On Empty Paths
'She stares up at the moon as though it is a mirror, reflecting the image of herself and her despair alike.'
She thinks she’ll die in this room.
It’ll be the lights, or the sounds, or the heat, she’s overwhelmed with options, each one getting somehow getting more pronounced the more she tries to tune them out. There’s glass clinks and cutlery rattle, there’s glittery chandeliers swaying in the rafters, there’s engine hum and people chatter, AC flow and kettle whistle. The lights paint streaks across her vision, the texture and sensation of the slightly-too-tight dress around her neck starts to prick at her.
Zhilan feels lightheaded, she’s a little hungry too, but her stomach does turns when she passes the food spread out on each table, she has a feeling that she’s not going to be able to keep it down even if she started to steal bites.
The bell behind her rings and she palms the two plates slid under a hatch, squinting at the table number and order codes. She winces at the location, right next to the family head. but she begins to make her way over there, dodging people and coughing out pleasantries in three languages.
Today’s event is nothing especially significant, the one notable thing would be the presence of the Xun family head, but there’s no other festivals, no special invitations, the volume of people pulled from international spheres was just a boisterous show of influence and strength. This kind of power, you’d never guess it when you looked at the family head at first glance. A thin, sharp man, his gaze is piercing, but his expression is frivolous, frustratingly so. He approaches high profile deals and in house executions with the same demeanour he brings to dinners and summers in the south. She recalls other times that he had seen the man, mostly from afar, his presence never diminishing. He showed to some wider family meetings, but always made it to the banquets and ceremonies. He talked slowly, deliberately, she had never heard him stutter. That dead calm smile, never reaching his eyes. The kind of expression on his face right now as she approaches with the dishes.
He doesn’t spare her a glance. she ducks her head and places the dishes on the table. Shakily taking her pen and checking off the items on the slip.
What was the point? Zhilan thought sometimes, the Xun family liked to hire servants from within, a humiliating practice that supposedly had historical roots when the Xun were betrayed by retainers of another family. It was a convenient excuse to maintain a caste. To press their thumb down on the branches of the family that had fallen out of favour. It’s funny, sometimes she likes the work just for the fact no one here cares about her name.
She’s twenty four now, she has cousins that believed that there was hope, treated it as some kind of game. One day, I’ll sit at the head of the table. Just a few more jobs, if she dolled herself up, spoke clearly, and did well, she might have a chance to divert support to her corner.
No, she had no delusions. Just something within, something violent and bright and true, of blood and teeth and horribly human things, she wanted to be in the library, the grand Xun family archive, where she could drown in this history and look for the lady in the moon. She remembers silence, true silence, under the weight of the sky, the infinite eyes of heaven, taking her, the reflection in the amber light.
In here, she would never see the sky, in here, she thinks she might die.
“Hey! You!”
She turns her head, it’s in Huawen, although the pronunciation is decent she can tell it’s not native, it’s a rude intonation, it’s not quite the convention you use when flagging a waiter. The person speaking is standing behind someone seated, likely a bodyguard hired from the Shiba line if she had to guess based on her attire.
“My client here she uh…” The guard’s ears do a flick and she mumbles something searching for the word she needs to use.
Zhilan watches her mime a wiping motion on her face, making exaggerated expressions of cleanliness, it’s a little funny, watching someone with scars like hers do this kind of routine.
She guesses, “towel?” in a Slavic tongue, and the guards face and ears perk up.
“Yes! And some water, thanks.”
She looks down at the client, from the cat lineage, she’s dressed elegantly, but her posture is not, she’s hunched over and covering both ears with her hands. Her face is obscured, but Zhilan can guess what expression she might have.
“Yes, right away.” She speed walks away, sympathetic to the sensory plight the one at the table is experiencing.
Zhilan is about to enter the prep area when things begin to shift—there’s a piece in her brain that falls into place, feels it in her gut, she turns back towards the room.
Near the family head, where she had been flagged by the guard, the client’s gaze is peeking through her arms, suddenly recovering from their ailment. She scans the room, and Zhilan following her gaze leads her to the realization that all of the servants have been sent towards the kitchen or on some kind of errand. Someone pushes past her, she looks in the kitchen and sees people fighting for the towels. There’s an uncomfortable murmur, someone whispers in the Xun head’s ear.
Then the lights go out.
Part of her is happy, one of her senses free from duty, but the larger more rational part of her begins to panic. She gets elbowed in the face and her glasses fall to the floor, she hears a crack and scrambles to pick them back up. There’s a low rumble of murmuring that escalates into shouting, and then screaming. Her glasses are in one piece but there’s shards missing from one of the lenses.
She runs, tripping over chairs and tables, there’s a mass of people traveling towards the doors. Gunshots echoing over the din accelerates the descent. The emergency exit is flooded with people, but she rides the wave and stumbles out of the building. Behind her, one of the grand windows leading into the venue shatters, Zhilan can hear sparking, shouting, there’s people on the streets fleeing from the night life.
