323Disclaimer: I own neither the WITCH cartoon-show nor Jackie Chan Adventures; they are the property of their respective creators, writers, and producers.
A/N: Hello again, dear readers. Yes, it is I! I have returned! Apologies for the enormous delay in delivering this chapter, but my life hasn't been what you would call easy in these past months. Long story short, and better to say it plainly than to try to complicate it, my father passed away due to liver cancer the past January. So, as you may expect, I wasn't in the best of moods to write. And when I began writing the Camelot chapters, I didn't like how they came out. They revealed too much too early, perhaps there were some subjects in them that I didn't feel comfortable tackling, and (inversely) I felt that no matter how much words I poured on them, I couldn't do them justice in a mere epilogue chapter. They feel they could be a story on their own. Therefore, and as much as it pains me because I really wanted to go deep into how Harold and Nimue ended where they are now in this tale and how they ended up being who they are; I have had to scrap the Camelot chapters, and rework them (again!) into flashbacks within several other chapters in Season 2. And so, this chapter you are going to read here and now, it's the one dedicated to Jade; which closes the Genesis of Evil chapters and ends this first season of GWaKFF for good and allows me to finally go into Season 2, which is what I have wanted to do since this tale began. Having said that, enjoy the ride. See you afterwards.
Genesis of Evil
III
Jade in the Wild
If I could go back in time and meet the first person that said that misery builds character, I would tell him that he is a fool. While I do think that many may showcase incredible strength in the face of misery, and that the best in all of us can come out when confronted when an incredible amount of despair… I don't think character and strength are born from them. I think strength is born of compassion, nurture, friendship, brotherhood and idealism. Many would call me naive, or outright stupid, for thinking so. Especially in my line of work. But if life has taught me something, is that the only thing that comes from misery, is more misery. Captain Augustus Black
Earth. Heatherfield.
There was a Portal in front of her. Swirling, and making that loud and awful sound that all Portals did. Wind was coming out of it, making her black hair flow backwards. A wind that carried the smell of leaves, old wood, grass and many different wild animals. The wind of another world. And it was so close. She only needed to take a step forward, and...
"Jade?" someone asked weakly at her back.
Jade Chan looked away from the Portal, to the man kneeling near the mouth of the alley. A Chinese man in his mid-thirties, with a square jaw, wide nose, soft, brown eyes with thick eyebrows, and short black hair. Jackie Chan, was his name. Her uncle. Well, he actually was her first cousin once removed, but she usually called him 'uncle Jackie' for simplicity's sake. And truth to be told, in the few years she had spent with him, she had come to think of him more as a father than anything else.
She stared at him, confused and doubtful. It hurt, looking at him. It hurt because it brought back the memory. The memory of another man, a far older man, that everyone called Uncle. A Chinese old man, thin and not remarkably tall, he had had wrinkles all over his skin, spiky hair that had long ago turned to gray, and he had needed glasses for most of his life. And he had been eccentric yet wise, harsh but fair. And loving, yes. Loving to a fault.
And now he was dead. Uncle was dead. He had died on Meridian, fighting a monster, a tyrant called Phobos. All so he could protect her and her friends. He had died to save her.
Now Phobos was dead, too. He had died on a cell, thanks to the wounds he had taken during the fight.
And Jade... Jade didn't know what to do.
She stopped looking at Jackie and turned her gaze back to the Portal. The Portal promised... what, exactly? Solitude? Disconnection? Perhaps, simply, a chance to think and forget. Forget the pain. And so, she made her choice. She looked at Jackie once more, and gave him the saddest smile she had ever smiled.
"Sorry, Jackie;" was everything she managed to tell him.
"Jade, NO!" she heard him scream before she faced the Portal once more and jumped into it.
Meridian
When her feet touched the ground again, it was grass what was beneath them instead of concrete. The Portal at her back closed afterwards, leaving no chance for Jackie to follow her.
She took a look around herself. She was standing at the edge of a forest, facing the tall trees, while behind her grasslands extended themselves towards the horizon. Above her head, the sky was blue, with some clouds here and there. A meridianite forest, meridianite grasslands, and a meridianite skies. She was on Meridian. Alone. Good. That was good. She wanted to be alone, didn't she?
She took a deep breath and held the air in. The air here was fresher than it had been on Heatherfield. The same smells from before, alongside new ones, reached her nostrils. She let the air out of her lungs, then breathed normally.
Next, Jade Chan shapeshifted, becoming the supernaturally enormous black she-wolf that her beast form was. And then, after letting a sorrowful howl, she dashed into the forest.
Nine days later
Within the Ben-Shui Chosen One's shared soul
"Has anyone been able to talk with her during the past few days?" Murasaki Shikibu asked with genuine concern.
They had all assembled. Herself, wise and blind Ben-Shui, bloodthirsty Vlad Tepes, cruel Elizabeth Báthory, cunning Grigori Yefimovich and offbeat Joshua Norton. And all of them had gathered here, floating within the multicolored 'inner world' that was their shared soul, with the same purpose. To know about the state of mind of their latest reincarnation, Jade Chan. Of course, the reasons as to why each of them were there varied greatly.
Ben-Shui was there out of a sense of responsibility towards the young girl, like he had felt towards all of his reincarnations, whom he had always tried to help and guide as much as he could, no matter who they were or what they desired to achieve. The Impaler was there out of morbid curiosity, most likely. As was Rasputin, albeit his curiosity was colder, motivated more by a genuine desire to know than to derive pleasure from that knowledge. Báthory was there, so to speak, to check on what she probably saw as an investment. She had put a lot of effort into teaching the girl, sharing knowledge with her; and would feel outraged by letting it all amount to nothing. Norton... Norton was an enigma. Maybe he simply was worried for her. He had said, more than once, that he found the girl funny.
As for Murasaki herself, she was concerned for the girl. Not just because of what had happened to her, but because of what she could become due to it. Too many times had Murasaki Shikibu seen good people turn to evil because of tragedy striking their lives. She didn't want it to happen again. Not to her own reincarnation.
"No. She has blocked us completely." Ben-Shui informed, floating with his legs crossed in a meditative posture and his useless eyes closed. "She doesn't want to talk. And until she wishes to, we won't be able to contact her."
"And what are we meant to do in the meantime?" Murasaki inquired. "Nothing? Simply wait?"
"We have no other choice, it seems." Báthory answered, sighing in frustration and rolling her eyes. "What is she even doing now?"
"I can't tell. She may be sleeping. Or dreaming. Or… No, it's…" Ben-Shui answered, unsure about how to describe the situation himself. "Something similar, yet different…"
Dreaming…?
"Why am I dreaming about you?" Jade Chan asked the monster. She didn't sound worried or angry. She sounded almost amused.
The monster said nothing. He stood there, not moving an inch, simply looking at her. She didn't like the way he looked at her. It was weird. Very weird. It was weird because… because he was a monster. And monsters weren't supposed to feel bad for others, right? No. Monsters were awful, and petty, and selfish, and just plain evil. Why were his eyes so full of pity, then?
A meridianite forest
Jade woke up as the first rays of sunshine rose over the horizon, the dream forgotten as soon as she opened her eyes.
She remained where she was for the following moments, letting the light of a new day fill up the dark sky from east to west, until it turned from black to a pale mix of white, orange, red and blue; and finally to just blue.
She yawned, then rose to her feet. Well, paws. Next she stretched, momentarily tensing every muscle of her body, from snout to tail. She hadn't shapeshifted back to human form in the last nine days. Not even once. She thought she had made the right choice doing so. It saved her from having to worry about her clothes getting dirty. Where did a Shapeshifter's clothes go when they transformed into beast form, anyway? It also saved her from having to use a toilet when she needed to go to the bathroom. What it didn't save her from, was thirst. And hunger.
Right on cue, her stomach grumbled. It was time to hunt her breakfast.
Time later
Jade was eating a hare. Or an animal from Meridian that closely resembled a hare, anyway.
Her claws had torn the animal's fur and skin, and her fangs had ripped the meat from the fragile bones, dirtying her snout with blood. It tasted... it tasted like raw, meridianite hare meat, she supposed. No salt or other spices to add flavor, and it was cold, not being cooked and all. Anyways, it was meat, it filled her stomach and... and it didn't bother her. She had grown quite used to hunting wild animals and eating them during the las nine days. It was what she had mostly eaten for the last nine days.
The first day had been the hardest. By the time something had clicked inside her head and she had realized that she had no food or water, she had already wandered deeply into the forest, the trees becoming bigger and taller; and she had no Portal to go back to Earth. The first thing she had done next was search for water. She had had to wait until she had exited the forest through the opposite side to the one she had come through before finding any source of water, and by then several hours had passed. A river, that was what she had found. Wide, deep and so long it lost itself in the horizon. A river with running and clean water. Well, as clean as the water of a river in another world could be.
Hunting had been far more complicated. By now, Jade Chan was no stranger to violence, was no stranger to killing using claw and fang. But there was a big difference between fighting a soldier (or pursuing a fleeing one), and hunting a wild animal. Animals didn't run away from predators in a straight line, like panicking soldiers did in a battle. Some animals climbed up trees when in danger, others simply went into their deep burrows; where Jade couldn't reach them. Night had already fallen over Meridian by the time she got her maw around the neck of an animal, and the only reason she managed to catch it was because of her Chi Magic, which she had used to blast it from afar. Then she had eaten it, and next she had gone to sleep. She had chosen a spot at the base of a large tree in the forest's edge that was nearest to the river. It was there that she slept every night.
The next days had been pretty much the same. Wake up, hunt, eat, drink in the river, bathe in the river, hunt some more, eat, sleep. Rinse and repeat. And she was fine with it.
And so, after she finished eating the hare, she made her way towards the river once again.
The river
The first thing Jade did at the river was drink water. A lot of water. Then she took air into her lungs and submerged her head into the running waters of the river. She opened her maw, letting the water wash away the blood from her snout and teeth. Once that was done, she took her head out of the water, and shook it at a high speed in order to dry it up. Another advantage of her beast form over her human one: no need for hair dryers when you're a wolf.
She lied down by the river's shore, resting her head upon her front legs, looking at nothing in particular. She wouldn't feel any hunger for the next several hours, when she would need to hunt again. Maybe this time she could try and find a larger animal, one she could eat several meals from. But what to do until then?
