her voice. “Enough talk. We are finished here, yes? Your curiosity has been sated, your score settled? Then I will be off. Do not expect such mercy next time we meet.”
Yelan scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ll count on that, then. Third time’s the charm, as they say.”
The woman says nothing, just gives Yelan another long, considering look before turning around, the flow of her hair like a crane unfurling its wings. Yelan watches her take a step deeper into the forest, then another, then another —
And stops.
Above them a single lantern floats on by, a paper star ablaze with firelight.
More soon follow, until it becomes the glowing, golden river of light Yelan can’t help but watch every year. It takes her a second to realize the woman is watching it, too — the lantern light cuts through the darkness, illuminates her full profile despite the evening. For the first time Yelan realizes the ethereal beauty she carries, realizes how she must have been mistaken for a crane straight out of an ink painting.
Then the woman drops her gaze, staring down at the grass instead. “There… is one more thing,” she murmurs. “I did not come close to the village just because of those bandits.”
“Oh, really?” Yelan asks, her own voice soft. “For what reason, then?”
“…Every year… the lanterns are beautiful.”
They’re quiet again, this time for several more minutes, watching the lanterns drift up and along the sky. But there aren’t too many in this part of the country, where it’s still more mountain and forest than houses, and after a while the lanterns trickle out and disappear entirely. Still, tonight is a clear night: the moon is high and bright, and all around it the stars wink down at them, as if privy to an inside joke only they know the punchline of.
“Hey,” Yelan calls. “What’s your name?”
The woman doesn’t respond at first, head still tilted up to the sky as if waiting for just one more lantern to float by. Then, begrudgingly, she turns to face her. “Why?”
“Don’t you think I deserve to know the name of someone who almost killed me last year?”
Had that been a trick of the moonlight or the flash of a smile? “What’s yours?”
Briefly Yelan considers going with Yao, then decides she isn’t that filthy of a liar just yet. “Yelan.”
“…Shenhe.”
“Shenhe. A lovely name.” Yelan smiles. “Now I might be a little bit late to a prior appointment… but if we hurry now, they might still have a pair of lanterns left for us to send out. Would you like to come with me?”