Bless Them!
Hong Yumin was a being who had given shape to the very concept of the immortal.
Myth, record, invention, common knowledge—every notion of the xian that lived within those bounds had been kneaded into one, and she was what came of it. Call her a blessing handed down by Heaven, and you would not be wrong. The goddess of the volcano named her the Child of Heaven, and there was reason enough that even an ordinary phantom thief called her a god.
Law.
Not a measure human beings had set. An absolute truth of the universe, which had always existed and would exist ever after. A fragment of a fragment of that truth was being drawn forth from a young god.
The Sixty-Four Laws. Set against infinite law, the quantity was meaner than dust. Yet even that scant unfolding, each law quickening and branching from the next, was—beneath a human gaze—a single law.
"……It's over."
The chief goddess of a mythology declared it. Mother of the Warrior, and a mother of mothers besides, she could feel it herself: this assault would yield no answer. It was an offensive even she could not easily overcome, and all the more so now, when she was nothing but a divine avatar.
The immortal, spending all she had, was beautiful. She was loosing the potential she carried with no limit upon it, freely enough that one nearly wondered why she had never managed it before. The first time the volcano goddess had looked on her, she had been nothing like this.
Growth.
She had fought the apostle who bore the eclipse upon his back, faced Life, communed with gods, and taught her disciple. Like a dam giving way, the growth she recorded was explosive. The walls of years, of solitude, of trauma, could no longer stand in her way. She had gained a dear friend, and a place to return to. At last she could reach higher.
A low hum. The candle flames shuddered. A frail human could not endure it.
"……Ha!"
The volcano goddess exclaimed, though the sense of it was entirely different.
Enduring? He was enduring? Under that judgment? Some lunatic who did nothing but howl up at Heaven?
Was the world in its last age, or had it advanced? That such a thing could exist. What ought never to hold was holding. But that, too, would be brief. She would grant him the strength to endure, and nothing more. Surely he ranked among the foremost powers of society. Within that company of theirs, there would be no one who could follow him.
"Kehehe!!! Aaaaah!!! How rapturous! Heaven this dense—how long has it been!"
"………He's speaking?"
The chief goddess's pupils narrowed. She was straining to see the human still drawing breath inside that law.
"……How?!"
The goddess was aghast at the humans before her. The attendant who had stood behind, and the white-bearded old man—both of them were resisting together inside a judgment that allowed no resistance. Their faces were a ghastly blue-green, as if they might die on the spot, and yet one grain of composure remained.
"Keuhehehe!!! Good! Very good! Yes—this is what it takes, if one is to be called a shrine maiden!"
The old man smiled a smile soaked in blood. The attendant bled without a flicker of expression. Perhaps the immortal felt that strangeness as well. She wiped the blood sheeting down along her jaw and spread her hands wide toward the sky.
"……The yin runs thick because of that bastard."
Cursing, under her breath, someone who was not there, she let the words fall soft, and the prayer took shape.
"What you require is a single axis. That axis shall be made of my law."
"I do not wish for the great. I do not wish for the small."
"I do your neighbor no harm. I pray only that you set your foot in quiet, and stand upright."
"Toward the enemy who bars my path, I beseech an eternal seal."
⟨ Prayer · Moon ⟩
Overflowing law drew itself into a band, as if hand had clasped hand and they were spinning in a ring. The laws raised up the shape of the Human, and slowly they closed upon the one the immortal indicated.
"Krrrgh!!!"
This, at least, was too much. The old man's knees buckled a notch. Veins stood out in his eyes. His shoulders cinched. His heart hammered as if it would burst. An eternity wearing the mask of death was drawing near to him.
The attendant looked at the old man. His own state was worse, and still he did not let out a single groan.
"Yes……. If not a moment like this, when would we ever use it."
Having shared a wordless communion with the elder, the attendant nodded.
Puhk!
He split his own chest in two. Dark, turbid blood fountained up and soaked the ground, then boiled away in the fury of the law. He groped inside the wound and drew out a stone tablet—a crude slab that carried the marks of a very great age. The moment the old man took it, the attendant weathered away and was gone.
"Go well. Companion of these long years."
The old man traced the sign of the cross and mourned the one who had departed. Watching, the goddess felt a chill of dread crawl up her spine.
"That is……."
What? What was it, that the old man gripping that tablet now pressed on her with a weight beyond all comparison?