Should she go and try to take a nap already? Eh, she didn't feel sleepy yet. She could take a walk by the side of the river before that. Or run through the forest, so falling asleep would be easier.
She ended up wondering what Jackie, Tohru and Viper were doing. What Will, Irma, Cornelia, Taranee and Hay Lin were doing. And about how they were doing. Were they worried about her? Desperately trying to find her? Of course they were. They were her family and her friends, and she had left them without a warning.
And she felt horrible about it. But she wanted... no, she needed to be alone. Just... Just a little longer. Until she became able to think about Uncle's death, about the fact that Uncle would never come back, and about the fact that his body had been cremated and his ashes probably had already been sent to China, without feeling how a hole formed on her chest.
Then she would track down a Portal, somehow, and go back. Yeah. That was what she was gonna do.
Jade stood up and began making her way back into the forest. She had just decided she was gonna take that nap now.
Dreaming…?
"Why am I dreaming about you?" she asked, once again, of the monster.
At first, he said nothing. He stood there, looking at her. Then, slowly, his lips curved into a smile. He was amused, this time.
"Pitiful child," the monster said. "You still haven't figured it out, right?"
"Figure out... what?" Jade asked. But before she could get an answer, she woke up.
The forest
What woke Jade up this time around was the distant sound of a pained howl. If she hadn't been in her beast form, she wouldn't have been able to hear it. She pondered if she should go and investigate it, or try to go back to sleep. In the end, her curiosity won. So, after standing up and stretching, she made her way towards the howling.
The rest of the forest was surprisingly calm. The wind rustled the leaves of the tall, thick trees, yet very few birds were singing, and there were no other animals prancing around. But Jade didn't pay much attention to that fact. The pained howl was getting louder. She was getting nearer to it.
In the end, after several minutes of walking, she tracked the sound to a small clearing somewhere deeper in the forest. She felt how the ground here was covered in soft grass in contrast with the mix of dirt, mud, fallen leaves and thin sticks that made most of the forest's grounds. She took a look around and saw... nothing. The most remarkable thing about the clearing were a couple of big rocks that sprouted from the ground.
But she still heard the pained howls. Louder than ever, in fact. Was she going crazy? No. No, she probably wasn't. There had to be a reason for this. As if this was the weirdest thing she had seen in her life.
With the wind blowing at her back, almost as if it was pressing her to advance, Jade walked towards the clearing's center, the point her ears told her the sound was coming from. She couldn't see anything there... but there was something. The grass in the spot the sound was coming from was crushed, as if something big and heavy was over it.
Jade roared, and the pained howl became a terrified whimper. Then ripples seemed to travel through the air, and the invisible became visible.
"Hey, I know what you are!" Jade said aloud. They were the first words she had spoken in more than a week. "You're a... a... Hermeneuta, right?"
It was an Hermeneuta. A beast from Meridian's wildlife. It kinda resembled a boar, except for the fact that its eyes were more like the ones of a snail or slug; and purple slime dripped from its mouth. This Hermeneuta in particular was also wounded. One of its legs had been snapped, preventing it from moving, leaving the beast defenseless and forcing it to resort to howl as loudly as it could for help.
"You're hurt. Someone's hurt you, right?" Jade said, circling the injured animal. "It's okay, I get it. I've been hurt too."
The beast whimpered again. No more loud, pained howls desperately asking for assistance. It was afraid. Of course it was. After all, its cries had alerted a predator instead of any other member of its species.
But it wasn't as if Jade was going to kill and eat it. Right…?
As if reading her thoughts, her stomach grumbled. Hungry again. She hadn't eaten a lot this morning, had she? And the Hermeneuta was big. Bigger than all of the animals she had hunted, killed and eaten for the past few days. That meant more meat.
But those animals she had hunted had had a chance, hadn't they? To fight back or escape. To try and bite her, or try and climb to the top of a tree or burrow themselves underground. This one didn't. This one couldn't move, couldn't escape. Nor could it fight back. Couldn't do anything, really. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel fair.
"Fair," Jade said bitterly. The word sounded meaningless to her ears now. She looked the terrified animal in the eye. Her stomach rumbled again. "No. It isn't fair. At all."
Roaring, she pounced at the Hermeneuta with her maw fully opened. The animal screamed. First, it tried to pitifully run away from her. That proved useless once her jaws closed around its neck and her fangs sunk on its flesh. Then, it tried to fight, to struggle, in order to shake her off. It proved useless. An ocean of blood flooded Jade's mouth. Soon, the animal's struggle came to an end. Its cries became silent. It was dead.
Next, Jade began to eat it.
Some time later…
She had roughly eaten a third of the animal when she heard the growls. Her body tensed up as she lifted her head from the bloody corpse of her prey to look at the clearing's edge, where now stood two other animals.
Hermeneuta beasts. Two of them, each more or less twice the size of the one Jade had killed and was currently devouring. One of them had very large tusks, the other didn't. Male and female, then. And when they set their eyes upon Jade and the carcass she was eating, their growls became powerful bellows, half furious, half sorrowful.
"Oh. Oh..." Jade whispered as she took a look first at the two living animals, then at the dead one she was eating, then back at the pair. "This was your baby."
The animals, of course, said no word. They were animals, after all. But they roared in anger once again. Perhaps, if their anger could be put into words, they would be asking her why she had killed their young when the little one couldn't defend itself.
Jade answered their roars with her own. "Yeah!" she said. "Yeah, I killed your kid! He's dead, and it sucks! It's horrible! But what was I supposed to do?! I was hungry! And he was hurt already! He was going to die anyways! You can't blame me! It's not my fault!"
The animals did nothing but continue their roaring. Jade roared again. The pair of Hermeneuta began to advance towards her. Shaking her head, Jade distanced herself from the carcass and stood her ground.
"Fine!" she screamed. "Do your worst, you dumb, weird-looking pigs!"
Roaring, the male Hermeneuta charged at her. Jade dodged with ease and prepared herself to counterattack. It was then that the female Hermeneuta hit the she-wolf in the side, making Jade to lose her breath for a moment and sending her to the ground. As she stood up and bared her fangs at the female Hermeneuta, she growled more out of frustration than actual pain.
What did these animals think they were doing?! She was Jade Chan! She was a Mammal Shapeshifter! She was the current incarnation of the Ben-Shui Chosen One! She had fought armies, and monsters, and tyrants, and sorcerers and demons! And every single time she had survived! A pair of weird boars weren't going to be the end of her!
Roaring, Jade coated her claws and fangs in her red chi and took the initiative, charging at the female Hermeneuta. The she-wolf leaped into the air and fell upon the animal, sinking her claws into the beast's hide and biting at its neck. They struggled with one another. In the end, Jade managed to rip a large piece of flesh from the animal's neck. The Hermeneuta screamed, then fell to the ground. There the animal convulsed as it bled, then stopped moving and breathing.
Jade quickly turned her attention to the male Hermeneuta. The animal was again charging towards her. She dodged with the same ease as before, and slashed the boar-like creature's weird eyes with one of her claws as she did so. Blinded, the animal fell to the ground, screaming and flailing its limbs. Jade fell upon it, biting at its neck. She tore it apart, just like she had done with the female Hermeneuta. The animal bled, and died soon after.
And so, in just a few moments, it was done. Where the corpse of one animal was before, now there were three.
Jade howled to the skies. Her mouth tasted Victorious. Happy. Ecstatic. For a brief moment, everything was forgotten. The war, the nightmares, the tears, the pain, the deaths. For a brief moment, she wasn't a mere Shapeshifter anymore. She was a true wolf, and the only thing that mattered, the only thing that was real, was that she had conquered her prey.
But that moment passed as easily as it had come. Jade stopped howling and, breathing deeply, calmed down. Then she took a look at the three dead animals. Well... she wouldn't need to hunt for a while, at least. Now, how was she gonna move them to...?
Jade heard something whistle through the air. And the next thing she felt was a stabbing pain on her left shoulder. She roared due to the sudden pain, then looked at her shoulder to see how a projectile had nailed itself on her flesh. It was thin, and black, and made of iron. Bigger than a dart, but smaller than an arrow. It was a...
Bolt, Jade realized. Her eyes opened wide, and she frantically looked around herself. Bolts didn't come from nowhere, after all. Someone had to fire them.
It was then that there was a change in the direction the wind was blowing. And as soon as it did so, Jade noticed a horrible mix of scents in that wind. It smelled to leather, iron, sweat, blood, wood, ash and... rotten flesh.
"I have found you, little wolf." said a raspy, inhuman voice.
The girl watched as another person, a man, stepped into the clearing. But calling him a man would be too generous, perhaps. A tall individual, dressed in dark-red hunting robes that left his torso exposed, a tattered fur cape, spiked wristbands, a grey breech-cloth, black boots and a pointy hat. His skin was green and dry, and his face was nothing but monstrous, with crimson red eyes, very sharp teeth and lacking a nose. In his right hand he carried a large flail that shone magically with pale green energy, and in his left he carried a small crossbow.
The Tracker. The monster that, for most of Prince Phobos' reign, had hunted down the rebels like animals; and had also clashed with the Chan Clan and the Guardians several times. His monstrous pet hound, Sniffer, didn't take long to appear, standing loyally at his master's side.
For the following moments, neither Shapeshifter nor monstrous hunter said a word. The two stared down at one another, not moving an inch.
"You brought those Hermeneuta here." Jade accused, finally breaking the silence.
"Indeed." the Tracker answered in his raspy voice. "When hunting predators, it is best to lure them out using bait."
"So... what? You're here to hunt me?" Jade asked, then snorted. "Haven't you heard, you bad monster movie reject? The war's over! Phobos is dead!"
Tracker kept looking at her, impassive, and maybe a little confused by her choice of words. If he was surprised by those news, he didn't show it.
"Phobos being alive or not is irrelevant. I never was loyal to him, he merely gave me a chance to hunt without having to worry about the nobility and the Guard interrupting me. I had no trouble abandoning him for Daolon." Tracker told her. "I have seen more Queens take the throne, die of old age and be succeeded by the next one than I can count." Tracker paused, then breathed a couple of times. "Monarchs are crowned and die. Wars are fought, won and lost. But the Hunt... the Hunt is eternal."
