Her lips twitched, and he suspected she was using her neutral expression to suppress a smile. “It’s not a complex process for me. I can draw you out of fate with a thought.”
“Fate. So then, if you’re not offended by this one’s humble questions…can you see the future?”
“Fate is not the future. What is destined to occur does not always occur.”
He bowed before her three times. “That is enough for me, thank you. Would you tell me my destiny?”
This time she did laugh, and he was almost surprised that it sounded so human. “I’m pleased to have descended personally, Wei Shi Lindon.” A thrill rolled through him. The celestial messenger knew his name. “I can show you some limited details of your fate, if you are willing to see them.”
“This one would be honored.” He tried to hide the eagerness in his voice. Even the most trivial knowledge of the future could be used to great advantage.
The tips of two white-plated fingers met his forehead, like cool eggshells. “Then see.”
The frozen world was wiped out, replaced with another. He was still standing on the stone of the arena stage, but the clouds Li Markuth summoned had never appeared, and the sun beat down out of a clear sky. Wei Jin Amon faced him, and though he resisted longer than anyone expected, he still lost.
That night, he nursed his wounds alone when the First Elder barged in without knocking. The old man slapped a book down on his table: Path of the White Fox.
Lindon’s eyes shone at this vision. He had succeeded after all. He expected the immortal to return him to reality, but the future flowed on, coming in faster and faster images.
He watched a version of himself, years older, receive a copper badge with tears in his eyes. The First Elder smiled in pride.
His sister led Wei clansmen to fight around a carriage, while armored members of the Kazan fought. She wreathed one man’s face with foxfire, then drove her sword through a second man’s gut and left it there. Kelsa wrenched the door to the carriage open, revealing a finely wrought box. Her expression lifted.
More years passed, and Kelsa was personally awarded a jade badge by Patriarch Sairus himself. She didn’t even look thirty. Lindon and his family cheered for her from the crowd, though his father looked as though he’d bitten something sour.
An unknown time later, Jaran slipped out of his house in the middle of the night while his wife slept. He hobbled on a cane, but he took an overcoat and a sword with him.
Lindon’s stomach dropped.
The three remaining members of the Shi family, wearing white funeral robes, clustered around an iron tablet with Wei Shi Jaran’s name on it. Seisha lit the candle herself.
More years silently slid by, and Lindon saw himself sitting on the edge of a roof under the stars, side-by-side with a girl he’d never met. She had a wide, open smile. He passed her a bottle, and she drank.
Now they stood together in the Hall of Elders, both wearing red, with a white ribbon tying their clasped hands together. The First Elder said something and everyone laughed, but the vision-Lindon gazed only at his new wife.
The Lindon of the present felt his eyes burn and hurriedly wiped them away. He shouldn’t show tears to a heavenly immortal, but…Unsouled weren’t allowed to marry.
Time moved on in the blink of an eye, and he saw himself cycling in a meditative position next to his son. Applauding his daughter as she conjured foxfire for the first time. Pouring tea for his wife.
Fate, it seemed, was good to him. Was this why a messenger had descended from heaven? To show him the rewards for a young life spent suffering? If so, he welcomed it.
He saw himself grow older, his children grow tall.
Then Sacred Valley collapsed.
The image passed so quickly he almost didn’t catch it. A monstrous creature that towered into the clouds waded through the mountains like a man through waves, washing over the valley and burying it in earth. Everything was wiped out in an instant.
And Lindon returned to reality, standing before the white-armored woman. Her green hair drifted behind her, and the ghostly lines leading from her fingertips to her skull flickered with light like swallowed stars. She watched him with that same mask of an expression, though now he saw a tinge of pity in her eyes.
His cheeks were wet with tears, and he felt as though his chest had been hollowed out. “I…my future, I…”
“Not your future,” she said. “Fate is only a direction. That is the direction your life would have gone, like a river flowing downhill, had Li Markuth not intervened. That is how your story is fated to continue, and how it is destined to end.”
“And now, you’ve…undone what he did. Is that still what will happen to me?”
Her smile was sympathetic, and the pity in her eyes deepened. Her compassion scared him almost as much as the visions, because that meant she knew. “It is a good fate. You only die after a full, rich life.”
“When my home is destroyed!” He’d never considered Sacred Valley his home before. Sacred Valley was the entire world.
“Not every thread is cut. A few survive, and they will go on to join greater powers in the world.” She reached over for her lines of gray smoke. “This is why I take the memories, Wei Shi Lindon. Fate is not considerate.”
“How do I fix it?” Lindon asked.
Her fingers froze on the lines.
Taking that as encouragement, Lindon continued. “There has to be some way to fix it. If it’s a direction, then direction can be changed. There has to be some… sacred arts, or some weapon, or…” Lindon still felt the countless tons of cold earth, pressing down on his family. “If I were strong like you are, I could change things. This one begs you. Please.”
Purple eyes watched him, weighed him. Her hand withdrew from the smoky strings, and she paced a half-circle around him as though to consider him from a new angle.
The immortal glanced to her left shoulder. He could glean nothing from her face, which remained somehow pleasant and impassive both. “Suriel requesting clearance for unbound transportation within Iteration One-one-zero. Verbal response, please.”
A woman spun itself into existence on her shoulder, like a doll made of gray smoke. That didn’t surprise him much; Forgers of the White Fox created illusions more solid than this one every day. The ghost spoke with the all-surrounding neutral voice he’d heard earlier. [Acknowledged. Consulting Sector Control.]
Silence reigned as the ghost waited for a response, but Lindon was caught by another detaiclass="underline" the celestial messenger had called herself Suriel. He’d never heard the name before, but he filed it away like a scroll in the clan archives.
[Clearance granted.]
“I would like a tour,” Suriel said, with a glance at Lindon.
[For what purpose?]
“I’m looking for combatants.”
[Acknowledged.]
Suriel reached up to rest an armored hand on top of Lindon’s head. “Steel yourself,” she said. “Do not be afraid.”
She’d told him that already, but before he could ask what he was supposed to be afraid of, they vanished. An intense pattern of blue light washed over him, devouring every other sight. It was like being covered in a blanket woven with millions of threads, and each thread was a distinct shade of blue light. His ears rushed with overwhelming noise…but only for an instant.
Then the blanket fell away, and they stood in the middle of a royal court such as he had never imagined. Lanterns held glowing, golden jewels a hundred yards overhead, and the room stretched so far that it vanished in any direction. Lindon was next to Suriel, the both of them standing in the middle of a vast crowd of old men and women in intricate formal robes. Each of the elders wore a fortune’s worth of jade, gold, and exotic metals that Lindon couldn’t identify. Some had sacred beasts with them—a red serpent coiling around an arm here, a two-headed tiger curled up there. He could feel their wealth and authority hanging in the air; these were people that could have Lindon executed with a gesture.