Chapter Text
Bleeding out, chopped up like some badly butchered animal, Xue Yang dies in the dirt.
He wakes up with a start, between soft silk sheets, golden sunlight streaming through the windows to glint off the equally golden detailing of the beautifully carved ceiling.
“What,” Xue Yang says, staring at the… everything, “the fuck..?”
***
As far as alleys go, this one’s not too bad – there’s a nook in a corner behind some discarded bamboo crates, making for a protected little nest, and it isn’t raining, or even too cold.
A-Qing opens her eyes and stares into the thin stripe of blue sky visible between the roofs above.
There are people nearby, outside her little alleyway – she can hear them bustling about, talking and calling and herding noisy animals around, hawking their wares and all other things people do. She keeps staring up at the sky, feeling heavy and light at once, shivering.
She’d forgotten what it feels like to be alive.
She’s never paid much attention to how reincarnation’s supposed to work, but surely this isn’t how it usually goes – you’re supposed to be reborn as a baby, if nothing else, she’s pretty sure of that part. Not just… waking up behind some backstreet corner on an unforgivably ordinary day. And there’s something about some afterlife bridge, isn’t there? And soup and forgetting all the memories of your previous lifetime...
She stares up at the sky and swallows, blinking away tears that just keep on coming.
She remembers everything.
Clutching her hands tighter around her bamboo stick, she cries for a bit, before wiping at her face with her dirty, threadbare sleeve and clambering to her feet to take stock of her surroundings. Being alive again somehow is well and good, but she hasn’t forgotten how careful you must be, always, if you want to stay that way.
She sneaks up to the mouth of the alley and peeks out – it looks like an ordinary small town market street like dozens, maybe hundreds of others she’s seen. This could be anywhere. Except maybe Yi City – she lived there long enough that she’s sure she would have recognized any part of it even from just a glimpse, longer than anywhere she can remember ever staying in any one place.
She angrily wipes her eyes again.
The Coffin House had been home. It had been home, and Daozhang had been family, and even that snake of a…
The thought makes her stop and hold her breath, a wave of impossible hope and fear crashing over her. If she’s here, alive again… Is Daozhang out there, too?
And what about the bad man?
She clenches her hands on her bamboo pole like she could strangle the life out of it, wrings it between her hands until they’re shaking. He killed her. And it hurt so much, eyes sizzling and melting in their sockets, an explosion of blood and agony in her mouth, and then…
And then…
She leans her back against the nearest wall, sobbing for breath, heart beating frantically like some little animal’s as she remembers what it is like to die. Most of all she just wants to go back to her little nest in the corner, curl up tight and pull her tattered robes over her head and never remember these awful, awful things again.
But if Daozhang is out there, he needs her help.
The bad man hurt him, too.
Lemme tell you what you should do with bullies, he’d told her, with that unnerving too-wide smile of his. Sharpen your stick, poke out their eyes and cut up their faces! Then they’ll see who’s ugly!
She stares at her bamboo pole and narrows her eyes, setting her jaw. Maybe it’s not a bad idea, getting her hands on some sort of weapon. She won’t let herself get hurt again, won’t let anyone hurt Daozhang either, if he really is out there.
But first she has to find him.
She draws a deep, deep breath and holds it until her chest starts aching, then lets it out with a whoosh and steps out of her alley, tapping her pole ahead of her, eyes wide-and lost-looking.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, excuse me…” she mumbles pitifully in the general direction of a promising mark, an old woman with a reasonably kind-looking round face. “I’m blind and I walked all night… Will you please tell me where I am?”
***
He still has his right hand.
At first, he figures that backstabbing rat Su She must have come back for him after all, hauling his unconscious body along back to Jinlintai to be put back together, still too useful to be left behind to rot.
But his right arm is still there, unblemished, no stitches visible, as strong and flexible as ever. Doesn’t even hurt. Like it never was chopped off at all.
Jiangzai rests up against the side of his bed, in its scabbard. He hasn’t seen that scabbard for a good ten years, not since his hasty flight from Jinlintai where it got knocked out of his hand during one of the first skirmishes and he’d been forced to leave it behind to outrun Jin Guangyao’s assassins. The first group of assassins, at any rate.
Xue Yang glares at the sword, chewing his lower lip.
