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Death is certain.
This is the first lesson every Diviner from the House of Fu learns. Fu Xuan is no different.
The fate of every Xianzhou native is to become mara-struck, eventually—not ‘death’ in the ancient sense, but more so the death of everything that makes one who one is. Resentment given form, flame—fury, burning everything mortal away. Immortality becomes a scalpel, a blade, skilfully parting the self from memory, leaving nothing but the brightest, sharpest and cruellest parts of life behind. Life is a curse. Death is a blessing. And becoming mara-struck is simply a price to pay.
Fu Xuan also dies, eventually.
The second lesson every Diviner from the House of Fu learns is that even with knowledge of the future, there are some things that cannot be changed.
She dies within her beloved Matrix of Prescience, the blade of a Mara-struck soldier through her chest under a starlit sky—at the end of it all, with all of time and every strand of the future within pulling and threading distance, she breathes her last. Without her, the Luofu flies on
or
perhaps it doesn’t—depending on which strings she tugs with her dying breath, and whether she winds them together tightly enough. Whether she bleeds dark and red enough to write with a fingertip in, or whether she has any breath left in her to whisper what has to be done into the ear of whoever is too late to save her.
But
she is no one anyway, in the grand scheme of the Xianzhou Hexafleet. Just one life, to the cosmic balance of thousands.
She shakes her head, pushes a headache back, and steps out of the Matrix to open her eyes, the familiar sight of the Divination Commission blurring into sight in shades of blue and purple. There are many things that require her attention. She has looked too far into the future for nothing.
If she looks far enough, she sees the Luofu fall from the sky, just one falling star among many—like an arrow fired by the Reignbow Arbiter. Always in pursuit of the Abundance even to the end, to their own end—the ones who follow Lan of the Hunt so closely that they lie in its shadow, always overlooked by their Aeon purely because of their proximity.
She will die. There is nothing she can do about it. With one last look into the Matrix of Prescience, she gathers herself, and leaves to find the Dozing General of the Xianzhou. Duty above death, and Fu Xuan has died more times than most.
-
She arrives at the Seat of Divine Foresight—perhaps mockingly named such—thirty-three seconds ahead of schedule, and she is still too late to catch Jing Yuan as he slinks off to wherever it is he goes to waste time. She is always too late. Maybe the Seat is named for Jing Yuan’s Aeon-like ability to always avoid her. But, upon walking into his office, Qingzu bows and says she can find the General
on
the opposite side of the battlefield, gnarled branches with golden leaves slithering up the side of his greaves and past his chest to wind around his neck, and yet his expression is unbothered. Relaxed, almost. Mara-struck. An Emanator of Abundance. Phantylia had won in the end, after all, in a game the Xianzhou were always doomed to lose.
Next to Fu Xuan, Yanqing—no longer a boy, now a young man and the Sword Champion of the Luofu—grips his sword more tightly, the taut set of his shoulders and the slight tremor that racks his frame the only sign that he recognises the enemy he’s about to fight. All the same, his expression is resolute, like the man he considers his father and master has done nothing but prepare him well for this moment.
Fu Xuan pities him, quietly. There is a pain in her chest, and she is unsure whether it aches for Jing Yuan and all of the unsaid words between them, or for Yanqing, who seems doomed to fall prey to the cycle that has already broken one relationship. Master trains student. Student kills master. Father, son, beginning, end. All that love between them, deep and wide and incomprehensible as Scalegorge Waterscape, and all it was ever good for is making the inevitable killing blow harder.
“Diviner Fu,” he says, voice quiet. “What
are
you looking at so intently? Is there something on my face?”
Fu Xuan blinks, and realises her tea has gone cold even as a burning pain lances through her head. Yanqing sits across from her, young again, a boyish grin on his face as he connects two dots that are too far to be connected by anything else than the folly of youth. Ah, so Qingzu must have shoved her out into having tea and playing chess with Yanqing while the General was out and she was in a haze.
“Oh,” he beams. “Did you see me being Sword Champion in my future, and that’s why you were staring at me? So you could tell me without saying it out loud?”