"Shrine maiden……. To die by your hand would be a glory. But I cannot die in a place like this."
He drove the tablet into the earth. Upon the slab, half buried in the ground, he wrote the first line in his own blood. The goddess, seeing the characters, cried out.
"A pity, shrine maiden……. Law is not yours alone to wield!"
"Kill him—now!!!"
Kieeee!!!
The band of the Moon crashed down upon the old man, and the immortal bound a hand seal.
Quickly, quickly—let it be as the statutes command!
Kieeeee!!!
Boom!
"Cough! Cough!"
Spitting dirt, Pele looked around her. The laws, having drunk deep of yin and then vomited it forth, had bleached white everything her eyes could reach.
"Child of Heaven! Where are you!"
She burned the frost gathering on her shoulders away with fire and searched first for the child who had been set apart. One who had shown more than her limit would surely be in a grave state. Unless a goddess tended her, she might well be in danger.
"Cough!"
At that ominous cough Pele broke into a run at once. Magma under her feet, flame ringing her eyes, she punched through the barrier of yin in a single breath. Between the mists as they shredded and shredded again, the Child of Nature lay collapsed upon a mound of ice made from her own blood.
"Child!"
Pele gathered Hong Yumin into her arms. What she held was no human warmth, but a lump of ice—the price of having failed to raise even the thinnest barrier against the storm of yin.
"I'm sorry. I should have protected you……."
"I… am… all right. You held back… for my sake… did you not……."
"Held back, nothing……. I just didn't have the strength."
Pele had been unable to shield Hong Yumin because the scale of the power the girl was working was something even a god hesitated to touch. A weaving of law so near to perfect might have been thrown off if divine power intruded. Had the balance broken by some mischance, no one would have come through unscathed. Pele had chosen the best she could.
"Let's get back. Take you to Life, and you'll be fine."
"……We must not. It is not yet… finished……."
In a voice that seemed about to snap, Hong Yumin pointed. Following that gaze—
"Huuuu!!!"
—there stood the old man, comparatively whole.
"Had I not had this, I truly would have died."
He leaned against the tablet and smiled, pale as bone. At that smile Pele ground her teeth.
"Krrk. You……. Where did you get that……."
"This, you mean?"
He stroked the tablet as though proud of it.
"The sacred relic that opened my eyes to my true path."
"True path? Don't give me that bullshit!!!"
The goddess's rage bucked wild. Fire surged toward the old man and only burned in a ring around him. Not a single hair was singed.
"It was noble at its birth, then fouled so it could smash a false faith, and you forced the defiled thing to stand upright again—how is that supposed to be a true path!"
The tablet in the old man's hands had begun beneath the touch of a prophet. It had taken down the words of great Heaven, and then, raging at the sight of a corrupted faith, had been smashed together with the idol and buried—an object erased from history. Now it had shown itself to the world once more.
"And so is this not also a fate that Heaven appointed? O great goddess?"
The old man licked his lips.
"Had it truly ceased to be, it would never have appeared before me. Because it had not! A beggar, nothing more—and yet here I stand! I gathered the apostles who would walk with me, and I made the Heavenly Punishment! I met the true Child of Heaven and reached the gate of the ordeal—is that not so! Come, then. Explain it to me!"
"Explain, my ass! You're nothing but a lunatic with a cracked head!"
Pele drew up her true strength, though it strained the body of her divine avatar. That tablet had to vanish, now. It was a sacred relic already polluted and fallen. Too long parted from Heaven's hand, even its meaning had bleached away. Used any further, there was no telling what terror might follow.
"Hahaha! Do you truly think a divine avatar—not even your true body—can break through this law?!"
The old man smeared the blood running from his body however he pleased and wrote upon the tablet.
"Goddess, you ought to have killed me even if it cost the shrine maiden her life. Because you could not, you have lost!"
The second sentence, written after the first.
For twenty-four hours, the master of the Stone Tablet shall be free of every harm.
In exchange for cutting the duration of the above law to one hour, the Twelve Apostles bound to the Stone Tablet shall descend.
"Descend! Apostles who follow Heaven!!!"
Rrrumble!!!
A road opened in the sky. Its center tore in one long rip, and out of a cold, dark space pillars of light came down, as if Heaven itself were lowering them. Lightning struck. Wind rose. The moment the pillars touched the earth they were dyed in blood, and from within them the apostles walked forth.