Broken Heart Village
From Sword Search for a Thousand Mountains, Chapter 43
They followed Fox Mian at a careful distance, crossing from the edge of Qingle Palace through Hehuan Palace's outer boundary until the rooftops of Wuhu Sect's territory appeared on the horizon. Only then did Fox Mian's pace begin to slow.
She stopped entirely once she entered Duanchang Village.
Hua Xiangwan held back, letting the distance between them stretch. She signaled the other two with a look and they walked the rest of the way in unhurried silence, giving Fox Mian time to settle wherever she was going.
Every city and village in Wugu Sect territory carried a poison's name. The land sprawled wide and thin with people, the forests thick with miasma, the roads between settlements long and quiet. As the three of them moved deeper in, the figures they passed grew sparse. By the time Duanchang Village's archway came into view against the fading sky, there was no one left at all.
The village was dead. Weeds pushed up through the packed earth of the main road. The houses stood with their doors rotting off the hinges.
Hua Xiangwan looked up at the archway and said, more to herself than anyone: "What is she doing here?"
"Somewhere with fewer witnesses," Xue Zidan offered. "Easier to work."
Hua Xiangwan turned it over. "There are empty stretches all along the road. Why come all this way to an abandoned village specifically?"
Xie Changji asked the sharper question: "Why is it abandoned?"
Hua Xiangwan went still. The name had been sitting at the edge of her memory since they arrived, and now it clicked into place.
She looked at Xue Zidan. "Is this the village Wu Sheng destroyed when he took the throne?"
Xue Zidan's expression confirmed it before he spoke. "I believe so."
Xie Changji stood quietly between them and said nothing. He had noticed, these past days, how easily Hua Xiangwan fell into conversation with Yun Qingxu outside the carriage. Yun Qingxu was young and quick to talk, and Hua Xiangwan, whatever her age, had the manner of someone still curious about the world. They shared a history in the Western Frontier that Xie Changji had no foothold in. He had learned to wait while they spoke and fill the silence himself.
Hua Xiangwan glanced at him now and offered the explanation without being asked.
"Wu Sheng leads the Wugu Sect. His father, Wu Chu, exiled him when he was young. He was found again in his late hundreds, came back without a word of complaint, spent a hundred years quietly eliminating every sibling who stood between him and the seat, and then waited out his father's death. He inherited the sect a hundred years ago." She paused. "On the day he formally took power, he slaughtered this village. Every person in it."
They walked through the archway into the empty streets.
"Ordinary people?" Xie Changji asked.
Hua Xiangwan's mouth curved without warmth. "Every one. Farmers. Children. Even in the Western Frontier it was considered a serious transgression. Killing mortals in that number is the kind of thing the Way of Heaven is supposed to answer."
"And did it?"
"The Way of Heaven," she said, tipping one finger toward the sky, "answers such things through Hehuan Palace. Or it did." The lightness dropped from her voice. "After Hehuan Palace fell, no one enforces it anymore. Wu Sheng answers to no one. Who controls a sect leader when the palace that kept order is gone?"
"The Azure Blood God," Xie Changji said, frowning. "Surely—"
Hua Xiangwan laughed, short and genuine. "The demon lord concerns himself with power and cultivation. The lives of ordinary mortals are beneath his attention."
Xie Changji absorbed this and nodded.
Hua Xiangwan's expression settled back into thought. "But what does Wu Sheng's massacre have to do with my senior sister? What is she tracking? And what is she afraid of?"
She was still working through it when the cold hit her.
It came from behind, fast and deliberate. Xie Changji was already moving. His scabbard cracked upward with a clean ring of metal and sent the dark dart spinning into the dirt.
A slip of paper was pinned to the dart's shaft. Hua Xiangwan flicked two fingers and let the paper drift down into her palm.
Peach blossom paper, soft and fragrant. The ink on it was a woman's careful hand, the characters small and upright:
At Duanchang Villa, by the Liushui River's edge, I await your lone arrival, Lord Qingheng.
Hua Xiangwan read it twice. When she looked up, something complicated had settled into her eyes.
She held the paper toward Xie Changji. He glanced at it and made no move to take it. "We should find senior sister."
"Wait."
She caught his arm. Something on the back of the paper had caught her eye.
She turned it over.