This is Jinlintai, that much is clear. But not the dungeons or back-rooms or even Jin Guangyao’s bedroom with its secret chamber, or any of the other shady places he’s slithered through on his last few visits to Lanling. This is his room, the room of a prominent guest disciple. It’s been a good ten years since he saw this place, too, but he remembers it well enough. He’s fairly sure there will be candied ginger in the bowl on the table by the window – or at least there used to be, then.
It makes no sense.
Not one to face an unknown and potentially threatening situation in his underwear, Xue Yang leaps out of bed and starts looking for his clothes. They're where they’re supposed to be – were supposed to be – and they're what they were supposed to be, too. Ivory silk with warmer yellow details, a Jin peony picked out in gold thread on the chest. He holds the robes up and stares at them for a moment before putting them on.
They fit perfectly. It feels like they shouldn’t.
Sure enough, there’s ginger candies in the bowl. Very much one to face an unknown and potentially threatening situation with some sugar in his system, he grabs a handful and shoves all of them into his mouth at once – it’s been a long time since he’s had the really good stuff. Chewing, he slides Jiangzai into the qiankun fold of his leather vambrace and goes to find someone to carve some answers out of.
***
He dies in the dirt, and he wakes in the dirt.
His fingers twitch, digging into the ground on their own accord, an enormous shapeless dread building inside until he can’t breathe.
He died, killed himself, put Shuanghua’s cold blade to his own throat, the only way out left to him. If he’s not dead, then…
“Please,” he whimpers hoarsely, throat so tight he can barely make a sound.
If he’s not dead, he failed. Or worse, if he’s not dead, Xue Yang must have made sure he wouldn’t escape so easily. Grabbing hold of him and forcing him back into himself, despite his best efforts at tearing his soul into pieces as he died, recreating him as something monstrous and unnatural to keep tormenting him even after death.
Like he’d done to Zichen.
Xiao Xingchen makes a small, broken sound and starts crying.
Everything remains quiet, no prowling footsteps or taunting laughter nearby.
It takes a long time for him to realize that he can smell living earth over the blood-stench of his tears, that the slow breeze rustles leaves, not fluttering funeral decorations.
Digging his fingers deeper into the dirt – soft, rich-smelling soil, alive, not the dusty gravel of the Coffin House courtyard - he breathes, trying to control his sobs.
He doesn’t understand.
When nothing happens for a long time - just the quiet breeze, birdsong, his own uneven breathing, he finally sits up. His hair snags on the branches of some nearby shrubs, and he blindly gropes around to pull free, uses his fingers to unsteadily comb some stray leaves out of his hair, then lets them trail down to his throat, trembling, to touch the unbroken skin there. Smooth, dry, no gaping gash, no stickiness of blood.
Like none of it ever happened.
He forces himself to breathe, calm deep breathing, moving spiritual energy in and out of his lungs, grounding himself. Focusing.
He is alive.
He is whole, in a way that should be impossible, given the ghastly nature of his self-inflicted wound.
This is not Yi City – if anything, this place feels like any of the hundreds of roadside groves and glades he’s rested in while he was wandering for all those endless years, unmoored and alone.
And he is alone.
He keeps breathing, agonizingly slow, until the racing of his heart slows, the blood slowly drying on his cheeks, the bandage across his eyes sticky and awful.
Breathing, and thinking.
Life is a cycle that every living thing goes through – life, death, rebirth, the lunhui wheel of samsara, ever turning. The actions of one lifetime affecting the fate of the next, forever and ever until ascension or final release.
But some rare times, Baoshan Sanren had told him, some rare times, something so cataclysmic happens, a perversion of the very fabric of the Universe so wrong that it tears the wheel itself apart, keeping it from fulfilling its full rotation until it’s been mended enough to turn again.
Maybe, he thinks, shivering in the mild breeze, too unsettled to regulate his temperature, maybe this is his wheel – so badly damaged it rocked back out of the pit where it cracked and came apart.
A chance to move forward more cautiously to avoid that calamity, offering him a second chance to do things right.
To never kill Zichen, or the countless other innocents who had been unable to even beg him for mercy as he mowed them down. Never save the life of a false friend found dying by the wayside, a single kindness breeding such unspeakable suffering. Never condemn a young girl to live through nightmarish horrors just by allowing her close enough to get tangled up in his cursed, miserable fate.