Tracker made a longer pause this time. Then he glared at Jade, and when he spoke again, the she-wolf noticed that his raspy, inhuman voice sounded angrier.
"But the Hunt has laws of its own. And you... You kept breaking them." he accused. "Stopping me from claiming my prey and denying me the chance to hunt and destroy Ikazuki. Such transgressions must not be forgiven. And so, I have sworn that I shall hunt down all of you."
Jade couldn't believe her ears. "That's... That's it? You're here to kill me because you're angry we didn't let you... what? Break those Oni Masks into pieces?" she asked. "Talk about being butthurt."
Tracker's only reaction to those words was to glare at her.
"So, what's the plan here? Bait me, have me fight some weird boars, shoot me... And then, what? Fight me yourself?" Jade asked, amused and disrespectful. "Yeah, I don't think that's the greatest idea. Because I'm pretty sure, dollar store Witch-King, that I'm way, way stronger than you."
Tracker nodded. "Yes, I am aware of that. You belong to the physically strongest type of Changeling. You wield magic. And I am alone. Few resources, no companions..." Tracker discarded the crossbow, wielding his flail's chain with both of his hands. He began twirling it. "That is why we are talking, little wolf. To wait until the poison takes its course."
Poison? Jade thought. What is he…?
She started to feel it before she even had the chance to finish her train of thought. A sudden dizziness. It was weak at first, but it grew stronger with every second that passed. Soon, she noticed how some of the faraway trees became blurry, how her stomach began to turn as if she was going to puke, how some of the sounds around her became distorted.
The bolt, Jade thought once more. The poison had been in the bolt. Just in the bolt? Or had been the young and wounded Hermeneuta poisoned too, so that Jade would consume the poison when she ate from the animal? Or did the Hermeneuta and the bolt carry each a different venom?
Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass! she told herself. She needed to do something! Now! C'mon, c'mon... Her head was beginning to hurt. Think! Think! Magic! She had Magic! Chi Magic! Spells! She had spells from her past lives! Her stomach grumbled weirdly. It hurt. Rasputin's spells! She needed to cast one and purge the poison! She needed to...!
Jade puked over the grass.
Tracker roared. A snarling Sniffer dashed towards her, leaping and biting her in her left foreleg. Jade screamed in pain. She struggled against the hound's bite, trying to shake him off, bite him herself, or slash him with her claws. But she couldn't. Her movements were... not clumsy, but they weren't as swift as they usually were. And she guessed it would only get worse from there.
In the end, she managed to get rid of Sniffer by blasting him with the most basic of chi blasts. The monstrous hound was pushed a few meters away from her, but landed otherwise unharmed. And upon seeing this, Tracker roared once more and his chest opened wide. From the resulting hole emerged dozens of monstrous red-eyed bats that, screeching, flew directly towards Jade with their mouths open, showing long, thin and sharp fangs.
Run, Jade; the she-wolf could've sworn she heard inside her own head. Run.
And so she did.
The swarm of bats chased after her. And Sniffer and their undead master followed behind.
Bad day, bad day, bad day, bad day! Horrible day! Terrible day!
Jade ran through the forest as fast as she could. Although she didn't turn her head to look at her back, she could hear the screeching of the swarm of bats, the barking of Sniffer and Tracker's furious roars. They were hot on her heels. At first she had tried losing them in the forest, but that had proven impossible. No matter which way she turned, how quickly she ran or how many obstacles she tried to put on their way… the undead hunter and his 'pets' were always right behind her. As it turned out, there was a very good reason for Tracker to be called that.
Now she was trying to run in a straight line, but she wasn't sure if she was managing to do so. She could feel how the effect the poison was having on her grew stronger with every passing second. Making her vision more and more cloudy, making it harder to tell one sound from another. She had also noted that she was feeling more and more thirsty. And she felt so tired… But she forced herself to keep running, keep moving. Stopping, or even losing the smallest amount of speed, would mean her death. If only she could just have a moment, a moment to cast the spell and heal herself… then she was sure she could deal with Tracker, Sniffer and those annoying bats with ease.
By the time she exited the forest, her lungs, head and muscles were burning. As she left the trees behind, the sight of what was ahead of her made her grow hopeful. The river. The wide, deep and long river. She was sure she could cross it, even in her current condition. More importantly, she was sure she could cross it in less time than Tracker and Sniffer could. Which meant that, even if they followed her to the other side, she could have enough time to…
Jade tripped and fell to the ground.
She tried to rise up immediately, but she couldn't. She felt nauseous. Slow. Weak. Soon, the swarm of bats clouded the sun over her head, casting an enormous shadow over her. The screeching animals descended upon her soon enough, biting her through her entire body. Though their mouths were small, their bites were surprisingly painful. Jade tried to strike them with her claws, to no avail.
Suddenly, the swarm of bats stopped biting her and separated themselves from her. Then Tracker roared louder than ever before, and the next thing Jade Chan felt was how something hit her on the ribs, sending her flying a few meters in the river's direction. Jade howled in pain, puking blood and twisting in agony over the grass. That freak had hit her with his flail directly on the ribs, breaking several of them.
Tracker roared again. Triumphantly. Proudly. He swung his flail once more, this time aiming to smash Jade's head against the ground. And Jade knew she had to move, that she had to evade the attack. But she couldn't. No matter how much effort she put into it, she couldn't stand up, much less continue running.
So, instead, she clumsily rolled towards the river. As she did so, she shapeshifted back into human form so Tracker's target would be smaller. The undead hunter's flail hit only grass and dirt. And for the first time in so many days, Jade Chan took in her human shape.
And it was... a mistake. The immense pain she felt in her beast form, from both the poison and the shattered ribs, did nothing but double in her human form. That, combined with so many days moving, walking, living in the shape of a wolf; made her even clumsier than before when it came to moving using human hands and legs instead of using claws. In the end, the only thing she managed to do, aside from making more blood to come out from her mouth and nostrils, was made herself steady enough to remain kneeling over the bloodstained grass instead of lying over it.
Everything hurt. Not just the ribs or her head, but her chest, her limbs, her eyes. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. Ironically, her senses were way duller than before. The river, now located at her right and nearer but still too far away, was a long, blurry blue mass. The forest, now at her left, was the same story, each individual tree having blended into a massive, blurry mass of greens and browns. The poison doing its work, she guessed.
She could still perfectly see Tracker and Sniffer, though. The undead hunter had opened his chest again, calling his little horde of bats back into his body. He then began approaching her, slowly, his flail ready to strike one last time.
Was... Was this it, then? Was Jade Chan, who had fought gangsters, wizards, demons and tyrants; going to die here? In a world that wasn't her own, away from friends and family? Away from everyone she loved? That didn't seem fair. That wasn't fair at all, damn it! She didn't want to die! She didn't deserve to die! Much less like this, at the hands of a zombie hunter and his weird monster-dog, while she was kneeling over the grass, weak and helpless, continuously spitting...
Blood. My blood, Jade Chan thought suddenly.
And the thought was like a powerful ray of sunshine breaking through the gloomy poison-clouds that darkened and slowed her mind. A thought that made her realize that maybe she had tackled this whole situation from the wrong angle. She glanced at the blurry river. It was still too far away, but... with enough impulse... And if Tracker couldn't move…
She watched as the undead approached her while his hound remained behind. Careful, as all hunters were of all living prey, no matter how wounded. But sure of his victory. Jade was counting on that confidence. She hoped it would make him drop his guard for just a little bit. A second would be enough.
She would only have one chance. One simple spell, then one simple chi blast. That was all she had to do. She wasn't sure it would work. She wasn't sure she would even be able to cast the spell. But she had to try. She had no other choice.
Tracker prepared himself to deliver another, final blow with his flail, his weapon glowing with ugly green energy as he did so. Time seemed to slow down, and Jade knew it was now or never.
Everything happened in the spam of three seconds.
Jade weakly chanted the spell in Chinese as she painfully and difficultly pressed her hands together. Her Chi Magic came to her as it had done hundreds of times before, coating her hands in red energy and then extending itself to the blood that was falling from her mouth and nose, and that had already fallen to the ground. Every single drop of the scarlet liquid crept through the grass like tiny snakes, and formed a crimson circle at Tracker's feet. She prayed for it to work.
One.
The undead roared as his flail fell flatly at his feet and he found himself paralyzed. Yes! Yes! It had worked! Not bad for a spell she had just put together inside her head! But she wasn't sure it would last for long, and if the circle of blood at Tracker's feet was broken, she was certain the spell would be broken too.
Two.
Barking, Sniffer dashed towards his master and her, ready to either free the undead hunter or kill her himself. And so, using the chi she had condensed in her hands, Jade unleashed the strongest chi blast she could conjure directly at the ground below her. The strength of the magic beam was enough to send her flying backwards… and directly into the river.
Three!
Jade heard a 'splash!' sound at the same time she felt her back hit something and sink into it, followed by the feeling of her entire body being enveloped by fresh water. And as her body floated upwards, she took her head out of the water, and she breathed; she realized that she had done it. It had worked. It had worked! She was in the river!
Then the river's current, stronger than she had initially thought it to be, began dragging her away from the scene. She didn't fight it. Even if she had wanted to, she couldn't have. She was too weak, too tired, her limbs growing numb. She took a last look at the river's shore, where Tracker remained trapped… for now. Yet he still roared. A roar so loud that Jade continued to hear it even when Tracker became only a blurry shape in the distance. There was a promise in that roar. 'I will hunt you. All of you. Even if it's the last thing I do.'
But Jade stopped worrying about the undead soon enough. The river's current was getting faster and faster, and her limbs had become basically useless. Everything her eyes saw was a blur, and her ears heard almost nothing. It didn't take long before she sank into the waters, taking as much air into her lungs as she could just before that. She didn't know how much time she held out like that. But in the end, with the poison burning her veins, the pain burning her body, and her lungs burning with the need for air… She opened her mouth and took a breath.
Water poured into her mouth, her nose, her throat, her lungs. Darkness engulfed everything.
And so, Jade Chan drowned.
?
Jade Chan was... herself. But something was different. She felt different. Shorter, lighter. Younger? Her wounds were also gone, and she wasn't in the river anymore. Taking a look around her, she wasn't so sure about still being in Meridian either. She was in a corridor now, with several doors at her left and her right, and one, very big door at the end.
