~DEMURE YU~

Yu grew exasperated with his quest.

He blew his bone whistle time and again with no result. The 'Waverunner's' crew, initially timid around him, now took to puckering their lips whenever they saw him on the deck. They whistled lewd tunes behind his back and laughed. Only Captain Zyed remained apprehensive. She scanned the horizon endlessly for the signs of pursuit, losing a bit of her good cheer with every passing hour. Luckily, they were left unmolested. Perhaps Weynala had assumed he'd escaped to Zha Yao's camps with the mages, perhaps she was preoccupied with more important things than one beggar.

Whatever the case, Captain Zyed kept frowning at him, the crew kept laughing, and Yu kept blowing the stupid whistle. Perhaps the demons intended for him to be thrown overboard by his own allies.

On Yu's seventh try after he'd stopped counting them, the sea serpent rose up from the Jade Sea. The success came as a shock.

What now? Do I dive into the waves and climb it like a tree?

The sea serpent saved him from embarrassing himself even more. It slithered over the ship's side just enough for Yu to step into its harness. "Bring us home," he whispered to the serpent's head, hoping that it would go to the stables like a horse.

Yu did not have the greaves that the demon riders wore, and the toxic quills pierced his ankles as soon as he'd mounted. But he forgot about the stinging needles in his flesh once the serpent lifted off the deck, and pushed out into the sea.

The shouts from the Waverunner's crew grew distant. Soon all he could hear were the waves. His serpent swam fast, so the spray blinded and asphyxiated Yu at first, but once he got used to it, the huge gulps of salty air invigorated him. He thought that he belonged in the green-and-grey swells between the sea and the sky.

He felt free.

Of course, it was not all good. The sea serpent cruised the Jade Sea at leisure, not heading in any one particular direction.

Maybe the demons do not keep them stabled. Maybe the sea serpents roam at large. But the harness? It had the harness.

He was getting too weak to let the serpent carry him off to only the Celestials knew where. He had to stir his mount to find the Blood, before the chill and the serpent's poison in his swelling legs finished him off. He could not even heal himself, because he was afraid to fall into the sea while euphoric.

Yu pushed the damp hair out of his mouth with a trembling hand. Tien Lyn's hair bracelet touched his cheek. I am dying. Will you perish with Zha Yao or marry him if I fail? He could not stand either possibility. "Blood?" It came out like a pipsqueak of a lost child. "BLOOOOOOD!"

The towering swells above and around him turned into a mirror-flat surface of a sheltered cove.

Correct. One does not look for the Blood, one calls to it, an ethereal voice said in his mind.

The sea serpent let him off in the surf. His lower body paralyzed, Yu dragged himself by the fingernails out of the tide's way. He laid on his back on the black-sand beach and stared at the sky until the euphoria of healing covered it in the familiar rainbows.

Once Yu regained his senses, he massaged life back into his limbs and stumbled away from the shore into a maze of black rock columns.

Your Progenitor will be your guide, the voice pointed out.

Yu turned a corner and saw a huge gathering of demons. She-demons and he-demons, old demons and young ones. Dark-skinned and fair. With hair red like flames, and like garnets. He looked around, overwhelmed by the choices and started sweating under pressure. Except it wasn't sweat that soaked through his skin, it was blood. Every inch of him got dotted with the tiny crimson droplets. They grew larger and trickled into his eyes, down his back, his arms and legs.

Choose, the voice persisted, and blood flowed faster.

His blood pooled under his feet instead of running down or seeping into the soil. Apparently, he was standing in the bottom of a bowl carved in the black stone, and he bled to fill it up. Yu grew dizzy. He was dying again. He wished his mother would come and save him. Or at least embrace him so he could die in her arms. But he resisted the urge to search for a familiar qi. He remembered all too well how hungrily the Blood leader had looked at him, and how the Blood laughed when they told him they wanted to know the name of his Progenitor. Tien Lyn was right, it did not bode well for my mother.

The blood flow stopped. Yu brought his arms up in front of him, white and empty. Not an ounce of blood was left in his veins, instead, it came up to his ankles, outside him. He touched Tien Lyn's hair bracelet with numb fingers and fell. Blood closed over his head. I am drowning, he thought and closed his eyes. Blood hissed in his ears like the surf in a seashell.