He’s woken up alone, and alone he will stay, the way he should have remained if he’d had any sense the first time around, at least not dragging those close to him down with him in his fall into karmic sin.
He will do better. Be wiser. Wander the world alone – atone, if he can. And pray that this time when his wheel has finished turning, he will have earned his release.
***
The town is called Eling, which means nothing to her. Most of the time she doesn’t bother to stay anywhere long enough to learn the names of the towns and villages she passes through, and the faraway places others have told her about might just as well be up on Chang’e’s moon for all she knows.
But the kind-faced old auntie bought her a steamed bun, and a-Qing gratefully munches it down, leaning up against the corner to her alleyway as she thinks about where to go next.
She needs to find Daozhang - if he's back, too, she can find him and warn him and together they can…
She frowns, chewing, not quite certain what exactly they’ll do if the bad man shows up again, only that she won’t let him hurt them again, not ever, no matter what.
A series of loud noises tears her from her thoughts – just down the street a braying donkey, fed up with his yelling handler’s whip has started rearing and kicking and dancing around, one hoof catching a tower of wicker baskets by a stall and toppling it over, sending dozens of others cascading in turn. A cloud of agitated ducks and chickens explodes out of the broken crates in a whirlwind of clucks, honks and feathers, even as the enraged donkey bellows and charges into a vegetable stall, sending apples and potatoes tumbling all over the street.
From one moment to the next, the market street has erupted into utter chaos, people yelling and screaming, half of them trying to run out of the way, the other half crowding in to help, or at least to snatch up a few free apples.
A-Qing stares, the last chunk of steamed bun hovering halfway to her open mouth, forgotten.
She remembers this! It happened before just like this, just a short while before she met Daozhang the first time: the angry donkey, the ducks and chickens and apples, the noise and yelling and flailing and confusion. She’d used the commotion to snatch a whole pocketful of sweet buns from the nearest cart, a feast for the road once she’d slipped away unnoticed in all the chaos.
There’s no time to think, and she darts ahead to repeat the performance while all the peddlers are still distracted by the tumult, but pauses as something else catches her eye.
It’s not until a long while later, once the rebellious donkey has been reined in, most of the birds captured and the crowd more or less dispersed, that the butcher realizes his cleaver is missing.
***
“Lianfang-zun is in an important meeting and doesn’t wish to be disturbed,” one of the guards outside the door to Jin Guangyao’s private office tells him with a cool look down his nose.
“Too bad for Lianfang-zun,” Xue Yang says with a shrug and kicks the doors open. The guards sputter and flail without actually going for their weapons to stop him, useless, a-Yao should thank him for demonstrating their worthlessness so they can be weeded out. Inside the stocky man sitting across Jin Guangyao’s ostentatious work desk half-rises, gawking.
“What is the meaning of this!?”
“Chengmei..?” a-Yao says with a wide, dimpled smile giving away just a hint of well-veiled alarm, though his voice remains as even as ever. “Is something the matter?”
“We need to talk,” Xue Yang tells him, and now the guards finally recover enough to actually wave their swords somewhat threateningly in his general direction. Not even worth drawing Jiangzai for, utterly pathetic. A-Yao meets his gaze for three long breaths, and whatever he sees there clearly convinces him not to do anything stupid.
“Yao-zongzhu,” he says, turning back to the outraged man across from him, doe-eyes wide and apologetic. “My sincerest apologies – it seems one of our guest disciples bears very important news, to interrupt us so rudely. I would humbly ask that you allow me the time to find out what’s amiss? A-Su and I would be honoured if you would join us for a private dinner later to make up for this unforgivable slight, we can continue our talk then. Please.”
The dimpled smile is so very amicable, almost imploring, and sect leader Yao nods grudgingly, looking somewhat mollified by the blatant ego-stroking.
“Very well,” he huffs, climbing to his feet. “But you may want to discipline your disciples better, Lianfang-zun, to teach them proper manners!”
“Of course,” Jin Guangyao says, rising as well, bowing and gesturing the self-important fool out the door with all the subservient elegance of a gentleman, or the most expensive of whores. “I thank you for your wise counsel, I will see to it at once. You may leave us,” he imperiously tells his useless guards, and if Xue Yang knows him at all, they’ll be without a job before sunset, quite possibly without heads by sunrise.