"I still don't know if it's the right choice." she suddenly heard a voice say behind that door. A voice that spoke in Chinese. A man's voice.
Her father's voice.
Now she knew where she was. She remembered this place. This was her home, back in Hong Kong. Before she was sent to San Francisco. And speaking of San Francisco, this had been the conversation her parents had had before sending her overseas. She remembered. She had been listening.
"I'm not so sure myself," a female voice joined the conversation. Her mother's voice. "Even after you said that fostering has always been a tradition of your family."
"Yes, yes... And cousin Jackie is a learned, traveled man. And Uncle is responsible and disciplined to a fault. She could learn much from them. But..." her father declared. "Are we sure it would be the best for her?"
Her mother didn't answer right away. "I don't know, Shen. What if we just... give it a try? Just for the next school-year?"
Her father breathed deeply. "Very well. Let's... give it a try."
Jade didn't hear anything else. Her younger self sighed, turned around and returned to her bedroom. There she lied over her bed, looking at the ceiling.
She loved her parents. She really did. And she knew they loved her. But there had always been some kind of barrier between them. Every time she wanted to share her opinion about something, or talk about a cartoon, or a fantasy book, or about... any interest she had, her parents would downplay its importance. But she didn't show a lot of interest when they tried to share something they liked with her, either. And she knew she could be difficult. She had always been a bit of a troublemaker at school, never the greatest fan of authority.
But it would really have been so difficult to say, 'Oh, Jade, that's actually a really good idea!'? Or 'Ah yes, I understand why you like this thing, let's talk about it!'? Only once. Only once, and she would've been happy.
Not that she was angry at them for sending her to San Francisco, to live with Jackie. It was the best thing to ever happen to her.
The next thing Jade knew was that she wasn't in her old bedroom anymore. Neither was she herself. Jade was now… a man. She was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, she was on Russia and the year was 1916.
What? What?! Why?! How?!
And Rasputin had seen better days. He lied on the cold, hard basement's floor. Bleeding and barely holding onto life. How?! How could this have happened to him?! He who had begun so low yet had risen so high! He who had had the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia dancing on the palm of his hand!
Yusupov! It was all the fault of that bastard Yusupov! He had invited Rasputin for dinner, and had poisoned him by lacing the food with cyanide! Only Rasputin's mastery of Chi Magic had kept him alive. But not content with poisoning him, Yusupov had shot him thrice!
And that wasn't the end of it. Rasputin had to watch, powerless, as Yusupov and his fellow conspirators took him, wrapped him in an old and dirty cloth, and then drove to the Petrovsky bridge and dropped him in the Little Nevka river. There, he drowned and died. Alone. Yet he had been Rasputin the Mad Monk. And he would be remembered.
The world around her changed, and she wasn't in Russia anymore. And she was still a man, but a different man this time around. A man walking through the streets of San Francisco. The year was 1880, and the man was Joshua Abraham Norton, First Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
What the hell was happening?! Why was it happening?! She knew these were her past lives, but why was she reliving them?!
But then Norton stopped walking. He took a hand to his chest, and suddenly collapsed on the street. No, no, no... this couldn't be! Not now! He had a lecture at the California Academy of Sciences! No, no, no... He still had so much to do! So much to do!
Oh, well. Everyone had to die one day.
Norton stopped struggling, surrendering to the embrace of the Grim Reaper. And so died the First Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, on the streets of San Francisco. He died poor and having achieved so little, almost nothing. Yet he had been Emperor. And he would be remembered.
The world crumbled and once more rose as something different. Gone were the streets of San Francisco, and in their place were the walls, floor and ceiling of a fancy bedroom in the Castle of Csejte, in the Kingdom of Hungary. The year was 1614, Jade was a woman this time around, and her name was Elizabeth Báthory.
Think. Jade had to think. Jade remembered... the river? Yes, the river. What had happened there?
"My hands are cold." Báthory told the man that stood guard at the other side of the door and that kept her locked within the bedroom.
Yes, yes... this was her prison. And no matter how comfortable the bed or how smooth the silks, a prison would always be a prison.
"It's nothing m'lady," answered the guard. "Just go lie down."
Sighing, Báthory did as told, lying over the bed. Many would have been surprised by how collaborative she was with her captors. She still had her Chi Magic, after all, so if she wanted to she could break down that door with ease.
Ah, but what would that accomplish? Nothing. Nothing at all. She was on her own. No allies to speak of, no resources at her disposal anymore. She had played the game, and she had lost. And she had always been of the opinion that one must accept defeat when it was certain. If there was a chance of victory? Then fight. Fight to the bitter end. But if there existed no such chance, then why bother?
And she had done such horrible things, hadn't she? So many young ones killed, their cute throats cut open, all for their blood. Precious blood she had needed for her spells... and for that childish obsession of hers about remaining forever young. Albeit she wouldn't admit it, perhaps she deserved to be imprisoned.
Well, at least everything had already been organized. Her children would inherit everything she had. God, it was cold. How could she be so cold? It was August! So, so cold...
She closed her eyes and fell asleep. She never woke up. And so she died, cold and alone. Yet she had been Bloody Countess Elizabeth Báthory. And she would be remembered.
When Jade opened her eyes, she found herself in a battlefield. She was a man once more, and around her screaming soldiers fought, bled and died by the dozens. The year was 1477, and the man was Vlad Tepes the Third, Voivode of the Principality of Wallachia.
What had happened in the river? She had fallen into it, and she had... she had drowned, hadn't she?
Vlad the Third screamed as he cut down another Ottoman soldier. How many had he killed already? Irrelevant. These were mere soldiers that he had cut down. Pawns. Basarab! He had to find and kill Basarab! If Basarab died, then none could ever take Wallachia from him and his kin!
Everything happened too quickly. One moment he was inches away from triumph. The next, his guard, composed mostly of his allies from Moldavia, had been massacred; and Vlad had been defeated, stripped of his armor, and chained.
He cursed them all before an Ottoman blade struck his neck. And so, he died; unable to defeat his hated enemy. Yet he had been Vlad the Impaler. And he would be remembered.
Next, Jade was a woman again. A woman that lied over a comfortable bed in a room of a Japanese mansion. The year was 1025, and the woman's name was Murasaki Shikibu.
Had Jade... died? Was that what had happened? Was she dead? Was that why she was seeing the last moments of all her past lives?
Murasaki shifted over her bed. She could feel her strength leaving her, little by little. Her death approached. But she wasn't scared, as she felt that she had lived her life to its full potential. She had learned to read and write, she had served at the Imperial Court, she had become a poet. She had fought the Oni tooth and nail.
Now the Oni were gone, first driven from Japan into another world, then defeated there and imprisoned in Masks that had been returned to Earth and scattered to the winds, with one Mask remaining in that other world. She had never understood why do that. Wouldn't it be easier to protect the Masks if they were in the same place?
Nevertheless, Japan was safe. Her works of poetry would endure. Her family was happy and healthy. What else could she ask for? And so, when she felt life slipping away from her, she didn't fight it. She died peacefully. She had been Murasaki Shikibu, great poetess. And she would be remembered.
Lastly, Jade was a man once more. A tired, old man. The year was… unknown. But it was long, long ago. Long before the man that many would call Christ was born. Long before the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus ruled the West. Long before Alexander the Third of Macedon, whom history calls The Great; sought to conquer every inch of land that was known to his people. Long before the Persian Empire of Cyrus of Babylon, whom history also calls The Great, ruled the East.
The man's name was Ben-Shui. One of the mightiest and most skilled Chi Wizards the world would ever see. He walked barefoot through the lands of what one day would be known as China. He dressed in old, ragged, dirty clothes. His only possessions a bag that contained maggoty bread and sour wine. And he was blind.
He fell on the ground, sad and tired. He knew he would die very soon. A part of him welcomed it. He had lost… everything. And now he, he who had once ruled this very land, who had been called Emperor, and who had been worshiped by his subjects as if he were a God… was nothing. Nothing.
But he deserved it, didn't he? He had done horrible things when he had had power. When he had ruled, and been called Emperor. When he had been worshiped as a God to such an extent that he had come to believe it. He had been a tyrant, and had abused those that should have been under his care. And then someone with the power of an actual deity had descended from the skies, and had reminded him that he was but a mortal. A very powerful mortal, but a mortal nonetheless. He had been stripped off his riches, his titles, his followers, his dignity. He had even been stripped off his sight. And he had been made to walk the lands and use the powers that once had elevated him over his fellow humans to help those in need. The poor, the weak, the meek and the sickly. He had dedicated decade after decade of his long life to help them, to protect them from what many were already calling 'Forces of Evil'.
But there wasn't enough time. That was why he had searched for her. For that woman that held the Mystic Heart of Earth itself. And she had granted him his wish. Now, when he died, his soul would reincarnate. His power and knowledge would pass onto others. And those would carry on with his mission. His atonement.
Many would call that cruel. Why should those that had not (and could not have) been part of any of the crimes he had committed, share on his punishment? Perhaps it was simple pragmatism. The abilities that Ben-Shui had developed were too useful, too precious, to be allowed to be forgotten.
Or maybe… just maybe… this was just a form of petty revenge. A way to drag some poor souls down with him, to condemn them to the same hardships he had endured just to spite the woman who had destroyed everything he had built. Because maybe… just maybe… Even after all those years of using his powers for good, after all the supposedly humbling and enlightening experiences… Ben-Shui hadn't changed at all. Perhaps, deep down, he was still that same selfish, cruel man that had once ruled through military strength, Chi Magic and the might of Dragons.
Or perhaps he simply wished for all the misery he had been through to have some kind of meaning. That all his suffering had been worth… something.
Ben-Shui took his last breath, and died alone over the ground. Very few would remember him. Monks would create an order on his honor, Chi Wizards all across Earth's history would know his name… and that would be it. To the other worlds across the Infinite Dimensions, he would be just an anecdote. And even less would be known about the monster he once was. Of that there would only be stories. Myths. Not even his own reincarnations would know about who he was. But maybe that was for the better.
Better for the Universe to forget about Ben-Shui, Jade Emperor, he who had been master of the Four Dragons before the Nymph Xin Jing.