Correct, the voice intoned over it. Blood is the only guide.

"Oh, shut up already," Yu groaned.

He felt dry and warm again, and blood surf went quiet. No more cryptic instructions, no sound of the sea either. He had a premonition that he wouldn't like whatever he was about to see, so he peeked out of one eye. There was nothing to feast his eyes on, but the ubiquitous basalt and purple glow.

Yu sat up, and the stone underneath him jiggled a little. He felt groggy after the bloodbath, but he thought the movement was not just in his head.

A quick survey of his surroundings revealed that he was perched on a round platform about fifteen feet in diameter, suspended in a well. The rocks kept sloughing off the walls, dropping past the platform, and disappeared below without ever making a sound of hitting the bottom. It was lucky that they had missed him while he laid unconscious, because the platform was littered with the smashed-up chunks of rock.

The middle of the platform was occupied by a large glass bowl, also intact. Somewhere far, far above him, two openings let in one shaft of light each. The light threaded its way through metal rings on the opposite sides of the platform, like a silk strand through an eye of a needle, and intersected inside the bowl, making it glow in the dark. Yu had never seen glass so pure and rich in hue.

Careful not to upset the platform's delicate balance, Yu tiptoed to the purple bowl and peeked inside. He found glass lenses of different colours. They were exactly the same size as the metal rings. If he inserted a red and a blue lens into the rings, the light would mix to turn as purple as the bowl.

Too easy.

Yu picked up a rock and threw it at the bowl to shatter it. Among the shards, he found the sharpest one. Sighing, he inched himself forward to stand right over the broken bowl and looked at his bracelet.

"I hope I am right, Tien Lyn. Otherwise, farewell," he murmured to her.

Yu slashed his throat.

The hot arterial blood squirted out and sputtered the stone in a morbid pattern. He pressed down on the wound with his palm. He healed through a lot of pain in his life, and this killing strike felt deceptively mild in comparison to some of his past experiences. But Yu was not fooled by the lure of death. He mobilized every last shred of qi to mend the cut before his heart could pump his life through his fingers.

The platform started floating upward through the onrush of the multi-coloured lights. It was not just the healing euphoria, though his head swam with it. Some of the lights were real.

The movement was real.

Correct, the voice roared and echoed in the well. Correct, correct, correct. The answer is always blood.

A single figure stood at the lip of the well, a she-demon with hair like copper, and qi that he shared. His mother.

"Welcome Yu, descended from Daji!" the demon said watching him step from the platform onto the solid rock.

Yu sensed that this was more than a mere greeting. She acknowledged him, so he prostrated himself by her feet.

Daji pulled him up. "Come along."

They stood in the center of a domed space, circled by endless layers of columns. Beyond the colonnades, he could see nothing but darkness. Daji took the torch from a sconce in the floor and led the way.

Yu did not follow her into the maze immediately. He wanted to ask something for years, and now he'd finally gotten his chance: "Why did you leave me, Mother?"

Daji turned to eye him. "Because Kai wanted you. I would have consumed you."

Good thing I asked! Yu shivered and chose to catch up to his mother rather than throw himself down the bottomless pit. He wondered if he'd come to regret his self-preservation instinct.

Daji cut through the columns hurriedly and veered into an arched passageway that almost immediately opened up on a room with a mural. She stopped to contemplate it, no trace of being in a hurry.

Yu studied important artwork with her. At first glance, the polished basalt was covered with a decorative pattern of silver and gold lines, but then his eyes picked out the bodies, weapons and a few hints of a landscape. The demons warriors were gold, and the humans were silver. No one side seemed to be winning, they just fought.

"This is how the world was conceived," Daji explained. "Demons hunted the humans for qi to grow stronger, and humans fended them off so only the strongest of them would go on. We lived in harmony and respected one another."

"Ah," Yu said.

They left the room and climbed some stairs. At the landing, they faced another mural. His eyes now picked out the figures right away. The golden ones - to one side, and the silver ones - piled up as corpses or kneeling to the new group, traced with another colour, the royal crimson.

"The newcomers are the Celestials. They are nomads, countless multitudes, coming and going through their portals. They opened one into our world and loved it. We, the demons, did not trust them. But they recognized in humans the mirror of their own ambition to spread like locusts." Daji twisted her lips in disgust.