It’s an assassination, or an attempted one, there’s someone here to destabilize the Xun, Zhilan thinks. it’s not safe here, it might not be safe anywhere in Huaxia for the likes of her. It might not be a good idea for her to stay here.
She realizes something then. She’s outside, under the sky, city lights be damned she can see it, the stars, the moon. There’s chaos in the night and this may be her only chance.
She runs.
//
It’s a million to one bet that she finds them, the guard and client tucked away in an alley, Zhilan thinks that this kind of luck must be heaven sent, the kind of luck brewed in a crucible of billions, but she’s here and it doesn’t feel like luck today.
“Take me with you.” She’s out of breath, her legs feel like hell, but it’s the most convincing thing she’s said in years.
The Shiba guard’s hand leaves her phone and darts inside her jacket, but the client presses a quick hand onto her elbow, stopped her from pulling a gun on her.
“What?”
“Take me with you.” She coughs, leaning against the wall of the alley. “The event is over, the Xun family head isn’t coming out again.” She raises a finger and points “And you have a way out.”
The guard looks like she has more to say, but her mouth snaps shut when the client gives her hand another squeeze. They exchange looks, it’s oddly comedic watching the guards expressions shift as time passes.
Zhilan has a moment to reflect, maybe she made an incorrect guess that these two had a way out, or were even from out of the country. Putting her own feelings aside, it’s still more likely that she’s going to die in this alley than in that room.
“She’s not going to like this.”
“She’ll be fine. You’ve dropped weirder things into her lap, Katia.”
The guard, Katia, looks like she wants to protest, but the guard smooths it over. Zhilan watches as Katia shrugs off her blazer and tosses it towards her. She barely catches it, looking up at the pair.
“C’mon. The night’s young enough.”
The physical texture of arriving to the harbour is something Rie has always known. Driving behind the wheel and in the sound dampened cabin of her car, the tone of the trip is different from back then, but it is the sensation of the road getting rougher, the lights getting dimmer, the feel of a rural road that held the keys to this small, hidden away corner of her mind.
It’s a persistent memory of sorts, the kind born from routine and repetition. She remembers things in different orders, wandering experiences with only lingering details as clues to their place. Her family came here on vacation in the past, an odd choice in retrospect. The harbour had no publicly open beaches, with only a shoddy boardwalk and occasional local tours to entertain visitors, but it was a tradition to come here, to rent out boats and fish, to walk by street vendors and throw rocks into the clumps of seaweed. She remembers a story she was told, about how the Oni descended the great mountain temples and arrived at the shore to feast every year. A pilgrimage for festivity and a celebration of their service.
Rie came here with family, every year for ten years of her life, watching things change and stay the same, blurring together into a great big smudge of colour, feeling, and flavour.
She still came here, but she’s alone now.
The drive comes to a close and she pulls into a parking space close to a public rest area. She gets out of her car and adjusts her coat, feeling the cool night air before shutting the door. It’s another texture that causes friction in her memories, her home town was often colder in the winter, but they never used to arrive here unless the nights too were blanketed in soft summer heat.
The old vapour lights are dim, barely shining on her as she idly fidgets with the cap of her lighter, debating whether or not to light a cigarette to drown the noise in the air. The moon is high in the sky, slightly obscured by dark clouds but still prominent enough to paint thin streaks over the water. When she comes through and past the initial hill obscuring the harbour, she sees that the boardwalk is empty, she notices construction fencing around the edges of the vendors street, and the empty dock with an open space.
She’s careful about stepping around the lines and nets and pays attention so that she doesn’t fall in making her way to the end. There’s a stool at the edge of the dock, she doesn’t know if it’s public property, or if someone had forgotten it, but she doesn’t sit down on it, not willing to disturb the image.
She stares out into the ocean’s wake, fiddling with the handle of her knife. She inhales the scent and recalls watching her mother fillet mackerel and sea bream with frightening efficiency. Hardly two minutes had passed since the fish was still alive and she had already finished. The memory is fuzzy, she remembers the scent of blood and the sense of wonder she had, but she can’t remember the shape of her hands, what kind of knife she used. She can’t compare her skills now to a shadow.
Rie stands there for a long time, enough for the waves to become noise, for the air to seem normal, long enough for the sensation to be added as colour pools into the crevices of her memories. Patching up holes and smoothing out rougher edges.
She misses it, at least, she thinks she does. The emotions are young sprouts of feeling that don’t break the canopy and lack the ability to cast shadows of their own. She wonders if she misses the idea of it, being here, walking those streets, or if she simply hadn’t understood the reason to celebrate service to others and pointless joys in a world that still felt like she had a place in it.