Was... Was this what was gonna happen to Jade? Was she gonna die alone, with her only consolation being that she would be remembered? That people would talk about the Black Wolf of the Rebellion long after she was gone?
No. No, no, no, no, no... No! No! No! No!
She didn't want to die! She didn't want to die! She didn't deserve to die! She wanted to live! She wanted to...!
"I'm sorry."
Jade found herself floating in a void of white, gold and pink. Before she could deduce or ask where she was, her eyes fell over... a woman. A woman that floated in the distance.
A pale woman that looked somehow Asian, dressed in white robes, her dark hair tied into a topknot, her lips of the same color as peaches. Four dragons, one green, one red, one of a deep blue, the last of a blue so pale that it looked almost white; flew around her in a circle.
She looked so, so tired.
"I'm so sorry." the woman apologized again. "I have tried to maintain things under control. To do as much as I can to keep that... thing from doing as It pleases. But when I push fate in a direction, It pushes it in another, and just as strongly. Now things have grown too complex, too many events colliding, too many lives overlapping, too many souls changing. I underestimated that monster. It already had a connection to your reality, even if it was small. And when I welcomed you here, I welcomed It too. And the influence It now holds here is far greater than the one It had on your original reality."
The woman paused, and looked at the girl with teary eyes full of guilt.
"I have tried to protect you, Jade Chan." the woman said sadly. "But I cannot do it any longer. Yet I swear, upon my name as the Nymph Xin Jing. I will aid your friends. I will guide their steps. I swear."
"We will save you."
The woman, the dragons and the void they were in were gone in the blink of an eye. Jade found herself in a very different kind of void, one of blacks and dark-reds instead of whites, golden and pinks. And where the woman and the dragons had been, now was...
The monster. Just like he had been in all those dreams she had had. It was then that it finally clicked inside her head.
"Those were never dreams." Jade declared.
"No. No they weren't." answered Tarakudo, King of the Shadowkhan and Lord of all Oni. "Welcome to the Shadow Realm, kid."
Next came the giggling, and Jade looked down. Under them were... things. Masses of scaly tentacles, feathery claws, mouths and eyes. Too many eyes. They moved and kept changing shape constantly. Looking at them made her head hurt. And that giggling. That nightmarish giggling...
Giggles became laughter as tentacle and claw shot towards her, grabbing her wrists and ankles.
Jade screamed. The abominations laughed like cruel children. They pulled, and dragged her downwards.
Into the depths.
Jade didn't known for how long she had been screaming. She didn't know for how long those monsters had been dragging her down. Her throat was sore. Her limbs hurt. The monsters kept laughing. And she was scared. Then, suddenly, the monsters flung her downwards. She fell and fell, while the giggling monsters remained above her and became smaller and smaller until they disappeared.
She kept falling and falling. She fell for what it felt like hours. Maybe even days. Eventually, she stopped screaming. She stopped moving. She just stared at the abyss below as she kept plunging towards it.
Then she saw... something in the shadowy depths. Something big. Something that grew bigger by the second. No, not bigger. Nearer. Was that what she was falling towards?
Once it was near enough, she saw it was a... surface? No, no, that wasn't it. She couldn't see its edges. Why was that? Was it... a sphere? Yes, yes. A gargantuan sphere. Enormous. Like a moon. That's what it looked like.
A massive moon of a grayish-blue color. Like the skin of a Shadowkhan.
But it wasn't as if the surface of said 'moon' was a flat one. Scattered through it Jade saw several... well, at first she though they were mountains, but soon she saw they were more akin to domes than to mountains. Gigantic domes, each probably the size of several cities put together.
And then, slowly, the moon started beating. Bump-bump... bump-bump... bump-bump... As if it was a massive, spherical heart. Then the beating grew in intensity, and Jade's body trembled with every single heartbeat.
And then the domes opened.
And they weren't domes.
They were eyes of a pale, sickly yellow.
Jade screamed louder than ever before. She tried, uselessly, to move upwards. To fly, or swim through the shadows. It didn't work. She kept falling.
AT LAST.
Holly...! It spoke! That thing spoke! It spoke! It spoke! It spoke! A terrible, booming, inhuman voice. A voice that rumbled through the entire Shadow Realm. A voice like no other voice Jade Chan had ever heard. Even the voices of Shendu and his siblings were normal by comparison. She took her hands to her ears, desperately trying to block the sound. But she couldn't.
"What is this?! What is this? What's happening?!" Jade yelled, terrified. "What are you?!"
I... AM. I WAS. I FOREVER WILL BE. AND I... RULE.
HERE IN THIS DOMAIN OF SHADOWS. HERE IN THIS SHADOW REALM. HERE I WAS. WATCHING. ALWAYS. HERE I WAS WHEN THE EXPLOSIONS THAT MORTALS ALWAYS NAME UNIVERSES BEGAN TO EXIST. FROM HERE I WATCHED HOW MANY OF THEM DIED. FROM HERE I WATCHED AS OTHERS WERE BORN. AND HOW THOSE DIED TOO, AND NEW ONES CAME TO BE AFTER THEM. AND EACH TIME ONE OF THEM PERISHED, ITS REMAINS FELL HERE, BECOMING PART OF MY SHADOW REALM. ALWAYS IN AN ENDLESS CYCLE.
AND I WAS SO... BORED.
I COULD NOT INTERFERE. OH, THERE WERE ALWAYS MORTALS IN THOSE EXPLOSIONS THAT FOUND MY REALM. TAPPED INTO ITS POWER. USED IT TO BUILD ARMIES, OR TO EMPOWER THEMSELVES. BUT I WAS ALWAYS RELEGATED TO THE ROLE OF SPECTATOR.
BUT THEN YOU CAME. YOUR REALM, YOUR UNIVERSE... IT WAS GOING TO DIE. IT WAS MEANT TO DIE. BUT YOU... YOU SAVED WHAT LITTLE WAS LEFT, AND TIED IT TO ANOTHER UNIVERSE. WHAT COULD NOT BE SALVAGED FELL HERE, DEAD BUT ALSO ALIVE. AN ARMY OF MONSTERS, TWISTED AND MAD. I TOOK THEM AS MY OWN. MY SERVANTS. MY CHILDREN. MY CAVALCADE OF HORRORS.
NOW MY DOMAIN IS TIED TO WHAT CAME OF THE MERGING OF THE TWO REALITIES IN A FAR STRONGER FASHION THAN IT WAS TO THE UNIVERSE THAT YOU WERE BORN IN. NOW I CAN INFLUENCE IT. I CAN TWIST ITS FATE. I CAN CONVERSE WITH THE MORTALS THAT INHABIT IT. AND IN TURN, THEY CAN DRAW MORE POWER FROM MY REALM. TARAKUDO, TWO-TIMES-MET, TWO-TIMES-AIDED; IS A GOOD TESTAMENT OF THAT.
NOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED. THINGS ARE INTERESTING. I AM NOT BORED ANYMORE. AND IT IS ALL THANKS TO YOU. IN THIS NEW UNIVERSE YOU MADE, I AM FREE. AND I LIKE IT. I HAVE DECIDED THAT I WANT… MORE.
SO YOU SHALL NOT DIE, JADE CHAN. YOU WILL LIVE. AND WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT, THROUGH YOU, I SHALL STRIKE AT THE HEART OF THIS NEW REALITY. I SHALL HAVE MY SHADOW REALM DEVOUR IT WHILE IT STILL LIVES. THE RESULT WILL BE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REALITY UNDER MY COMMAND. XIN JING, HER DRAGONS AND ALL THOSE WORLD-HEARTS... WILL BE MINE. THEN I SHALL USE THIS NEW REALM TO SET SAIL TO ALL REALITIES, ALL UNIVERSES. I WILL TWIST THEM ALL, THROWING THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE INTO AN ETERNAL UPHEAVAL.
SO THAT I WON'T BE BORED ANYMORE.
Jade had curled up into a ball. Frozen in terror, she could do nothing but stare with her eyes wide open as she fell into one if this monster's own sickly yellow, massive eyes.
"I don't understand." she said. "What are you? What the hell are you?!" she repeated.
I AM THE HEART OF THE SHADOW REALM. I AM THE CEASELESS WHEEL. THE SERPENT EATING ITS OWN TAIL. I AM THE WEAVER OF MISERY. IS IT REALLY SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? IT IS NOT AS IF YOU SHALL REMEMBER THIS MEETING… BUT I GUESS YOU HAVE EARNED THE RIGHT TO KNOW MY NAME.
The gargantuan eyelid closed, and Jade Chan was swallowed by darkness. There, the heartbeat took in a shooting rhythm, and the next time the thing spoke, It did calmly, softly and gently. Almost like a loving parent trying to calm a scared child.
"Saṃsāra, Jade. I am Saṃsāra."
Within the Ben-Shui Chosen One's shared soul
"What sorcery is this?!" Ben-Shui shrieked.
What was happening within the shared soul of the Ben-Shui Chosen One was... something unheard of. Something that was neither the soul of the current incarnation nor the one of a previous life, had appeared there. Something big and black and oily... Like a mass of black, writhing, shadowy thorns had appeared there. For lack of a better term, they were being invaded.
At the exception of Norton, the rest had left his company some time ago, returning to the corners of their shared, eternal soul that they called their strongholds. And so, when the transgression took place, only he and Norton where there to try and put an end to it.
The thorns grabbed Norton and began dragging him towards them. The blind Ben-Shui extended his hand to help his reincarnation. One of the thorns, thicker than the rest, impaled the man through the chest then. Norton screamed. And Ben-Shui... stopped. He remained where he was. Frozen. He opened his mouth. And then he began to cry the same tears that a father cries when he holds his son on his arms for the first time.
"Ah..." he muttered. "I... understand…"
Meridian
Now
Jade Chan breathed. And each breath came slow, hard and harsh. Each breath burned her lungs. But she breathed. And that meant… that meant that she was still alive. Alive! She couldn't move, though. She felt something hard and cold pressing against her back. She could barely hear anything, her mouth tasted like iron and dirt, she smelled nothing and she only saw shadowy shapes against the light. But who gave a damn?! She was alive! She was…!
"Alive…" she barely managed to hear over her head. "Barely… Very injured… Alive… Rest… Miracle…"
The last thing she felt just before falling back unconscious, was something soft and warm taking her by her torso, arms and legs; and lifting her up.