“No,” Fu Xuan lies, and feels herself choke on her words. She hates lying as much as the next person, but if Yanqing knows he will become Sword Champion, he
starts
escaping from his lessons to train on his own, causing Jing Yuan undue worry, before dying on the battlefield, felled by the hubris of being young—just one future of many, of course. Or, he could go running off to challenge enemies he is not equipped to face—which he already does, anyway, just slightly less reckless and slightly more willing to listen to Jing Yuan as of now. In most of the futures where he knows he is fated to become Sword Champion, he also becomes arrogant along with it. Proud past the point of foolishness, thinking himself one of the legendary heroes—what he does not consider is that death is what defines a hero, is what makes them worthy of remembering, because there is no remembering when one is still alive. Eventually, on an ill-advised excursion that Jing Yuan fails to dissuade him from, he will become mara-struck, having been kidnapped and used as a test subject by the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus.
In that same potential future, running parallel to a hundred other better futures, Yanqing will be only seventeen when he dies a hero, a hair shy of becoming the man he always thought he would be. Jingliu will be too late to save him. Jing Yuan will be the one to kill him. And Fu Xuan
doesn’t
like thinking about this future much—yet again, just one of many, of course, but one that she would prefer to never consider at all—she’s happy to keep that future as a hypothetical, one possibility in a sea of possibilities. She’d rather die a thousand deaths than breathe even one word of her affection for the father-son-adjacent pair aloud, but she loves Jing Yuan like an annoying brother and Yanqing like a childish nephew far too much to see either of them go through any unnecessary anguish. Yanqing is still so young, and Jing Yuan is already so old. Where she can steer them away from the worse futures she’s seen, she will try her best.
Yanqing cocks his head at her, waiting for her to make a move, finally leaning back in his chair and sighing, and Fu Xuan thanks Jing Yuan mentally (with some semblance of reluctance) that he’s taught Yanqing proper manners, and when not to push for answers.
“You’re going to lose,” Fu Xuan teases, knowing full well that this is yet another lie—but a necessary one, to push him onto the path to success. “I can see it.”
“You can see the future,” Yanqing counters, crossing his arms over his chest as he huffs in mild annoyance. “This isn’t fair.”
“Nothing ever is, didi,” she laughs. “But treat this as training, hm?”
“Training,” the boy repeats, an expression he will insist is definitely, absolutely not a pout on his face. “More like bullying.”
All the same, he makes his move, and like that, Fu Xuan whiles an afternoon away. The burden of her Eye is a heavy one that she will never set down until she dies, but just for now, faced with a triumphant Yanqing when he finally bests her, she can forget about all the lives, unborn and extinguished, that weigh on her conscience.
-
Sleep is rare.
That is the third—and last—lesson that Fu Xuan, Diviner of the House of Fu, has hated learning the most. She is more familiar with the blackness that death brings than she is with the restfulness that sleep grants her, and she has long come to accept that as bright and brilliant as the House of Fu’s Diviners are, and she bests them all by far, she is no exception to the lesson.
And unfortunately, it seems that while sleep does not bless her, dreams will plague her instead.
“Each Diviner from the House of Fu has at least a bookshelf in the Garden of Recollection,” the Memokeeper says idly, swaying slightly from where she hangs upside down from a beam in the ceiling, above where Fu Xuan is hunched over her table, arms around her frame as she shakes like a leaf in the incomprehensible, swirling storm of the future. “Normal people usually get one book. But, Miss Fu Xuan, I believe you will need at least
a
library?” Her father laughs, patting the top of her head, and for a moment, she is seven again; young and foolish, the most pain she’s ever known being the time she tripped and scraped her knee. “It’s that way, A-Xuan. But don’t worry. You have a bright future
ahead
of you,” the blind man says above her, pain wracking her body in waves until she feels like she’s going to be torn apart, a flood of everything that has been and will be cascading through her fragile, human mind, shredding what was/is/will be Fu Xuan into a million brilliant, glittering, glass-sharp fractals. Before her aching eyes, she watches herself be torn apart and stitched back together into some semblance of herself, not quite all there and too much of herself all at once, a shell of her past stuffed with the agonising, infinite expanse of her future. “There will only be pain. You will know everything, and feel everything, and there is more pain than there is anything else in this world. You will burn the brightest, and die knowing that you have touched the lives of many, Fu Xuan. You will die alone. Loved, but alone.”
