Work Text:
Today was a very important day, Harrow's parents told her, and as always, she listened. She got up early, she put on her finest black robes. Her mother tied a red ribbon in her hair, and even did her best to make it look as if Harrow hadn't been stuck in a lightning storm. She was eleven years old, and she was going to meet God.
"No you're not," Gideon said, fidgeting in the ribbon Harrow's parents had attempted to tie into the hair Gideon had hacked off with her own sword. Gideon was an idiot, and thought just because her parents were dead and never knew her that meant she could do what she wanted with her body. Half the people Harrow met these days were dead, and almost all of them strangers. They could come across Gideon's parents any day, and wouldn't she be sorry then?
"I am too meeting God," Harrow snapped, because stupid people couldn't help being stupid but Gideon was clearly doing it on purpose, and that made it impossible for her to ignore it.
"That's his name?" Gideon groused, digging a bit of dust out of her ear. Yiling was as lousy with dust as with the dead. "When he wakes up in the morning and gets on that cart to sell radishes, he says to himself, Another day to be God and do crimes?'"
"Well, no. He calls himself the Yiling Laozu, idiot."
"Does not," Gideon said with perverse satisfaction.
"Does too," Harrow fired back, uneasy at falling to Gideon's level but not so uneasy she wouldn't do it to prove a point. "Everyone calls him that. The sects, demonic cultivators, the liars selling genuine Yiling Laozu talismans to protect your house."
"Everyone isn't him, though. Say you start calling me Giddy the Glorious, it's all you call me. Doesn't matter if I like it so long as people think I'll answer to it."
"This is an idiotic discussion," Harrow said, brushing the dust from her robes.
"You're still discussing, though. Takes two idiots," said Gideon. "And if you wanted brushing dust off your robes to look regal or imposing or whatever, you'd need far less dust and a fair sight more robe."
"Shut up," Harrow snapped. "You don't even know anything about demonic cultivation — ("And I'm happy to keep it that way, O Dread Demonlet," said Gideon) You don't know what it is you're profaning."
Gideon frowned, inasmuch as one could see it under the quantity of hood and layer of corpse-white paint with darkened veins that Harrow's family affected. They were supposed to represent that Harrow's family were the Yiling Laozu's servants, as biddable as any fierce corpse, and that just as a fierce corpse did they had been reborn in the process. It wasn't a very hard look to achieve, mostly flat white paint with a few dark wisps twining their way up from the neck.
Gideon, having declared she would apply her own once it became clear wholesale refusal was not an option, had slapped a splotchy base that looked as if it were mouldering over her brown skin. Her dark lines were not elegantly sinister veins but wobbled drunkenly with a distinct air of scribble. Harrow was irritated just at the sight of her, but then, when was that not the case?
"Like your family knows anything about this guy," Gideon snapped. "He didn't even try to set up a sect or what the fuck ever you guys are trying to turn him into. He's just some asshole farming in a mountain with some Wens. Has he taken anyone as a disciple? Has he even acknowledged anyone? Your parents included?"
"Shut up," Harrow said, feeling very small and trying to stop it any way she could.
"Fine then. I guess I'll see. When we go to the Burial Mounds and he takes us all into his amazing death trap, I'll be in your debt."
The Yiling Laozu wasn't even in town that day. When Harrow's parents waited at the Burial Mounds, he never showed.
Harrow dressed again to meet God fourteen years later. Black robes. No paint. No red ribbon, either. She wasn't trying to come as an aspirant or to issue a demand. She just. She needed to know.
Harrow was not in Yiling, either. Caiyi Town was far wetter, and generally less dead. There were food stalls and vendors and other things that people tended to enjoy — Harrow had never been the person to know about those sorts of things. Harrow had never been the sort of person to enjoy things in general.
Gideon would have loved the place. She would have chewed on street food with her mouth open and dragged Harrow along to watch Gideon's aggressively large biceps flex as she won a game. Harrow would have ended up enjoying not the town itself, but Gideon's pleasure in it.
She would do so once Gideon was back. She had to believe that.
When Harrow finally met God, as even her parents had never been able to do, it wasn't even on purpose. She was simply sitting at a tea house, staring into her cup and contemplating the vague, distant possibility of drinking, when she heard a white-robed Lan calling for a Wei and froze. She turned around and there he was. The Yiling Laozu, in black and red, his intelligence shining out of someone else's eyes in someone else's face. Harrow had to go. She couldn't not.
The Yiling Laozu's eyes were not unkind when he saw Harrow, but perhaps... chagrined. Like a man at a dinner party who couldn't remember the name of someone he was talking to.
"I'm sorry in advance for how this question is going to sound," he said, "but, ah... who did I kill?"
Harrow stared blankly. This was not the question she had expected.
The Yiling Laozu kept talking. "It's just, you know, people keep coming up to me and staring and I have just a terrible memory at the best of times, so it's not that I don't regret whatever I did to your..." He trailed off — hoping, Harrow expected, that she would name whoever it was she had lost to him.
‘You didn’t do anything,” Harrow said abruptly. “I did. The fault lies with me.”
“And who are we talking about?”
“My — ” and wasn’t that the question. What had Gideon been to her, really, that she had the right to claim? “A girl. My bodyguard. We were… accosted. She died. I should have. So I need to know how you did it.”
Something in the Yiling Laozu’s face sharpened. “I’m afraid raising the dead only works if you’ve got a corpse at hand to — ”
“Not that,” Harrow said. Look at her; desperate enough to interrupt God. “I need to know — ” she waved her hand at the man’s stolen face, too round, too young. “I need to know how to do that. To call someone in.”
“No you don’t,” he said.
“You would dare,” said Harrow.
“I would,” he agreed, as calm as a teacher pointing out a missed metacarpal. “This girl, she died for you?”
“Because of me,” Harrow choked out. “If I hadn’t — if she’d just — ”
“No, no. Take yourself out of it for a second. She made the choice to die?”
“She was bound to my service,” Harrow said slowly. “There is no choice in that. But — yes.”
“Then what’s it going to solve if you do the same thing?”
Harrow didn’t — she wouldn’t. That was hardly her intent.
Was it?
God looked her directly in the eye. “It destroys your soul, that ritual. You can never get it back — and don’t start, I know you’d pay that and gladly. But think. You pour your veins out, burn your soul up bringing her back. What happens next?”
“She lives,” Harrow said. “She lives, like she should have.”
“No she doesn’t. She storms my house a week from now demanding I swap your soul for hers, and you’re gone for good already. She made her choice. You can’t do it over.”
“Then what do I do?” Harrow said.
“I’m not the person to ask,” he said. “I just died and woke up after everyone was done with me, I don’t know what happens in the middle.”
“Somehow I thought you’d be more helpful.”
God made an undignified noise. “I never said I knew everything. But there’s more you can try. Call her soul back. Knit it together if it’s broken. Ask her what she wants and start from there.”
“And that works?”
“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But look: there’s no point saving her soul if you won’t be here to welcome her back.”