One day later
Jade awoke sweating, her body sore and her throat dry. However, breathing no longer made her lungs burn. Her vision wasn't blurry, and she heard the few sounds that reached her ears perfectly. There was something cold and wet over her forehead, and her back was lying against something soft. A bed. She was lying on a bed.
She tried sitting up to take a better look at her surroundings, but a sudden, painful pang in her side stopped her from doing so. She slowly took a hand to her torso and touched. Whoever had rescued her had taken her clothes, and dressed her in what couldn't be anything else but a nightgown. She also felt a harder fabric under it, something tightly wrapped around most of her torso. Bandages, without a doubt.
Oh, yeah. Tracker had broken her ribs. That's why it hurt to move. But she healed fast. Not as fast as a Reptilian Shapeshifter would, but fast enough. And whoever had rescued her from the river had treated her wounds, so they probably (hopefully) weren't an enemy.
What about the poison, though? Had they (whoever they were) gave her some kind of antidote? Had her body simply purged it? Had she actually managed to cast a spell and she didn't remember? Too many questions, and she was too tired to try and find their answers. Where even was she?
She turned her head to her left. A wall made of thick logs. Tch. She turned her head to her right. A room. It wasn't small, but it wasn't exceptionally big either. A small and crudely made square table was the only thing inside aside from the bed, and the light of the morning and the sound of birds chirping entered through a single window. Then there was a single door... that was being opened.
A middle-aged, tall and chubby Galhot woman entered through the door. She was bald, her skin was of the same blue as Vathek's, and similar scaly plates as the ones of the rebel adorned her chin and head; albeit hers were gray instead of white. She dressed in the typical clothes of a meridian peasant: a long, sleeveless brown gown over a white shirt; her feet covered by simple shoes. And she was carrying a pitcher full of water in her hands.
Jade watched as the woman put the pitcher over the table. The Chinese girl licked her lips due to how thirsty she was. Maybe she made a sound while doing so, because then the Galhot woman looked directly at Jade. Their eyes met, and Jade saw the woman's face lit up first with surprise, then with joy.
"You're awake!" the woman said happily.
"W-Water..." Jade said, followed by some coughing.
"Yes, yes! Of course!" the woman uttered, then quickly took the pitcher in her hands once more and approached Jade.
Tenderly, the woman used one hand to lift Jade's head, while she guided the pitcher to her lips and helped her drink with the other. Jade's dry lips, dry mouth and dry throat were thankful for the fresh water. A part of her found that somehow ironic, considering that she had almost drowned.
"There we go..." the Galhot woman said gently as she took the pitcher from Jade's lips and lowered the girl's head again. She quickly took the pitcher back to the table, and Jade breathed peacefully.
"You've been asleep for almost an entire day." the woman said softly as she stood by the bedside. "We found you by the river's shore, badly wounded. There's an old Faithful living here, he treated you as best as he could, but it's a miracle that you're alive. Blessed be the Light of Meridian for her kindness."
A whole day… Jade thought. "Thank... you..." the teenage girl weakly told the woman.
"No, don't speak. Don't make any effort." the woman retorted. "Just rest. I'll bring you something to eat. You must be starving!"
Jade watched as the woman disappeared through the door, then sighed heavily as she stared at the ceiling. She probably should eat something, but she didn't feel hungry at all. Tiredness beat hunger, she guessed. Nevertheless, when the woman returned carrying a bowl of stew in one hand, a big wooden spoon in the other and a smile from ear to ear, Jade didn't object to eating.
The stew, that the woman had to feed to her, wasn't anything extraordinary. Meat, carrots and potatoes that hadn't been cooked as well as they could have; and a gravy that lacked salt. But it was the first cooked and warm meal that Jade had eaten in days, so she ate it without protest. And it wasn't as if Jade Chan had ever been picky about what she ate.
After the bowl had been emptied, the woman left Jade alone, and she inevitably fell asleep again. Several hours passed before she woke up once again, but it was still bright outside when she did. And Jade's body wasn't sore and she wasn't sweating anymore. She sat up, and there were no sudden, painful pangs this time around. Good, that was good. Next she got out of her bed and gave a couple of steps forward; rough, dusty ground under her bare feet. No problem walking, either. However, she didn't make any sudden movement. While she was sure her body had already healed, she knew better than to force it.
She exited the bedroom, entering another, larger room. A room also built with logs and that contained almost as little as the one she had slept in. A door that led outside, two windows flanking it. A fireplace over which hanged an iron pot that probably contained the same stew Jade had eaten. A table with a pair of chairs around it, all of them built in wood. Two bowls over the table. A wooden bench near the fireplace, several blankets over it. It looked like the bed Jade had been sleeping in was the only one in the entire house. The Galhot woman had been sleeping on that bench while Jade recovered, then. Scratching the back of her head and after letting out a loud sigh, the Chinese girl walked out of the house.
The village she was greeted by was an ordinary and small one. Around two dozen one-story houses, around two thirds of them built in wood, the rest built in stone. There were dens of pigs and chickens between some of the houses, and at the village's north (or what she assumed to be the north) there were a few farmlands. When she looked to the village's south, she saw the river where she would have drowned had these people not rescued her. There was also… another building. Built in stone, bigger than the houses and one story taller than them. Built in the shape of a circle, too. Its walls were lined with windows, and the gates it had were remarkably bigger than the doors of the houses. Then the doors opened and an old, thin half-breed man with pale, yellowish-green skin, long grey hair and beard, and dressed in a robe that Jade identified as the one worn by the Faithful of the Light of Meridian stepped out from the building. It was then that Jade realized that she was most likely staring at a meridianite… church? Temple? Shrine? Whatever the place the faithful did their thing at was called.
And he didn't come out from the building alone. The same Galhot woman that had let Jade live in her house, sleep in her bed and had fed the Chan girl her food followed behind. The pair then talked for a bit. Then they noticed Jade, and their faces filled up with shock. Seconds later, they were running towards her. Oh, great…
"What are you doing out of bed?!" the Galhot woman asked Jade as soon as she and the priest reached her.
"I... uh..." Jade found herself babbling. "I'm... feeling better."
"Young lady," the priest spoke now. "I treated your wounds myself, and no matter how well you think you feel, you need to rest."
Jade was tempted to tell the both of them that she was a Shapeshifter, and therefore far more resilient than most people, but she didn't think it'd be a very good idea. These were kind people, of that Jade had less and less doubts with each passing moment, but Meridian was still Meridian. And Shapeshifters were still, at best, distrusted by most of this world's population.
So Jade kept her mouth shut and allowed the Galhot woman to take her back into the house and then into the bed. There she remained until night arrived, and when the Galhot woman came into the room with another bowl of stew, Jade insisted until the woman allowed the girl to eat with her.
"What's your name?" Jade asked the Galhot woman as they ate dinner together.
Putting down her spoon, the Galhot woman looked at her and smiled. "Talissa." she said. "My name is Talissa."
Jade nodded twice, slowly. "My name's Jade," she said in turn.
She spent the entirety of the next day in the village, doing mostly nothing but eat, drink and rest; because Talissa and the priest insisted that she didn't make any effort. This, however, gave her the perfect chance to see how the people of the village... well, lived their lives.
Most of their time was spent working. They worked from dawn to dusk, only stopping when it was time to have lunch or dinner. And everyone worked. The men worked, the women worked. The elderly worked. Even the children worked. Those who were old enough to be helpful, anyway. Some worked in the farmlands, growing grain and other vegetables. Others worked taking care of the pigs and chickens, feeding them and selecting those who were old and fat enough to be sacrificed. Some others washed clothes or fished in the river. Others tended to the houses and dens, making sure they were in good condition. Even the priest worked, either helping wherever he was needed the most at the moment, or healing some villager that had gotten injured while working.
But… But while everyone was kind to her and to one another, while everyone worked together, while no villager fought another, while everyone tried their hardest to smile… Jade couldn't ignore the sorrow that weighed on the shoulders of these people. It was there, she could see it in their eyes. Even in the ones of some of the children. These people had lost… a lot.
That night, Talissa explained it all to her. She explained to Jade that the reason why some houses were made of stone and others from wood, was that the latter (including the one where the Galhot woman lived) had been built more recently than the former. That the reason for that had simply been that, due to the war, people had begun arriving here, forced to abandon the places they had called home for their entire lives. They had lost family members too, to the point that most of the people that lived together inside those wooden houses weren't related by blood at all. Fathers and mothers that had lost their sons and daughters, wives that had lost their husbands, brothers that had lost their sisters, children that had lost their parents… That was the kind of people that ended up living here, trying to live on.
"I used to live in the Capital, with my family." Talissa told Jade. "My mother, my husband, our… our children. My precious little girls." she paused, looking down, a sad smile on her face. "When the Guard told us that we needed to leave, that everyone was leaving, that it was for our own good, to protect us from… from the Usurper and his monsters, and the war he had caused… We left everything we couldn't carry behind and… and suddenly we were on the road with other families, and we moved so slow and, and…" the sad smile left the woman's face, replaced with a fearful grimace. "The brigands attacked us half a day from this village. They prey on the people that walk the roads around here. They killed my husband first, then my mother, then… wounded my girls, and by the time we arrived here they were… The priest couldn't do anything, I… I… I still think that, had we not left the Capital, they wouldn't have…"
Voice quivering, the Galhot woman stopped herself just before she began to cry. Jade said nothing. Did nothing. A part of her wanted to tell her that had she and her family stayed behind at the Capital they all would've probably died due to the meteorite that Phobos had dropped over the city. But she didn't say such thing. What good would saying that do?
"I'm sorry." Jade spoke at last. "I… I lost my Uncle, because of Phobos, too."
The Galhot woman looked at the Chinese girl with tears in her eyes and, forcing herself to smile at her, she nodded. "Some of the people that arrived lately, they say that the Usurper is dead. That the war is over, and that the rightful Queen, the Light of Meridian made flesh, is going to rule us now. But that won't give me back my family. Nor will it give them back theirs," she said, making a gesture towards the door, towards the rest of the village. "And I know it is sinful to think so, for she is the Light of Meridian itself, but I can't avoid wondering… Will this new Queen's rule make our work easier? Our stomachs fuller? Our lives safer? I don't know, I… I just don't know."