The characters there were nearly illegible, scratched in a frantic, graceless hand entirely unlike the elegant front:
SENIOR SAVE ME
Hua Xiangwan stared at the writing for a moment. She had spent years struggling through Xue Zidan's prescription notes, which were widely accepted to be unreadable by any living person. She recognized his hand by the particular way it defeated itself.
She could tell he had tried. That almost made it worse.
She reached out with her spiritual sense and sent a message toward where he had gone. Silence answered her.
"This is no ordinary peach blossom paper," she said, turning to Xie Changji. "Yun Qingxu's been taken."
Xie Changji's expression stayed level. "Then we move quickly and find the sect."
"They want you to go alone."
He looked at her without moving.
"Go," she said. "I'll be fine. He's young, his cultivation is still developing. If something goes wrong—"
"I'm going," Xie Changji said. "What are you going to do?"
"I'll handle what's here."
"There are people watching us right now." He said it plainly, without emphasis. "Whoever set this up arranged for both of us to be separated and occupied. You know that."
She did know it. She stood there turning the peach blossom paper between her fingers, running through the pieces she could see and the pieces she couldn't.
She trusted Xue Zidan's knowledge of poisons thoroughly. His ability to fight was another matter. If he had been caught, it was by ambush, and an ambush that succeeded against him was not a small thing. Xie Changji going alone made sense as tactics, but what was happening here in this village was not yet clear, and she and Fox Mian had not spoken in years, and the people in the dark watching them had chosen this moment deliberately.
Xie Changji was watching her work through it. He spoke before she arrived at whatever conclusion she was building toward.
"You're not worried about him."
She smiled, easy and quick. "Of course I am. He came with us—"
"You're trying to keep me away from whatever happens when you find her."
The smile stayed on Hua Xiangwan's face and did not move.
Xie Changji reached out and took her hand, turned it palm up, and began writing in her skin with his fingertip, tracing a sword technique into her hand with careful strokes.
"You carry the twin talisman. You can share almost anything through it, except poison. This sword intent will hold against a serious strike." He kept writing as he spoke. "If something happens, call me immediately."
His voice moved quickly and without ceremony. Hua Xiangwan looked down at her own hand and said nothing.
When he finished, he looked up at her.
"The last time you asked me to go with Fox Mian, I wanted to ask you something and didn't."
"Ask it," she said, to her hand.
"Does it bother you? What I'm about to do?"
Hua Xiangwan went still.
"Look at me," he said quietly.
She made herself look up.
His face was clear and steady, his eyes holding hers without looking away.
"I'm taking this paper," he said. "But remember that you owe me the truth when I come back, Hua Xiangwan. Don't lie to yourself about what it is."
"I didn't—"
He took the peach blossom paper from her hand and turned away.
The moment it left her fingers, a map bloomed across its surface. Xie Changji read it in a single glance and set off, the paper dissolving into light as he moved.
Hua Xiangwan stood in the empty street and watched until he was gone. She held the stillness for a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she bit her fingertip, let the blood fall, and flung it across the ground.
The formation spread outward in an instant, sprawling through the dirt and dead grass of the entire village, every line snapping into place with the kind of precision that came from a very long practice with very high stakes.
She straightened, put her hands behind her back, and called out pleasantly into the dark: "You can stop hiding. Weren't you looking for someone?"
She laughed once, bright and sharp.
The laughter that came back from the shadows was nothing like hers.
"Hua Shaozhu." The voices came from every direction at once, wet and clicking, rising out of walls and earth. "How generous of you to come to us. We will make sure you are properly entertained."
The ground split.
A scorpion the size of a horse burst up from the dirt, and behind it came the insects, wave after wave, flooding out of the dark from all sides.
Hua Xiangwan touched her toes to the ground and launched herself upward as the spiritual energy beads at her waist shattered open, her formation blazing to life beneath her. Fire swept outward in a clean ring, burning through the first wave before it reached her.
She landed, turned, and caught a flare of movement behind her.
A woman in red came tumbling out of a doorway at speed, moving like she was fleeing something. Hua Xiangwan crossed the ground in three steps. The moment a giant puppet lurched from the shadows with its mouth open, she drove a burst of Dharma light into it and blew it backward, then caught the woman by the back of her robes and threw her bodily through the doorway she had come from. With her other hand she pulled the formation tight around the house, sealing every crack, every gap, cutting off the insects and snakes pressing in from outside.
She stepped inside.
Fox Mian was on the floor, breathing hard, not looking up.