“You seem very agitated, Chengmei,” a-Yao says, turning that little smile on him, all genuine concern, gesturing at the empty seat the sect leader just vacated. “Won’t you sit down and tell me what’s wrong?”
“What date is it?” Xue Yang interrupts him abruptly, barely resisting the urge to pace, hating not knowing what’s going on and wanting very much to pass his discomfort on as far and wide as possible, preferably with a blade. But getting answers out of dead people is a lot trickier – not impossible, just trickier – so he forces himself to meet a-Yao’s smile with one of his own for now.
Jin Guangyao blinks exactly once, which is still an expression of severe bewilderment coming from him before he smiles again.
“It’s the fourth,” he says, almost sympathetically. “Wuyue fourth. Have you forgotten to sleep again?”
“Fine, sure, but what year?” Xue Yang asks, turning sharply to glare at him, and Jin Guangyao blinks once again.
“Rooster,” he says, more slowly. “Has something gone wrong with one of your… projects, to affect you this way? If there’s something I should know…”
Xue Yang laughs, and it sounds just slightly hysterical even to his own ears.
Ten years off. He wishes he had a spell to turn back time like that, that’d be a really useful trick to know! The things he could do with a spell to turn back time itself…
He freezes.
He doesn’t have to. If this is really the fifth month in the year of the rooster, time has already turned back. If it is, it’s only a few weeks before he first…
Something else hits home.
“Wuyue fourth,” he repeats, sharper, laughing a much nastier laugh. No wonder Jin Guangyao looked so alarmed when he came storming through the doors. “That makes it, what, two days before I’m scheduled to die?”
A-Yao goes pale, but the smile doesn’t waver, just stretches a bit further, his cheeks dimpling deeper with apprehension you’d have to know him very well to see. And as it happens, Xue Yang does know him very well, and his panic is plain as day.
“Oh, a-Yao,” he says, letting his voice drop sad and disappointed even as he calls Jiangzai to his hand, pointing it at Jin Guangyao’s face. “And here I thought we were friends.”
“Chengmei… You seem very confused,” he says, voice barely wavering at all, just concerned, soothing. “Have you worked too long without rest again? Is there anything I can do to help…”
He shuts up when Jiangzai’s sharp point digs into the vermilion mark – the tiny trickle of blood dripping down Jin Guangyao’s nose makes it look like the paint is running, and Xue Yang laughs again, shaking his head.
“Help? You’re about to have me killed. That’s not very helpful, a-Yao.”
His drink had been drugged, he recalls, or he could have taken that first band of assassins out, easy. But he’d been dizzy and disoriented, taking a few nasty blows and having to leave poor Jiangzai’s sheath behind as he made a pretty pathetic break for it. He hadn’t been drugged for the second, or third ambush, granted, but there had really been quite a lot of them. His side and thigh twang sullenly with the remembered phantom pain of wounds he hasn’t even suffered yet.
“Don’t,” he says absently as Jin Guangyao’s hand twitches for his belt, the hidden sword there, and he obediently freezes. The guards are just outside the door, but they both know he could lop Jin Guangyao’s head clean off before he even opens his mouth.
He’d been pretty out of it when he left Jinlintai, Xue Yang remembers, but though he ran far – made it almost all the way back home to Kuizhou looking for a place to lie low – it can’t have taken that long. If he leaves now, he should be able to make it to that stretch of road outside Yi City with time to spare.
And maybe. Just maybe…
“You know what,” he says, lowering Jiangzai, and Jin Guangyao’s eyes track his every move like a rabbit watching a coiling snake. “I think maybe you can help me, after all.”
“What are you thinking?” Jin Guangyao asks, voice even and polite, even though his eyes are wide and dark. Not so much afraid as simply very, very aware of the danger he’s in.
Xue Yang laughs again, a bit unsteadily.
“You want me out of your hair, and as it happens I have more important things to do than hang around here, anyway. There’s an old friend I’ve been dying to catch up with, and I think I know just where to find him! But being horribly murdered would really fuck up my plans. So how about you call your assassins off, I’ll disappear, you can tell everyone I’m dead, and maybe I won’t have to cut your guts out and strangle you with them right here and now after all? What do you think?”
Jin Guangyao winces ever so slightly, and elegantly – but slowly, not being an idiot after all – produces a handkerchief from his sleeve to dab away the thin trickle of blood from his forehead, wiping off the red vermilion dot in the process. It’s such a small thing, but it makes so much of a difference, like wiping off the veneer of Lianfang-zun Jin Guangyao, letting just a flash of good old practical Meng Yao shine through.