“Will I regret this?” she gasps, curling up further into herself. It is so cold and so hot and so windy and so dark and so bright and so overwhelming all at once, and yet the old man is unmoved, tilting his head.
“You have my eye, Diviner. Look within yourself.”
Blindly, she reaches out for a shard, closing her fingers around it and ignoring how the memory feels like it’s cutting into her flesh, and
watches
her master die all over again. But she has—had—no time to dwell on how he smiled at her in his last moments, mara-struck and helpless and hopeful all at once, stumbling over to the Cloudpeer Telescope and smearing blood over the lens with her shaking hands, red with her master’s life and gold with her master’s death, ginkgo leaves swirling around her as she fumbles.
She is running out of time. People are dying as she works. She tears her palm open on the jagged edge of shattered glass and charred metal and presses it to the weathered bronze, watching her blood seep through the metal grooves. She would gladly bleed oceans, if it means this foolish, headstrong, downright idiotic plan might finally work. So long as she can save people, it doesn’t matter if it comes at the cost of herself in every future she sees—she has lifetimes to give, after all. Lifetimes to burn up and burn out like candlewicks, just to bring more light into this cruel world she’s been born into and cursed with.
The SOS signal goes out. A minute passes, feeling like a lifetime and the end of a thousand all at once. Another minute ticks by, and with a shaky breath, she sinks to her knees. She is intimately acquainted with failure, but like death, it never hurts any less.
Three minutes pass, in the end. The Reignbow Arbiter does not answer.
But the Xianzhou does, the flagships Yuque and Luofu descending from the skies. As she sits there, bleeding out slowly and leaning against the telescope, all she can think of is how the ships look like Lux Arrows, fired by Lan themselves.
“You were right, Master,” she sighs, knowing the old man cannot hear her—he is dead, and for a moment, she envies him. “I did end up killing you. But I suppose I’ll never stop trying to prove you wrong.”
-
“Can you see the future?”
Fu Xuan turns to Bailu, where they sit on a stone balustrade somewhere deep in Aurum Alley, Bailu hiding from her problems and retainers as she attempts to enlist Fu Xuan’s help to aid her in continuing her escapades. Fu Xuan merely sighs at that, turning her berrypheasant skewer over in her hands, having been asked this question by different people in at least seventy-three thousand, two-hundred and fifty-nine of the futures that she has seen and remembers. There have probably been many more times she has been asked this question that she cannot recall. “No. There is no set future. I can only see futures. I do not see a future.”
“You sound too used to giving that answer,” Bailu says sulkily, kicking her feet. “Does it mean that it’s my destiny to always be dragged back to the Alchemy Commission when they find me?”
“Destiny isn’t a real thing,” Fu Xuan snaps, regretting the roughness in her tone a heartbeat later, but she forges on nonetheless. “You being dragged back to the Commission is a foreseeable consequence of your actions—but just because the end results are predictable, does not mean that it is destined. Maybe you will stay out a little longer than you did last time, maybe you will find ways to run circles around them, or maybe you will slip and fall and be caught. Destiny is inescapable, and the retainers of the Alchemy Commission are not. Nothing is ever inescapable, so long as it can be postponed, day after day after day, and thus, nothing is ever destined.”
Bailu grins worryingly at that, and perhaps slightly too late, Fu Xuan realises that Lady Bailu has probably only heard and processed the first part of her answer. “It isn’t?”
“Yeah,” the Diviner nods. “It’s all a load
of—”
don’t use that word,” her senior chastises, pushing one of the girls gently as they laugh and stumble out of sight behind a corner, and the young man falls into step next to the pink-haired girl. Fu Xuan is so young in this memory, like looking at it from behind fogged glass and misty sunlight, all soft margins and rounded edges. “It’s not fitting of a Diviner of the Yuque, A-Xuan.”
“I’m not a diviner yet,” the girl pouts. Her senior laughs and ruffles her hair.
“Funny you say that. I’ve seen that you’ll be one. The best of them all.”
And despite herself, Fu Xuan brightens like the sun at the hint—despite knowing that the rules stipulate there should be no unjust divinations, no frivolous misuses of this power they have been burdened with, surely this, at least, nothing harmless. It is what everyone has been telling her, after all, since her future was divined. It is everything she knows, and everything that she doubts when the scryglass remains clouded or the matrix refuses to spin. “What—really?”
