This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

“Come now, Elder Fan, surely you have something to say in defense of your actions?” Sectmaster Meng Xiao asked. He didn’t expect a response. Truth be told, he was not sure he wanted one.

Black velvet curtains hung down over the roughly worked stone walls, dampening any echoes. A single brazier sat in the center of the chamber, its wan flames casting dim light across the tight confines of the space. Meng Xiao paced, slowly circling around Fan Xiaotong.

“We are a demonic sect after all. I do not think the requirements we place upon those who elect to join us as teachers are too onerous.” Meng Xiao said, his voice slowly rising in volume as he spoke. “We do not require you to pass down the core of your arts. We do not demand of your time beyond what you see fit to give. We allow you great latitude in disciplining those beneath you. We allow you to exploit those seeking your tutelage as you desire, whether you seek labor, spirit stones, or less… orthodox favors in recompense.”

“I do not think it is unreasonable of me to ask, why you decided to kill twenty of my outer disciples!” He roared, his voice shaking the very mountain. It hardly matters. This deep in the heart of the Night, sound and light alike existed and transited at his sufferance.

Fan Xiaotong did not respond. Meng Xiao gestured, and the darkness that filled the chamber retreated, withdrawing back towards the far edges of the room. As they fall back, tendrils of ebony pull Fan Xiaotong’s limbs with them, joints popping as they lash him tighter still against the pillar of stone he is bound to. Viper-thin tongues of shadow lap at the exposed flesh of his feet and ankles, each gentle passage leaving reddened skin that dews with small drops of blood.

“You had to know it would end this way. Nothing that passes beneath the night sky escapes my sight. Were we not kind enough to you? Was your position insufficiently honored? Did you think the blood of our sect might buy you greener pastures among the righteous?”

Meng Xiao’s voice lowered into a whisper as menacing as it was exhausted.

“Has a mere hundred years of solitude allowed the prospect of my wrath to drift into myth?”

At these words, the tongues of shadow at Elder Fan’s feet leapt higher, biting deeper. With each flickering pass, strips of flesh vanish as if they never were, leaving ruby red muscle exposed to the firelight. Finally, Fan Xiaotong breaks his silence, grunting as his legs are eaten away.

At the sound of this, Meng Xiao stops pacing. Turning to face his captive, he sits down where he stood. The dark rises up to meet him, tendrils of writhing shadow twisting and cavorting amongst themselves, assembling themselves into a twisted facsimile of a couch.

“Finally, he speaks.” Meng Xiao said with a mirth as hollow as his wrath. “I’m excited to hear this, truly. Before I erase you, enlighten me as to why exactly you thought this idiocy was a good idea.”

“Heaven frowns upon you.” Fan Xiaotong replied, each word slow and ponderous.

“A dog of the orthodoxy? You spent 41 years among us to throw it all away for the lives of mere outer disciples? You can’t have passed back much of note if we never caught you. Was this an act of desperation? Worried that with your pathetic failure at spying you were doing more evil in our service than you might ever redress?”

The tongues of shadow rose higher, dancing around Fan Xiaotong in a queer parody of a man burning at the stake.

“I was not speaking in the abstract.”

Seven words. With them, the whole atmosphere in the room twisted. Meng Xiao’s good humor disappeared. Fan Xiaotong’s slow speech suddenly changed, his words no longer the last gasps of a dying man, but the weighty cadence of a judge pronouncing a sentence.

“Tian’s patience has expired. No longer can you hide from his eyes. Your pathetic little rebellion dies.”

Shadow raged, black tendrils expanding into great swaths of shadowstuff. In an instant, they surround Fan Xiaotong, then interweave and tighten, closing around him like a flower borne against the currents of time. A moment later, they collapsed inwards, and the center of the room was empty, leaving no sign that Fan Xiaotong, the chains that had bound him, or the pillar of stone he’d been bound to, ever existed at all.

Meng Xiao does not move. Even the riotous threads of darkness that make up his couch seem subdued at the news.

“The Beggar of Barren Paradise, in one of our elders.”

The fire goes out. Meng Xiao sits quietly in the umbral abyss that is the heart of his power, tracing threads of possibility, weighing outcomes.

“Well, fuck.” He finally muttered. “There goes this century.”