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The space between timelines is cold and hollow. Dark, between the shining webs.
Cheng Xiaoshi had held out a hand to stop him, futile before he’d walked into nothingness, mid-sentence. Li Tianchen had grinned with his mouth curved wicked, his eyes red, and he’d stepped forward. It’s something like killing himself, a thousand times over. It’s nothing like that kind of phantom-death.
Then: a ghost-fox by his side, dark and intelligent eyes blinking up at him, and his hand falls instinctively to its head—reminiscent of tying ribbons into twin pigtails—before the fox disappears into air. He can see it moving between the threads of different timelines, as he walks. He can see it bleeding out, fur stained with drying rust-red.
Liu Xiao had said, offering him a stolen spark, everything is a metaphor, there. Then, everything is real.
Illusions, behind his eyes. Not-there. Not-not-there.
First: Liu Min, indolent and lazy, a wineglass careless in his hand. Offering his own kind of friendship, insincere and predatory (Li Tianchen thinks, hunter, with something strange in his chest). Qian Jin sitting next to him, examining the photograph in his hands with a kind of precision, then lifting his head up and looking at Li Tianchen. Expectant. Qian Jin, taking the carved-wooden bow from Liu Min’s hands; Li Tianchen recognizing wordlessly that Liu Xiao’s hands had whittled the weapon. Li Tianchen reaching to take the bow, before the sight fades.
Second: death, in shards. His own. Others’. Fire. Li Tianxi, muffled and unclear, signing with her hands, the words blurring out of her mouth—his first time hearing her voice in years. Her face wet, and his (instinctively, breath fast) mirroring it. A forest calling, birdsong and sunlight, his mother’s voice, dissolving as he steps into it.
Third: Li Tianchen shifts shapes. Skin to feathers to scales to fur to skin. Li Tianchen walks from ground to water to air, gasping for air, wanting. The ghost-fox trails behind him.
Another illusion: Liu Xiao offers his hand outwards, says, if you’d like. Li Tianchen could possess him, if he wanted. Liu Xiao would let him. He knows, blindly, that it would be his death anyway— he reaches forward, and the threads of the timelines around him wind forward to tie around his neck, constricting his breathing. Every deal has its cost. The space around him echoes: what now?
Delicate hands, recognizable, disembodied. Nails painted the pale, glossy pink Li Tianxi had picked up off a shelf once in a market, that she’d laughed at when he’d made a mess of trying to paint them. Had cleaned up with him with cotton pads dipped in acetone sweeping over skin. Signing, the way he’d lifted her hands up and adjusted them with his own, teaching her, I don’t want—
Li Tianchen closes his eyes until they’re gone, then keeps walking.
The woman doesn’t have a face, her body shifting a thousand times over, and then she does.
“The usual company I see here,” Shao Yuanyuan says lightly, as though she’d been expecting him, not introducing herself even as her name slots into Li Tianchen’s head (false memories, Cheng Xiaoshi looking at his mother with something startled and vulnerable behind his eyes), “is much more careful than you’ve been.” She glances deliberately at the way his skin is stained with the glow of different timelines, the way his fingers are tangled in threads.
“Are you?” with the same sourceless knowledge telling him: not exactly. Usual company— there’s a flash of white hair at the edge of the range of his vision. The inside of a clocktower, its gears all bound in knotted rope, straining to break free.
She clicks her tongue. “This isn’t about me, is it?”
Li Tianchen is silent. Waiting for something.
Shao Yuanyuan laughs. She’s trying to save someone, Li Tianchen thinks— or, it’s never that simple, he sees in the darkness. There’s always more linked to the desperation that leads someone to this not-place. She’d said to Lu Guang, sitting on the ribbon-edge of a timeline, eyes a shining golden, if you believe it can’t be done, then it’s already done, as reasoning, meaning: I won’t, then asked (faux-casual, slipped into something less sincere) how her son was doing. Then, she’d levered herself up to stand, and dived into the river of light she’d been sitting on. “Don’t be too reckless,” she says now instead, scolding and too-familiar, one time traveler to the next, and then she’s gone.
The ghost-fox keeps vanishing. Li Tianchen keeps chasing it.