He nods, putting an index finger over his lips like they’re sharing a secret. Things are so simple, where the biggest worry Fu Xuan has is what she’s going to eat for dinner, and whether her seniors are doing well.
“Of course,” he grins, before tapping her nose lightly. “You trust me,
don’t
you?”
Her mother smiles, sets her embroidery down, and Fu Xuan runs into her arms, smudging her tears and burying her face into her mother’s sleeve. For a moment, she is home again, and her parents never died, by fire or by flood or by Mara or at all. Yet again, it’s just one past of many. But it’s a past she wants to drown in, sometimes.
“Not doing well,” she sobs. “I don’t understand. How does everyone get their scryglass to work, and I’m the one who’s divined to have the brightest future, and yet why is mine always dark?”
“Don’t worry,” her mother soothes. “There will be many setbacks to your journey. But you will always end up where you are meant to be, Fu Xuan. Our little Master Diviner, in the making.”
Destiny is not real, but she thinks that surely, surely, being trapped into this lifetime she has never chosen and will never escape despite being given every chance to, this must come pretty close.
Her mother was right. She will be the Master Diviner.
The Divination Commission is right. She is the Master Diviner.
The Diviners were right. She has always been meant to be the Master Diviner.
She is right. She will stay the Master Diviner, until the day that she dies for the final time, and when she dies, there will only be the Master Diviner left in history books. No trace left of the girl who used to push her vegetables around her plate, waiting for her seniors to eat them for her; no trace left of the young woman who had dreams instead of nightmares, nothing left of her that isn’t defined and warped by the lens of being the All-Seeing Omniscia of the Luofu.
Distantly, she wonders if anyone who loves her will remember she was someone before she was the Master Diviner. Whether the reason that the House of Fu is so exalted is because people cannot bring themselves to speak of their names, making up for it by only lauding their feats. Whether the history books will say that she tried her best in a universe where there are only losers, fighting to stave off the inevitable ending for one more day, or whether they will bury her name and only see her as another Diviner in a long line of Diviners, all of them doomed to fail, sacrificial lambs sent to the metaphorical altar and bled out for just another moment of peace. Duty above death, after all. The many lives traded for the one.
She holds her head in her hands at the end/beginning/middle of it all, and wonders whether anyone will ever remember that she was once called—
“Fu Xuan,” Qingque whispers, with the air of someone who’s repeated themselves for the third time, inching closer like she expects the Diviner to lunge out and bite her, or worse—ask her why she’s late to work again again, and Fu Xuan plummets back to gravity, her feet landing against the ground gently to turn around and see who exactly is the one who’s ripped her out of her own mind. “I got you a…”
The girl doesn’t finish her sentence, holding a cup of startaro bubble tea out like a peace offering, and Fu Xuan blinks—suddenly, she is just herself again, instead of the Master Diviner, and the tragic pasts and nebulous futures all melt away to leave the crystallised, solid present before her eyes, reaching out on instinct to take it.
“So I’ll—uh, I’ll be off if there’s nothing else,” Qingque grins, slightly abashed as she edges away, Fu Xuan just staring in mild confusion, eyes darting between the cup in her hand and her colleague who really doesn’t show up to work enough to be called such. “I’ve got—erm, I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on.”
She lets Qingque go, still too unsettled by her thoughts to really snap at the young woman, slowly spiralling back down to the right plane of existence like an unmoored Starskiff. The coldness of the cup in her hands is grounding, and she raises it to eye-level, turning it over as she wonders how something so simple can trump the incomprehensible weight of the future in the eye of the Omniscia.
Staring at the cup, speckled with flecks of cream and white like the infinite impenetrable expanse of the sky, she thinks. Thinks whether being a Diviner is really such a bad thing, if it means people like Qingque get to be ordinary. After all, if the sacrificial lamb bleeds enough, doesn’t that mean no one else has to follow in her footsteps?
She will die, after all. Alone but loved, the blind man had said. It is the first lesson she has learnt, and there is nothing she can do about it. But maybe, she can do something about when she will die.
So she sighs, and closes her eyes again. If there is no future where the Xianzhou Luofu sails another day, then she will make one with her own sweat and blood.
She has so many lifetimes of it left to give, after all.