Hua Xiangwan stood over her, her own breathing unhurried, a faint smile on her face. "Senior sister. It's been a long time." She tilted her head. "Why run?"
Fox Mian kept her head down and said nothing.
Hua Xiangwan walked toward her, one unhurried step at a time. "You hid from me. You won't meet my eyes. After all these years." She stopped close enough that Fox Mian would have to look up to see her face. "Don't you think you owe me an explanation?"
"Ah Wan—"
"Don't." The warmth drained out of her voice. She drew her sword and pressed the tip to Fox Mian's throat. "Call me Young Master Hua. The moment you turned against the palace, you gave up the right to call me anything else."
Fox Mian went rigid.
Hua Xiangwan looked at her with flat, patient eyes. "Was it you? The poison, that day?"
"No."
The denial came fast and absolute.
"Your engagement banquet," Hua Xiangwan said. "I checked everything that passed anyone's lips. Everything except the wine you poured for the guests yourself." She bent slightly, bringing her eyes level with Fox Mian's, the tip of her sword resting lightly against skin. "Everyone who drank it lost access to their spiritual power. There was something in that wine. Tell me I'm wrong."
"I don't know what was in it."
"Who gave it to you?"
Silence.
"Qin Minsheng?"
Fox Mian looked up for the first time. Her eyes were steady and serious. "Don't ask questions I can't answer yet."
Then, quietly, she began to speak.
"I didn't know what it was. The wine was mine. I didn't know why it was poisoned. I didn't know until the battle had already happened." She steadied herself. "When it was over, there were only the two of us left. You had fainted. Before I lost consciousness, I saw him arrive. When I woke up, one of my eyes was gone, and he was nowhere. I understood then that someone had been watching Hehuan Palace and waiting. I was the only one who knew anything at all, which meant I was the only thread left to pull. If I stayed, I would not have survived long enough to find the answer." She held Hua Xiangwan's gaze. "So I left."
Hua Xiangwan listened without expression.
Fox Mian's voice settled into something quieter. "I have been looking for him since then. Everything that happened that day traces back to him. I need to know what he was part of, who he answered to, how many others were involved. I am close now. Give me more time, and I will bring you the whole truth."
She had barely finished speaking when a detonation shook the walls.
Hua Xiangwan's eyes cut to the door. Fox Mian straightened sharply. "Wugu Sect. They know I came here. They may know I have the blood order. They are here for it."
"What is your plan?"
Hua Xiangwan raised her hand and poured more of herself into the barrier, absorbing the force crashing against it from outside.
Fox Mian moved quickly to her painting supplies. "Duanchang Village is where I first encountered Qin Minsheng. I can use the light-tracing mirror to pull that time back into the present, layer it over this place. Once the painting is done, anyone who enters it goes back to that moment and sees what actually happened."
Hua Xiangwan stared at her. "Enters it."
"Yes. I used the village itself as the subject. Anything connected to Qin Minsheng from that period, any moment involving him, or me, or whoever else goes in, becomes visible from inside the painting. You enter the painting, you see the past as it was."
The barrier shuddered under another blow.
Hua Xiangwan looked at Fox Mian and said nothing for a long moment. She thought of the engagement banquet. She thought of the wine being poured, and who had poured it.
Fox Mian met her gaze and said, with real urgency now: "Ah Wan. I did not rebel. Believe me."
"I don't believe anyone."
The words came out flat and without heat. Fox Mian opened her mouth, and Hua Xiangwan felt something shift in her chest, a hairline fraction, and said: "But I'll give you the chance to show me. Paint. I'll hold them off."
She pressed the twin talisman against her own skin, drew her sword across her palm, and let the blood fall. The barrier doubled in density around the little house.
Then she stepped outside it.
The creatures battering the walls from every side turned immediately and rushed at her.
She stood in the doorway with her sword loose in her hand, looked at what was coming, and said, very quietly: "Filth."
She began to cut.
Her movements were clean and minimal. The sword did most of the work. Fox Mian sat with her brush and watched Hua Xiangwan's sword hand moving in the lamplight and found she had forgotten to start painting.
"Work!" Hua Xiangwan said, without turning around.
Fox Mian flinched back to the canvas. She pulled her brushes out and started painting fast, sketching the outlines with one hand while reaching for pigment with the other. After a moment she said, to the canvas: "I heard you've lost your powers."
"Why stop there? I heard you heard I was completely useless."