On the horizon, a shape breaks through the light and begins growing larger and larger as it approaches the dock. It’s not a small vessel, but it’s hardly suited for ocean crossing. Rie watches as it slowly breaks through the waves and arrives to the edge of the dock, under the cover of night.
From inside a voice shouts out, and Rie reaches out her hands to catch and tie the line of this ship to the dock. She sees a familiar shape rise out and drop out onto the dock with some weight as she finishes her work.
“You’re early.” Rie says to the figure.
“Aww, not even a ‘welcome back’?” The figures voice is a little tired, but it has a restless energy that Rie imagines might be common with people in her line of work. The shape emerges from the shadow of the boat and reveals Katia, a woman with dog ears and a heavy coat. Her face has two scars, one going over her right eye and another carving a groove through the left side of her lip. The story as to how she got them is one Katia likes to tell, an inconsistent tale that she told with humour despite the grim subject. Rie wonders if the details had also begun to blur together in her head.
Rie makes a vaguely affirming noise to the sarcastic dig at her lack of hospitality. She throws a sharp nod at the boatman before turning back towards Katia and gesturing back up to shore. “Come on, the car’s parked up there. I have food inside.”
Katia smiles, all teeth, maybe out of habit, or just to show off. But she doesn’t move to follow Rie back to shore. Rie blinks, arms falling to her side.
“What’s going on?” She breaths, she’s perceptive enough to know something’s up, but too drunk on the night air to take wilds stabs at what Katia was hiding.
Slowly, a from shuffles out from the back of the boat, it rises with wobbly legs and hops out of the boat. ‘It’ ends up being a woman, swaddled in a blazer, Katia’s blazer if Rie’s memory held; the rest of her outfit is not fancy or especially ostentatious, but it’s well constructed, there are flairs and patterns that clue in on an origin. Rie traces the line from the collar down and into the side of her chest. A construction she knows is common in—
“Huaxia?”
“Yep,” Katia says, confirming the woman’s origin. She finally begins sauntering over to Rie’s side, almost bored that the reveal that she had smuggled a person out of the neighbouring country wasn’t more surprising. “Picked her up after some things got a little hairy.” She waves her hand to dismiss the gravitas of the story, passing Rie and giving her a sly look, daring her to ask for details.
Rie considers it, meeting her gaze evenly. The details of her story are vague, but she can’t detect the teasing lilt that Katia uses when she has something real to hide. The kind of tone she coughs out when she has a story or a bullet wound in her side. In truth, Rie would like to believe that there was something a little thicker than blood underneath this bridge.
“Alright.” Rie turns towards the woman, holding out a steady hand. “Let’s get you something warm to eat.”
The wind picks up, and the woman stumbles, perhaps still a little off balance from the long voyage. Rie rushes forwards a little to catch her from dropping into the water. Her hands are warm, but the grip is weak, Rie notices the bony definition of their wrist and hisses. The womans muscles tense in reaction, and she recoils from the sound.
Rie doesn’t push, she gently releases her grip and waits for calm to settle in again. She sticks out a leg and drags the stool from the end of the dock over and gently guides the woman to sit.
Closer now, even underneath the dimming lights, she sees deep shadows under her eyes, something haunting behind them that covers her form like a veil. There’s a presence in the deep amber tone that she feels more than she knows.
“What’s your name?” Rie whispers.
“Ah— Zhilan—” The woman clams up, dispelling the words with a rough cough. Again, Rie holds out a hand, watching the furtive glances and fidgets as they try to come up with a response. “My name, it’s—” The moon breaks the silver canopy then, as if lifting the veil over the harbour. Her silhouette dances in the pale light. “It’s Yue.”
Rie feels then that there is an intangible weight behind that, tucked away in a corner of her heart, quietly pleading to be seen.
She squeezes Yue’s hand as response.
“That’s a good name.”
It’s a quiet night on the shore, where the sea and sky meet, where the moon hangs low, where the Oni come to remember, she thinks it might be a fine night for the adrift.
Author’s Note
Like usual, nothing here is perfectly set in stone, in fact, I only just decided on Yue’s old name and had to rewrite sections of it because I initially planned on completely omitting it entirely, but eventually caved and gave her one to avoid awkward writing.
And again, like usual, this passage has existed in some form for at least over a half a year at this point, originally intending to be a short character study centering on Rie only, before the idea of creating an accompanying piece of artwork and bringing both of my primary characters forward ate away at me for a couple months.
This passage is obviously the first time these two meet, both having lived some of their life out before this encounter, I toyed with a lot of ways these two could have met, but something under the moon felt right!
And with that, I have little else to say.
Thanks for reading. Take care, good night.
The text that has been presented contains a very powerful message about love, affection and resilience. It's clear that from the author's point of view, this isn't just a story about suffering, it's about growth.