“That does sound like a more desirable outcome, all around,” he sighs. “I do prefer my guts on the inside, and strangling is such an unpleasant way to go.”
Xue Yang laughs, amusement genuine, and lowers Jiangzai further.
“I could make it far worse than strangling,” he shrugs with a smile. “Maybe I should, you backstabbing snake, for double-crossing me!”
Jin Guangyao gives him a look that just looks tired more than anything.
“Chang Ping is under Jin protection,” he says, rather sternly for someone still bleeding. “It was the deal for him recanting his testimony, our sect reputation hinges on it. I can’t let you have him.”
Xue Yang blinks, the faintest thrill of want stirring. Faint and easy to set aside – for now.
“Not the old friend I was talking about,” he says, “but thanks for the reminder!”
Jin Guangyao gives him a look of well-veiled curiosity, then carefully folds his elegant hands on the desk in front of him, all business again.
“If you cause that kind of trouble, as chief cultivator I will have no choice but to act against you,” he says, “And if I let you walk away, you can’t ever come back. Should anyone ever learn that you’re alive once you’ve been declared dead, it would end badly for both of us. You’d have to at least try to keep a low profile, Chengmei.”
Xue Yang shrugs and sheathes Jiangzai, suddenly buzzing with restless energy, the need to move, to get going.
“You just worry about keeping your assassins off my back and let me worry about the rest. And really, do keep your assassins off my back! I know where you sleep.”
Jin Guangyao gives him a flat glare and he meets it with an unrepentant grin. He’s being nice here, letting a-Yao off easy. Anyone else betraying him like that, he’d be busy slicing them into a thousand bloody ribbons by now! But he guesses Jin Guangyao did actually end up helping him, once everything’d gone to shit and he came crawling back, asking pitifully for Yiling Laozu’s research notes back. That counts for something.
Xue Yang’s never had a lot of friends, and the fact they’ve all tried to kill him one way or another is… really just the way things are. He can be merciful, for a friend.
“You’ll want to get going, Chengmei,” Jin Guangyao says, almost snippy, folding the handkerchief and putting it away in his sleeve again. “Zewu-jun and the other sect leaders will arrive for the upcoming cultivation conference in three days time, and I want to be able to tell them you’ve been properly dealt with by then.”
Xue Yang laughs and gives a cheerful wave, a light and bubbly sensation a more idiotic person might have called hope making him light on his feet, almost giddy.
“Already on my way! Have a good life, a-Yao!”
“You, too, Chengmei,” Jin Guangyao sighs, looking oddly wistful like maybe he’s a bit happy about not having to have him murdered after all. “Farewell.”
Xue Yang yanks the doors open just as forcefully as he kicked them in earlier, making the guards outside jump again, but he doesn’t even see them.
Too excited to even stop and grab some food for the road, he hurries out of Jinlintai, just far enough outside the central wards to get on Jiangzai to take to the skies.
There’s a dusty road lined with overgrown ditches somewhere far to the west, leading to a miserable little dreary city no sane person would ever wish to call home, and there’s nowhere in the world he’s ever been more eager to go.
***
He wakes up nearly choking on his own tongue, a thick and heavy and utterly unfamiliar weight in his mouth.
Song Lan sits up with a start, a hand going to his heart – his beating crescendo of a heartbeat, hammering away inside his chest like the roar of a waterfall or the thunder of an earthquake – though he already knows what he’ll find.
There are no pouches resting inside his robes, his clothes fitting flat and flush against his chest. His breath catches, his eyes tearing up, disbelieving awe and agonizing hope swelling and swelling and swelling inside his chest until he thinks he might just burst with it.
It worked.
***
It feels if not good, then at least right, wandering the roads of the world again the way he once did – the way they once did – helping anyone and everyone in need. It takes some time for him to learn to trust Shuanghua’s senses again, getting scratched up pretty badly by a number of evil beasts and vicious creatures before he feels confident enough in his ability to tell them apart from poisoned innocent humans to really fight back.
But he learns, and he steels himself, fights with reckless abandon, ridding the world of evil as he goes. In his weaker moments, he thinks of the story of the monk and the butcher, and wonders if it can possibly be so simple, that merits and sins can be portioned onto their respective scales so easily, and that with enough time, the former can simply outweigh the latter.