Hua Xiangwan cut through a wave of insects without looking away from the next one. Fox Mian pulled out a second, thicker brush and kept moving both at once.
"I did hear that," Fox Mian said. "I was trying to be tactful."
This made Hua Xiangwan laugh, sudden and unguarded. "Just paint."
"I'm painting, I'm painting." Fox Mian dipped the thick brush. "Call Xie Changji back. At this rate I could be painting for a month."
"I don't need him here to manage this."
"That's not what I mean." Fox Mian kept her eyes on the canvas. "I thought when you and he found your way back to each other it was finally settled. But you walk around with that same closed-off look you've had for two hundred years. What exactly is a man supposed to do for you? Burn incense at the altar of your past?"
Hua Xiangwan went quiet.
Fox Mian outlined a roofline and said into the silence: "I know you were badly hurt. But he's a good man. He's useful, he looks right, and his temper, though not particularly warm—"
"He doesn't need to know the details of what happened at Hehuan Palace." Hua Xiangwan's voice had gone cool. "He's been cultivating the Heart Sword. He's one step from ascension. He came here for the spirit, and when he finds it, that's where he goes. The Western Frontier is in chaos, and the Heavenly Sword Sect needs him there. It was always going to end there."
"Even so—"
"If it were Qin Minsheng," Hua Xiangwan said, turning her head just enough that Fox Mian could hear the edge in her voice. "If it were the person who destroyed everything you had built. If it were you, in my position. Would you let him stay?"
Fox Mian's brush stopped.
Hua Xiangwan turned back and cut hard through a witch-made puppet lunging at her from the left.
"Cultivation is sailing upstream," she said. "You release certain things or you stop moving. That's the trade." A pause. "When he came west, he refused to let me help him. Every step forward he took himself, pushing me back. The heavens know that Xie Changji is—"
She stopped.
The word she almost used was forever.
She swallowed it and said nothing else.
The peach blossom paper led Xie Changji to an old house at the far end of the village.
A ghost lamp swung at the entrance, pale and cold in the dark. The moment his feet touched the threshold, the lamp flared warm gold, and the house transformed around it: red lanterns blazing to life, silk streamers unfurling, a carpet of deep red rolling out from the front door like something waiting for a groom.
He walked in with his sword at his side.
A woman sat at the head of the reception hall in black and deep violet, elevated on a raised seat with the kind of stillness that comes from knowing you are being watched. The hall was filled with dolls, one after another along the walls and floor, a servant standing motionless behind each one. The lamplight sat wrong on their faces.
The woman herself wore her clothes with deliberate intent, shoulders and arms bare, the fabric cut to show every line of her figure, her long skirt parting as she shifted to show the length of her legs.
"I have heard so much about Lord Qingheng," she said, and her voice was like warm oil. "Exceptional bearing, exceptional face. Seeing you now, I find every word of it was true."
Xie Changji stood in the middle of the hall. "Release Yun Qingxu."
"I've worked so hard to bring you here. You won't let me say a few words?" She propped her chin in her hand and regarded him with open interest. "Where are you rushing off to, my lord?"
He said nothing.
"To find Young Master Hua?" Her smile didn't waver. "But Young Master Hua doesn't seem particularly concerned about your arrival. I used the peach blossom paper specifically out of worry that Young Master Hua might be... displeased." She tilted her head. "Where exactly does your lord's heart reside?"
Xie Changji's sword was at her throat before she finished the sentence.
She went very still, then let her hands rest on the chair arms and tilted her chin back slightly, looking up at the blade. "My lord, the sword doesn't belong there." She reached up and pressed the tip down with two fingers, guiding it toward her chest. "It belongs here. All the way down, slowly." She smiled. "You may find that in the Western Frontier there is more than one person worth your attention."
Then her expression sharpened.
"Though of course the sword must stop somewhere. Push it further, and the Heavenly Sword Sect and the Wugu Sect become permanent enemies."
"Are you a witch?" Xie Changji said.
"Wu Mei." She said the name cleanly. "Deputy leader of the Wugu Sect. I am here carrying a message from Young Master Qin."
"Say it."
"Young Master Qin says: you came for the spirit. Young Master Hua is not the only path to it. Mingluan Palace can offer you the same help, and with considerably more strength behind it."
As she finished speaking, Wu Mei clapped her hands.