"I stepped through their portal once and met a Celestial," Yu said and bit his lip. Was he boasting in front of his mother? Why? "She said their humours made the humans sick."

"Correct. But humans were stronger back then. Some of them were immune to the Celestials' humours, and they built the First Courts while the rest of their race was diminishing. The Celestials destroyed the harmony. We tried to force them to leave, both with words and with swords."

"But what of the faeries?" Yu asked. "Where were they?"

"Come along," said Daji. This time they squeezed through narrow passages that forked all the time. Yu had no idea how Daji navigated the maze, but she brought him in front of the next mural. On it, the red figures stood apart, and a long line of blue ones made a beeline from them to the silver humans. The silver and blue people fought the golden demonic ones. Of course.

"The Celestials finally noticed the devastation that their presence caused, and tried to make amends. They bred with the First Courts, intending to replenish the humans' numbers, to give their favourite race guardians, and to guarantee their survival."

"The faeries!" Yu guessed. "That's why Sayewa said that we were similar. We are both half-human, half something else..."

"Correct," Daji repeated. "The faeries were created to bear children through an act of will, but they are more fertile with a human lover. Alas, all the children born to them were faeries, and never human. The Celestials never thought of that."

Yu studied the mural some more. "Then the Celestials left our world?"

"Yes. They finally listened and understood the tragedy they had wrought. They pronounced the Final Interdict against entering our world again and poof!" Daji snapped her fingers then motioned for him to come along.

The final mural was a huge map coloured by splotches of silver and gold. Daji pointed out a few larger silver patches: "Alas, the Celestials gave the humans the taste for numbers, and we could not contain them where they could easily sow their accursed fields of millet and rye. Their Empires grew like ant hills with the faeries' fanatical guidance. Luckily, they fail often, once they scourge the land."

"But letting them persist is not a solution," Daji continued. "We managed to keep parts of the world in harmony. Some of our kin even grew despotic enough to form Empires of our own and keep the humans under control. I do not know which abomination is a lesser evil."

Daji sat down and patted the rock by her side. "I've talked enough for now. Tell me how and why you went through the Celestials' portal, son."

Yu did.

She listened without interrupting him, then said incredulously, "You did me a great favour then. Weynala meant the Lament for my ears, and it was unpleasant to hear it endlessly."

"Why?" Yu exclaimed taken completely by surprise. "Why you?"

"The same reason she tried to kill you," Daji said with a wicked grin. "Serene Sister Weynala wanted Kai as her consort. I was hunting the Kneeling Men for qi as we still do for sport. I thought that an incensed faery hunting me down, in turn, would add a bit of thrill to my safari. I paraded him to lure her into it. But your father had an insatiable appetite for thrills, and I carried it too far."

Yu covered up his face with his palms. He felt like crying and laughing at the same time.

"Curse you!" Daji shook him angrily. "You will doom us with your weakness."

Yu was growing tired of it all. "If you wish me to denounce our relation, I will do so."

"You have passed the tests," Daji grit her teeth. "We will go down together, you and I. By giving birth outside the Blood, I thinned the Blood's qi. Now we are both indebted, the Progenitor and the Descendant. You have taken next to nothing thanks to your perverse ways. Even if I were to consume you where you stand, it would not be enough for me to pay down my debt and stay strong. You have squandered my lovers' gift to Kai, son."

"Father liked my ways," Yu tossed his head angrily. His father had never encouraged him one way or another, to heal or to prey. But Yu was certain that his father had loved him.

"My idiot child," Daji sighed. "Are you aware how pitifully little qi you take with each healing?"

Yu shrugged noncommittally. That he took any for himself was news to him.

She would not leave it at that. "You have cannibalized Blood's qi so much that even without today's reckoning you would not be long for the world."

"Do not bury me just yet, Mother," Yu hissed, fighting back tears. "I brought the down payment. Help me, and I might include your hide in my bargaining."

Daji's eyes narrowed to slits. "If that's true, the Blood waits for us at the maze's exit. It is but a short walk. Be ready to haggle as you had never haggled before."

Yu got up to his feet without another word; he was not sure that he could haggle. He was, however, sure he hated Daji as he had never hated before. 

AN: Thank you for making it this far! This final bunch of chapters was labelled 'Yu plays videogames' for a reason, heh. We will stay with Yu on Friday.