That maybe, maybe, given enough time, the good he can still do may finally outbalance the unforgivable sins tarnishing his soul.
Maybe, he thinks, comforting the little girl he’s brought back from death’s door, having cleansed her tiny fevered body from snake-poison, knowing that she will live, and that if he hadn’t been here she would not.
Maybe, he thinks, throwing himself into night hunt after night hunt, spattered with the blood of man-eating yao rather than men and women begging soundlessly for mercy at his feet.
Maybe, he hopes, and feels horrible for hoping, that the good may yet outweigh his sins and set his soul free.
***
She recognizes the stream, and hurries her steps – it’s not far now!
Just in case it’s important to get everything right to make the chance meeting happen a second time, she takes care to do everything exactly the same this time around.
Almost walks into a tree, expertly missing its towering bulk with her tapping bamboo stick, to be “saved” by the helpful women kindly offering her food for lunch even as they gossip pityingly behind her back.
She reaches the small town, so excited it’s hard to remember to walk slowly and letting her cane lead the way. The sleazy man with the near-empty money-pouch approaches, and she’s tempted to just let him walk past, but just in case it’s important to do things the same way as last time, she bumps into him and relieves him of the purse all the same. He grabs her butt under the pretense of guiding to her to a calmer side street, and she grits her teeth and thanks him with a stiff smile, then darts out of his sweaty grasp, eagerly scanning the street up ahead.
It’s here, it’s right here, and he should be here, any moment now!
There are fewer people here than on the main street, and Daozhang is tall and easy to spot even in a crowd, especially in his white robes, but she can’t see him yet. Maybe she hurried away from the creep on the market street too fast, she thinks, rising up on her toes to see better.
She waits for a long time, her excitement slowly turning into worry and finally a heavy rock in the pit of her stomach.
Somehow she’d been so certain Daozhang would be here, just like last time, and now that he’s not, she feels like someone’s punched her hard in the guts. What if he never came back at all? The bad man kept muttering about Daozhang’s soul being broken, all those years she’d skulked around Yi City as a half-dead thing.
Maybe he was too broken to come back.
There’s a growing lump in her throat, her eyes going itchy and blurry, and she’s about to slide down the nearest wall and fold in on herself when a strong hand closes on her arm, making her start in panic.
“You! You ungrateful little wretch!” yells the creep from the market street, shaking her violently. “I helped lead and guide you, and this is how you repay me? Stealing my purse?”
He gives her a slap hard enough to make her head ring and shakes her again, and she kicks at him and thrashes in his grip. Last time Daozhang chased him off, but Daozhang isn’t here.
Daozhang isn’t here.
“Okay, okay, you can have it back!” she gasps, trying to pull free. “There was barely anything in there anyway!”
He yanks the purse out of her hand and puts it away, but still doesn’t let go, hauling her along toward a deserted alleyway, and her heart starts hammering, her mouth going dry. He’s going to give her the beating of a lifetime, or… that other thing. She’s heard about what sleazy men do to lonely girls in deserted alleyways.
“No!” she yells and starts fighting harder, hoping someone will see, hear, do something to help her. But people seem not to see, or hear, turning their heads away, hurrying their steps.
“Daozhang!” she screams, crying, hoping that he’s somewhere near after all, that maybe he’s just a little late...
The creep slaps her over the mouth again, and something dangerous sparks alive deep in her guts.
Lemme tell you how to deal with bullies, she hears the bad man say, grinning, and with a roar she yanks the big cleaver out from the folds of her clothes and waves it in her attacker’s face, nicking him good across the nose with it.
He squeals like a pig, clapping his loose hand over his nose to hold back the gushing blood, and she stands up on her toes and bares her teeth, waving the cleaver at his face again.
“Let go of me!” she yells, with all the threat and intimidating fury she can muster. “Or I’ll carve your eyes out and cut up your face, you bully!”
He panics and shoves her away into the wall behind her so hard all air whooshes out of her lungs. There’s a loud horrible crack and suddenly she is blind, the back of her head all wet and weird and sticky, and when the man finally lets go of her bruised arm to skitter away, she slides down the wall like a limp broken doll, unable to stay standing.
There’s a loud rush in her ears, growing louder and louder and louder... And then the world just disappears.