There was a sound of something heavy being dragged, and then Yun Qingxu was shoved through a side door and dropped hard to his knees. He stared at Xie Changji with his eyes full of desperate prayer, making muffled sounds through whatever was covering his mouth.
"The spirit," Wu Mei continued, rising from her seat and clasping her hands in a show of deference. "Mingluan Palace can find it for you. And Young Master Hua—" her voice smoothed over the name like something to be discarded— "we can handle that matter cleanly, if it would be convenient."
While she was still speaking, the guard beside Yun Qingxu drew his sword and drove it into him.
Yun Qingxu's eyes went wide.
Wu Mei watched Xie Changji's face. "We have been observing all three of you for quite some time. I wonder if my lord finds this proof of sincerity satisfactory."
"Explain what you mean."
"If the Way Sect learns that their disciple was killed by Wugu Sect hands, they will not let it rest." Wu Mei's voice was pleasant and precise. "That is the handle. It is our earnest gesture toward alliance. In return, we ask only this: that the Heavenly Sword Sect refrain from involving itself in the affairs of the Western Frontier. The fighting here is not the Heavenly Sword Sect's concern. Hehuan Palace offered your sect a role in exchange for help finding the spirit. We offer the opposite arrangement. Don't interfere, and we will give you everything you came for, freely."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then I'm afraid the Western Frontier and the Heavenly Sword Sect become entangled in ways that may prevent my lord from returning home at all." She said it the way one notes the weather.
Xie Changji looked down at the sword in his hand.
"Kill," he said, to nothing in particular. His voice was quiet and steady. "Can you keep me here permanently?"
"My lord?"
The cold light came before she could track it. Wu Mei threw herself backward but the sword tip caught her across the abdomen. She stumbled, pressing her hand to the wound, her voice breaking into something raw: "Are you truly not even curious?!"
"I thought it through," Xie Changji said, and his eyes came up to meet hers. "From the moment I left the realm of life and death and took my first step out, I thought it through."
His sword moved.
Wu Mei screamed: "Kill him!"
Every doll in the hall rose at once and threw itself at him. The servants drew their weapons in a single motion. Xie Changji's gaze swept the room, and then the killing intent came off him like cold water, filling every corner of the space.
On the floor, Xue Zidan held his breath and played dead.
He had swallowed the false-death pill the moment the sword went in. He lay with his eyes shut and made himself go completely still, feeling the impact of bodies hitting walls around him, hearing Wu Mei's voice rising and breaking, tracking Xie Changji's movement through the floor vibrating under him.
He understood what had just happened.
The sword through him had been Wu Mei's message to Xie Changji, not an actual murder attempt. Everyone in the room could see clearly that Xie Changji had no particular attachment to Yun Qingxu's life. The knife was a test and a demonstration, both at once.
What Xue Zidan had not anticipated was the degree of confirmation that test would receive.
He thought of what Hua Xiangwan had told him, back when this journey began.
He takes the Way of Heaven as his guiding principle. He has never raised his sword for personal reasons. A gentleman like jade, like clean moonlight, like wind that costs you nothing.
Lying on the floor with blood from the wound on him and the screaming dying down, Xue Zidan thought about those words very carefully.
Every year, Hua Xiangwan, your eyesight gets a little worse.
He held perfectly still as the room went quiet and Xie Changji's footsteps came toward him, slow and deliberate. He felt the pause above him. The assessment. The long silence.
Then Xie Changji said, very softly: "Sorry."
He walked past.
And Xue Zidan lay there in the quiet of the ruined hall and knew clearly, replaying the moment the sword went in, that there had been a fraction of a second, the smallest window, during which Xie Changji could have intervened.
The defensive talisman Hua Xiangwan had given him. The night the two of them had sat up healing together. The way the distance between them had been closing, day after day, in every small ordinary moment of this journey.
That fraction of a second had been enough for all of it to move through Xie Changji's mind.
And then Yun Qingxu had hit the floor.
Xie Changji walked out of Heartbroken Villa step by step, his sword hand trembling finely with something that had nothing to do with the effort of the fight. He stopped outside the door and turned back.
He looked at the blood-soaked hall behind him, at the bodies and the broken dolls and the red carpet still spread ridiculous and intact along the entrance, and he let what he had just done become fully real to him.
He could not go back.
He had not been able to go back for some time, but he had not let himself say it this clearly before.
He was still looking at it when the sound of the explosion hit him from the direction of the village center, and Hua Xiangwan's Dharma light split the sky above the rooftops.