They went to bed shortly afterwards. That night, Jade remained awake for a few hours. Thinking. About these people, these people that had so little, but hadn't hesitated for a second to help her. But she also thought about Meridian as a whole. About how many villages like this one had to be out there. And she thought about Uncle, too. And about herself. And what she was going to do from now on.
The morning after, when the first rays of sunlight began turning the sky from black to white, she asked Talissa and the priest to remove her bandages and give her clothes that better suited her, such as a shirt, pants and boots. Then she told them that she was going to leave the village.
"You don't have to leave." the priest told her just before she left. He was the only one that had come to bid her farewell. "You would be safer here than alone on the road."
"I know, it's just…" Jade told him as she stood at the village's edge. She had been told that following the river upwards was the shortest way to find a minor road that would bring her to a larger village and then to a city in a few days. They had given her a small bag with a waterskin and some jerky. "Thank you. For everything. And tell Talissa that I understand if she's mad at me…"
"Talissa isn't angry with you." the priest told her. "She is… sad that you are leaving. You remind her too much of her little ones, I fear."
"It's just… I think that what you've done here is… incredible, but…" Jade breathed deeply and looked over the horizon. "My family's probably incredibly worried about me, and also looking for me. I need to go back home. I shouldn't have left to begin with."
The Faithful nodded. If he believed her or not, if he judged her or not, that Jade Chan didn't know. But she was grateful for the fact that he wasn't trying to force her to stay. Besides, the longer she stayed here the greater was the risk of Tracker finding out that she was here, showing up and hurting these people.
"Very well. I can't stop you, but I can't help you more than I already have. Water and some food are one thing, but weapons are something we can't spare." he said. "But I shall pray to the merciful Light so that those horrible brigands don't attack you."
"Don't." Jade said as she began to walk. "I'm counting on it."
Later…
Why did Uncle die?
That was the question that Jade asked herself as she walked. She had reached the minor road the villagers had told her about a few minutes ago. The sun had risen fully into the sky, turning it a vibrant blue.
Why did Uncle die?
Well, the answer to that question was pretty obvious, wasn't it? Uncle had died because Phobos had killed him. A simple answer for a simple question. But what if the question was a little bit different? What if, instead of 'Why did Uncle die?' the question was...?
What had Uncle died for?
For me, Jade thought instantaneously.
Yes, that had been what she had been thinking ever since Phobos had impaled Uncle with that horrible sword. A thought she hadn't been able escape from, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how many times she remembered what Irma had told her in the Infinite City... No matter how many times she reminded herself that Phobos had killed Uncle, and that the fault was his, and his alone... She couldn't stop thinking that...
That it had been her fault. That, maybe, had Uncle not fought Phobos in order to protect her, the old wizard would still be alive. That Uncle had died to save her life. That he had died for her.
But now... Now she wasn't so sure about that. Had Uncle died only for her? No. No, that wasn't true. He had died for Jade, yes... But also for Jackie, Tohru and Viper. And for Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin. And for Caleb. And for Elyon. And Blunk. And Vathek, Drake, Sephiria, Aldarn, the Mage, Julian and all the other rebels.
And for every single person that lived in this world. For every meridianite that had suffered so much due to Phobos' actions. And that would have suffered even more had Phobos won. Uncle may not have known it when he choose to fight the Heart-wielding mad tyrant, but he had fought, and died, for them too. So they could have the chance to live a better future.
A better future that, judging by what she had seen, was still very far away.
The battles had been won. The war was over. Phobos was dead, and his regime had crumbled to dust. And even after all this time, after everything that had happened... After all the fights, all the sweat, all the blood, all the tears, all the suffering... A part of Jade had thought that bringing the mad tyrant down would be enough to make things better.
But she had been wrong. That single village, full of people that had lost everything and that had to struggle in order to simply live from day to day, had been all the proof she had needed. And she knew there had to be more. Many, many more. The war was over... But the hunger, sickness, thieving and murder that had followed and would follow after the war... Jade now understood that those posed as much of a threat to the well-being of all meridianites as the war had posed.
And while Phobos was dead (and Cedric was imprisoned), there were others that could do a lot of harm to Meridian. Tracker, as Jade knew all too well, was still out there; obsessed with hunting people like they were animals. Daolon Wong, who had already tried to take Meridian for himself, was also still out there, somewhere. So was Tarakudo, and the last two Oni Masks and whatever type of Shadowkhan they could be used to summon. Even that spider-girl, Miranda, was still out there. And those were just the ones off the top of her head.
And knowing all that, Jade Chan could do nothing but ask herself… Could she do something about it? Something to protect those that Uncle had died for? To make sure that his sacrifice hadn't been in vain?
With those thoughts on her mind, Jade kept walking and walking through the dusty and rocky meridianite road. The terrain around her began to change, the road went up and down, and at her right and left fields of blue, red and yellow flowers quickly overtook the green of the grass. It was then that she finally began to hear the loud neighs of several approaching horses, alongside the sound that their hooves made against the ground. She stopped walking, and dropped her bag on the ground. The brigands appeared shortly after, all of them on horseback. It was a group of only nine. Two Galhots, six humans, and one Lurden. Each of them carried crude swords and axes, some of them rusty, and one of the Galhots had a bow and a quiver on his back. They began surrounding her, cruelly laughing to one another.
"Look what we've found!" the Galhot with the bow and the quiver said loudly. His voice was deep. Was he the leader? He and the other Galhot had green skin with bright yellow scale growths through their entire body. "A little girl walking alone through the road! Don't you know that's dangerous, runt?! There's this very dangerous band of outlaws around these parts, and they wouldn't think twice before killing some little girl and stealing her stuff!" he laughed, and the others joined in. "See what's in the bag!" he ordered. He was clearly the leader.
It was the Lurden that dismounted and took the bag, checking what was inside. He pulled out the jerky, tossed a piece into his mouth, then handed the rest to his boss. Next he took the waterskin and handed it to one of the humans. Then he searched a little bit more inside the bag, and upon finding nothing, he threw it into the ground.
"What? That's it?" the other Galhot, far thinner (and maybe younger) than the other, asked. "What a waste of time."
"Oh, shut your mouth." the other Galhot told him, eating a piece of jerky himself and then tossing the rest to one of the human bandits. "The meat's good, we got some water and the day's just beginning. We'll find more prey. Say, runt…" he addressed Jade. "Did you bring this meat from home or from somewhere else? If you tell us where we can find more, I promise, it won't hurt when we kill…"
"Why do you do this?" Jade suddenly asked the bandits, interrupting the Galhot.
"What?" the leader of the band of thieves and murderers asked flatly, surprised by the Chinese girl's words.
"Why do you do this?" Jade asked once more. "Why do you steal? Why do you kill? Don't you understand that the people you're hurting are poor and hungry? Don't you understand that you're taking what little they have?"
Upon hearing her question, the Lurden gave a step forward, with a rusty blade in hand. The band's leader stopped him with a gesture. The other bandits exchanged glances. The Galhot looked amused.
"That's just how things are, runt." he told Jade while he shrugged. "How things work here, in the wild. Big beast eats the little one, that's all there's to it. Why should we feel bad about it?" he said, smiling. Then he made another sign to the Lurden, who began approaching Jade with the blade ready to kill once again. "Does a wolf feel bad when it eats some sheep?"
Jade couldn't avoid chuckling a bit. That had been a very poor choice of words, hadn't it?
Before the Lurden could deliver any blow, she jumped in the air and strongly kicked him in the face. The bandit fell to the ground, screaming in pain, letting go of his sword and clutching his face with both hands. She had broken his nose, and also most of his teeth. Next Jade Chan shapeshifted, sending both the horses and their riders into a frenzy.
"If you want to live like animals...!" the enormous black she-wolf roared. "Then you'll die like animals!"
Later…
To call what followed a one-sided slaughter would be the understatement of the millennium. By the time Jade was done and she shapeshifted back into her human form, she was unharmed and only one of the bandits remained alive. One of the humans. He was badly wounded, bleeding and his legs were now useless. He was pathetically trying to crawl away from her. But he was still alive.
The others hadn't been so lucky. They were all dead. The Galhots, the Lurden, and the other humans. Jade had torn off their flesh, broken their bones, even disemboweled some of them with her claws.
She breathed deep and slowly. This wasn't the first time Jade Chan hurt people, or took lives. But when she had done so in the past it hadn't felt like this. There had always been... a burning feeling, so to speak, in her stomach every time she had killed before. In every battle, every confrontation, even when she had killed those guards at Fallbottom, that burning feeling had been there.
That hadn't been the case now. While she had been furious, these kills had been... Cold. Mechanical, even. And it was with that same cold feeling within her that she began approaching the last surviving bandit.
"No... No, please... Please..." he said, still trying to crawl away from her. He stopped moments after, instead choosing to focus all his efforts into begging. "Please... I had no choice... I didn't want to... But I had no choice... I..."
Jade glared at him when he said that. "You didn't want to?" she asked him, voice full of scorn, when she reached him. "But you did. You all did. You killed good people. People who've got nothing. People who're hungry and poor. People that had families. And you took what little they had."
The man stopped suddenly stopped sobbing. Then he met Jade's glare with one of his own. "You… Don't you dare to lecture me! They were hungry and poor?! Why in the Light's name do you think we've been doing this?! Do you think I'm not poor?! Do you think I don't have a family?! Do you think none of us did?! And you killed us! Shapeshifter! Beast! Monster!" he yelled. "You're just a monster!"
And then the cold anger within Jade's chest gave way to boiling fury. The scars that ran across her back began itching and, for just a second, she could've sworn that Alistair Tharquin was standing right next to the fallen and crippled brigand, staring at her with those hateful, merciless eyes of his.
Monster, the apparition seemed to say without needing to use a single word. You are a monster. An animal. Don't you see? I was right. You have proven me right, little Beast.
And then Jade breathed, and the boiling fury and Old Worm's apparition were gone as easily as they have come. Jade knelt down and stared at the fallen bandit's face. The man had begun crying again. Jade then lifted her right hand and partially shapeshifted her fingers into claws.
"Fine." she said.
"W-What…?" the man asked, voice trembling, any semblance of bravado having evaporated from his voice.