He was already moving.
On her side of the village, Hua Xiangwan and Wu Sheng had exchanged one full-force strike and both come back two steps from it.
Fox Mian finished the last stroke behind her. "It's done! I—"
She stopped. Her hand went to her chest. The pain that went through her was not from the outside.
Hua Xiangwan turned. She looked at Wu Sheng.
"The Wugu Sect's most formidable technique is not poison," Wu Sheng said. His voice was level, instructional. "It is not insect cultivation. It is witchcraft. You take a person's hair or their skin, you make it into a puppet, you add their eight birth characters. After that, their life is yours."
Hua Xiangwan's pupils shrank.
The eight birth characters of a cultivator: their name, their birthday, their body, the most intimate particular facts of their existence. These were the reason witchcraft never spread widely through the cultivation world. Gathering a monk's true birth characters was almost impossible.
Almost.
Only a very small number of people knew Fox Mian's eight characters.
Hua Xiangwan looked at Wu Sheng and did not say what she was thinking.
"If you want her to live," Wu Sheng said, "tell her to surrender the blood order."
"You—"
A sword strike came from behind him.
Wu Sheng twisted away barely in time. Hua Xiangwan pulled Fox Mian back through the thickening barrier in a single motion and pressed three fingers to her acupoints in quick succession, sealing her whole body and severing the puppet's connection. Fox Mian slumped against her, drained of spiritual power, and lifted one unsteady finger toward the light-tracing mirror resting on the floor beside the painting.
"The mirror. You. Drive it."
"How does it open?"
Fox Mian took one breath and then explained: "Drip your blood onto the mirror. Fill it with spiritual power. Hold it facing the painting. Then enter."
Hua Xiangwan did exactly what she described, quickly and without questions. Fox Mian kept explaining as she worked.
"Everyone who enters the painting returns to that moment in time. Only the person who opened the mirror retains awareness of where and when they actually came from. Everyone else in the painting becomes who they were back then, with no memory of entering. You must come in with me. When I enter, I become who I was two hundred years ago. You choose your own form. Watch what happens, and come back and tell me."
Hua Xiangwan looked up from the mirror. "What do I need to know before I go in?"
"Don't change what happened. You were not in the Western Frontier at that time, so you cannot appear as yourself, but because you opened the mirror you can take any form you choose. At the point when time reaches your first journey from Yunlai to Hehuan Palace, you will find yourself redirected back toward the palace in the painting as well. If you don't make the actual journey to Yunlai inside the painting, it shouldn't matter. Don't disrupt the moments we need to see."
The mirror lit up in Hua Xiangwan's hands.
"Senior sister." She caught Fox Mian's sleeve. "Do you have to go back to be sure?"
Fox Mian looked at her. "In the battle at Hehuan Palace, only the two of us survived. Don't you want to know how?"
The question landed and held.
Fox Mian stood and turned to the painting.
She stepped in.
Hua Xiangwan stood holding the mirror, looking at the painted surface now glowing from within. She turned toward the door, toward the sound of Wu Sheng pressing against the barrier, and opened her mouth.
She felt the magic light an instant before it reached her.
She had no time. She threw herself backward and her feet found only air.
She had just enough breath to shout: "Xie Changji!"
Then she fell through the painting with the mirror pressed to her chest, and the light swallowed her.
Wu Sheng broke through the door and swept the room.
The painting was still open on the floor.
He crossed the room in three strides, and then the air beside him cracked open and a hand took him by the collar and threw him through the outer wall. Xie Changji landed in the same motion, scooped the scroll off the floor, and was out of the room before Wu Sheng's men cleared the doorway.
By the time the Wugu Sect flooded into the house, there was nothing left in it at all.
Xie Changji landed in a cave some distance from the village. He put the barrier up, spread the scroll open on the floor, and looked at it.
The painting was already moving, figures and landscape shifting inside it like something dreamed.
He did not know how to enter it. He did not know the instructions. He turned it over, read the blank back, checked the mirror, and arrived eventually at the only available option.
He pressed his cut hand to the surface of the painting and pushed his spiritual power into it.
The painting brightened, and then pulled him in all at once, sudden and total, like a hand closing around a stone and drawing it underwater.
The scroll fell to the cave floor, unrolled, lying perfectly flat, and inside it, a story that had happened two hundred years ago began to play again from the beginning.