"I said that it's fine." Jade Chan said, shrugging. "Call me a monster. A lot of people have called me a monster. And I've got a feeling that far more people will call me a monster. But it's alright. It's okay if I'm a monster. And you wanna know why? Because I'm beginning to think… that someone's gotta be. In a world like this."
Jade slashed the man's throat. He died before she stood up and shapeshifted her hand back to its regular, human shape. Then she distanced herself from the corpses and stared into the horizon. She didn't really knew if killing these people had really being the right choice… but she knew that they wouldn't harm anyone ever again. That village, the people that traveled through these roads, and any other innocent these bandits may have assaulted had she not killed them… Now they wouldn't be harmed. Now they would be safe. And it was in that very moment, after so many days in the wild, that Jade Chan found some sense to the pain she had been through. She finally had an idea about what to do. She had finally found an answer to all those questions she had been asking herself.
Yeah, she thought. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do from now on. Protect Meridian. Protect its people. Protect my family. My friends. Protect what Uncle had died to protect. Protect everyone I love. Whatever it takes.
And as if Meridian itself wanted to acknowledge and reward her new vow, sparks of bluish-white electricity began to travel through the air. Moments later, a Portal in the Veil had opened right in front of her.
Jade stared at it for the next few seconds, surprised at how timely the appearance of the swirling vortex of energy had been. Then she jumped straight into it. When her feet touched the ground again, she was greeted by the familiar sight of the streets of Heatherfield.
Earth. Heatherfield.
The Silver Dragon's basement
Tohru was tired. Extremely tired. Then again, all of them were. Jackie, in particular, looked like he was going to pass out from exhaustion at any moment. But who could blame any of them? They had been searching for Jade, non-stop, for almost two weeks.
Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia, Hay Lin, Jackie, Viper and himself had gathered today, as they had done each single day since Jade's disappearance, in the basement of the Silver Dragon. And today, just like in each of those days, they hadn't found her.
"So, nobody's had better luck this time around?" Will asked tiredly, and everyone shook their heads in order to answer 'No'. The redhead sighed.
"This doesn't make any sense." Taranee declared, taking her glasses off, cleaning them with her shirt, and putting them back on. "I know how big Meridian is, but we've been searching for days, each in a different are lately. We should have found a clue about where she is by now. Someone that has seen her, or that's met someone that has seen her."
"I talked with Caleb today, and while he couldn't send as many people on a search as he would've liked to, he told me it's weird they haven't found anything." Cornelia informed them. "Not even Elyon's been able to find anything about Jade, and according to what Mrs. Lin told us about how Hearts and their wielders work, that makes no sense."
Yes, that was something that worried the large Chi Wizard as well. When Jackie had first told them about Jade jumping into that Portal and they had traveled to Meridian, Tohru had cast every single tracking spell he knew about. Of course, each of them was utterly useless in finding Jade. At first, Tohru had blamed himself, and his lack of experience with Chi Magic compared to his late Sensei. But then they had turned to Elyon Brown… and she hadn't been able to find Jade, either. Which, as Cornelia had noted, should be impossible. Elyon, while still far from having mastered Raw Magic, was the wielder of the Heart of Meridian. For her, finding someone within Meridian itself should be as easy as simply willing it. So the fact that she had been unable to find Jade meant that, either Jade had access to chi spells powerful and advanced enough to hide her presence from a Heart-wielder (which was very unlikely) or… Or…
Or there was something, or someone, out there hiding her from them. Something or someone with enough power to rival the Heart of Meridian, and that didn't want them to find Jade. Which was only a theory that Tohru had come up with as of late, and that he hadn't voiced (everyone was worried enough already); but the possibility of it being true was there. And it terrified him.
"What if… What if we haven't been able to find her because she isn't in Meridian anymore?" Hay Lin wondered, bringing up a possibility as good as likely as the one Tohru had thought about.
"Where could she be, then?" Irma asked, rubbing her temples. "Here? On Earth? Where on Earth? Heatherfield? Or in the other side of the world? Can a Portal leave her anywhere that isn't Heatherfield?" She sighed louder than Will had done. "Guys, I… I think we should tell this to my dad. To the police, I mean. You know, that Jade's disappeared. I know we can't tell them about all the Guardian stuff, but… it could help."
"I'm calling Captain Black, then." Jackie Chan said, suddenly. The Japanese Chi Wizard wondered how many hours his friend had been able to sleep today, if he had slept at all. "Section 13 has far more and better resources than Heatherfield's Police Department does. And I'm telling him everything. About the Guardians, about Meridian, about Jade, and about what really happened to Uncle. I should have told him a long time ago."
"What?" a dumbfounded Will asked.
"Easy there, love." Viper told the archeologist. "I thought we all agreed not to tell Captain Black about the whole 'There's actually a bunch of other populated and magical worlds out there' because we don't know how his higher-ups will react to that information?"
"I don't care." Jackie said, almost scathingly, pulling his phone out of his pocket. "The only thing I care about now is finding…"
Before Jackie had the chance to finish that sentence, the door to the basement opened, and Yan Lin descended the stairs as fast as she could.
"Grandma?" Hay Lin asked with worry, approaching the Chinese old lady and putting a hand over her back. "Is something wrong?"
"No, no, everything is alright, but… Well, it's better if you see her yourselves." she answered, then she pointed to the stairs.
Her? Tohru thought. And for the first time in days, his heart was filled with hope.
Another woman walked down the stairs. A teenage girl. And although she was dressed in dusty meridianite clothes, and her hair was unkempt and dirty, it was impossible for everyone within that basement to not recognize her.
"H-Hi." Jade Chan said awkwardly once she reached the end of the staircase. "It's me. I'm... I'm back."
For the following seconds, there was only silence. Then, Jackie Chan, followed first by Irma Lair, then by the other four teenage girls and finally by Tohru and Viper, rushed to Jade's side and embraced her tightly.
"Oof… Okay, a hug." Jade whispered while her uncle's and friends' arms tightened around her. "A hug's good."
Then came a stream of questions from her friends, mostly variations of 'Where were you?' or 'Are you alright?'. Tohru heard no word come out of Jackie's mouth, though. He was crying.
"It's okay, I'm fine…" Jade said, unable to free herself from the embrace. "I said I'm…"
"It's alright." Jackie said at last, voice trembling. "It's alright. You are home, Jade. You're home."
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm… I-I'm… H-Home…" Jade said. Her voice had begun trembling, too. She tried to fight it for a few moments, her body shaking slightly, but in the end, she surrendered.
And so, in the arms of her family and friends, Jade began to cry.
"I'm sorry!" Jade said between sobs. "I'm sorry I left! I'm sorry, Jackie! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
Nobody said anything else. They remained there for a while, hugging each other, and letting the girl cry as much as she needed. For those tears were not bitter. Those tears were a good omen. They meant that, after everything that had happened, after everything she had said and done…
Jade Chan could still cry.
Maybe… Maybe everything wasn't lost yet.
Right…?
Within the Ben-Shui Chosen One's shared soul
"Where is Norton?" Murasaki demanded to know.
They all had gathered once more, Rasputin, Báthory, Tepes, Murasaki and old Ben-Shui. All of them floating in the multicolored, endless void that Jade Chan's inner world manifested as. All of them but Joshua Norton, who was nowhere to be found. Their first incarnation, eyes closed and legs crossed in a lotus position, floated just in front of the rest of them.
"I don't know." Ben-Shui answered calmly.
"What does it matter?" Rasputin wondered. "The girl is safe. That is what is truly important."
"Regardless, I did feel something strange a while back." Báthory declared.
"The girl nearly died." Ben-Shui declared, voice still as calm as the surface of a lake in a windless day of summer. "It would have been strange if we didn't feel anything weird."
"Everything has returned to normal, then." Tepes said. "Well… at least something interesting ought to come out of this. Back to waiting and see how it all unfolds, then." he added, leaving afterwards.
Rasputin followed shortly after, and Báthory was next. Murasaki lingered for a few moments, looking at Ben-Shui. It… unnerved her how calm he had been through this entire ordeal. Even if their latest incarnation had returned to her family, she had almost died, and her intentions regarding the fate of Meridian were foreboding, to say the least. Yet Ben-Shui hadn't voiced his worries regarding the matter, if he had any.
"Are you… alright?" the poetess asked of the old man.
"I feel… at peace, Murasaki. I think I truly feel at peace for the first time in a long while." the blind old man answered calmly. "I can't explain it. And even if I could, I don't think you would understand."
"Very well…" Murasaki said, not knowing how to interpret those words, and leaving afterwards.
Ben-Shui was left alone. And when he made sure that none of his incarnation were around him, he lifted his hands and held them in front of his face. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes. Each of them was an orb of pure blackness. No sclera, no iris, no pupil. Just black. Just darkness. Just shadows.
"I can… see." Ben-Shui said. Then he began chuckling. The chuckle evolved into laughter, and then into a mad cackle. "Ahahahahah! I can see! Ahahahahah! I can see! I can see!"
"I can see!"
?
Hello?! Is someone there?! Can someone hear me?! Anyone?! It's me! Joshua Norton! Hello?! Please! The darkness, the shadows… they took me! They took me, and… And there was something in the darkness, in the shadows! Something terrible! And I think that thing, I… Oh, Lord… I think… I think…
I think It ate Ben-Shui.
Guardians, Wizards and Kung-Fu Fighters
Genesis of Evil
The End
A/N: And… it's done. Holly crap, it's done. I can't believe it's done. Anyways, like always, thank you for being so patient, hope you enjoyed your read, leave me a review if you feel like it. Also, now I find kind of funny that one of the reasons I decided to not write the Camelot chapters was that the threatened to reveal an important twist, yet here I reveal probably the most important detail of the story's cosmology… Oh, well.
Anyway, this marks the end of the Genesis of Evil epilogues, and the true ending of this first season of Guardians, Wizards and Kung-Fu Fighters. I have decided to publish the second season separately, as this one is big enough already as it is, and you will see the first chapter (or maybe even first couple of chapters) of that tale published here by Christmas, if not sooner.
And having said all that, I would like to thank all of you there, at the other side of the screen. Thank you very much for sticking with this story of mine until this moment. I don't think I'd have been able to finish it without you. And I promise, the best is yet to come.
Have a nice day, be safe. Goodbye, and until next time.