Itinay preferred to cultivate at night, leaving her days free. It was easier to contemplate the stars without sunlight in the way, and out of all her sisters she had perhaps the weakest link to the sun. Beyond this, no matter how associated with starlight the sect might be, it remained far more active during the daylight hours. The majority of its members still required at least some sleep and therefore maintained alignment with the ancient schedules of mortal humanity.

  Daylight activity also reduced fuel expenditures for those unable to see properly in the dark.

  This resulted in daytime being the natural period during which to conduct sect business. Not that administering the Textiles Pavilion required a great deal of effort. The sisters had long ago structured the sect so as to automate most administrative processes, leaving them to the oversight of mortal servant families. Such distance from day-to-day matters led to the occasional attempt to cheat the sect, mostly financially, but with the extreme focus and mental capacity available to a cultivator in the celestial ascendancy realm it was a matter of mere minutes to audit a year's worth of accounting. Fraud did not last long, nor was it tolerated. Though incidents were rare, the archives recorded a suitably gruesome list of punishments formulated over the centuries.

  In this fashion, she could evaluate reports filed by subordinate elders, mortal administrators, and any pavilion member willing to dispatch a missive in moments. Responses were composed with almost equal swiftness, the limits of ink-drying speed being far greater than her ability to compose. Itinay was aware that the servant who came and collected her messages every morning found her tower terrifying, but she did not consider such fear out of the ordinary. A little trepidation was good for the mortals, it kept them cautious. It benefited cultivators as well, produced awareness of disparity. That was important, it was all too easy to cause great harm simply by accident.

  She had fought too hard to preserve humanity to let foolish mistakes imperil it again.

  As the work of the sect took little time, she was free to spend her days mostly as she wished. Weapon practice occupied a portion of every morning, memories of warfare and death made it impossible to neglect those essential skills. Such maneuvers were limited, of course. She could not use anything like her full strength, not even if she rose high in the sky. The shockwaves unleashed by full power sparring would threaten to rip Mother's Gift apart. Not since the demon horde incursion had she engaged in battle with true vigor, and she would not do so again until the next. The sisters regretted this, feeling it slowed the development of their weapon arts immeasurably.

  Thankfully, no such imposition of safety measures impacted her weaving. It was this art, composition in thread, that occupied the majority of her daylight hours. Endless time before the loom, contemplating the infinite variability of patterns and colors. She would make, unmake, and remake countless items, always seeking to push her skills in new directions. Most of these productions were small and simple, little squares intended to test designs or color combinations. Blessed with the patience only a true immortal could acquire, she would plan and draft a thousand times before putting forth the fullness of her capability and the true extent of her qi into a fully-envisaged work.

  Her primary focus was, and had long been, tapestries. Itinay made the night sky come alive in thread, and these starry vistas filled the walls of the sect's many public buildings, providing inspiration as well as insulation. Though she preferred the stars, she was not above earning supplemental wealth through works aligned to other themes. Great sweeping rolls filled the walls of pavilions and halls with imagery suited to their specific practices. For a significant inducement she would even change mediums and produce rugs. These, noted for both warmth, softness, and durability, covered the floors of the rich both within the sect and in Starwall City. The overall output was limited, but the works of a grand elder endured for many centuries untouched by decay.

  She was presently at work on such a rug, one that commemorated the most recent victory over the demon hordes. It would, in time, hang in the city's main temple alongside twenty-three others rendered in memory of each assault. This one would be notably less tragic than its kin.

  On the day after Su Yi entered closed door cultivation she was hard at work through the noon hour. An ordinary day, for an immortal, one of countless ones that stretched out like all the others, soon forgotten. This one would be separated from those soon enough by the unexpected arrival of one of her sisters.

  Visitors were not unwelcome. Itinay might relish isolation when conducting her work, but she equally craved knowledge of the sect's ongoing development. As a grand elder she could hardly speak to initiates or disciples and was forced to rely upon reporting from the lesser elders that she supervised. The sisters shared such developments and news among themselves, but slowly, at a pace that would appear glacial to mortal sensibilities. Itinay often craved to know more, though she could not be bothered to take any sort of action to support this curiosity. Certainly she would never develop the sort of spy network Neay had created among the servant families. Such a thing was far too familiar.

  How her sister maintained that network of mayflies remained a puzzle, not in the logistics, which were easily calculated, but in sanity.

  On most occasions the sisters sent messages ahead to alert their siblings before they called upon each other. It was far from necessary, given how easily they could feel each other move about when close by, but they tried to maintain the illusion of courtesy nonetheless. An unannounced visit therefore implied a pretense of secrecy, a meeting that did not exist, even if such a thing was impossible to conceal.

  It could, however, take a while for rumors to filter down to those with less acute senses.

  Of course, every group had those who chose to ignore certain rules. Among the Twelve Sisters, that role fell to Artemay. She never bothered to inform anyone of her comings and goings, and it was she who appeared at the Starwall's northernmost tower shortly after noon.

  Itinay felt her prior to arrival, of course. One advantage of a remote tower was that no one was liable to walk past idly. Any powerful qi signature possessed only one reason to access this point. The anticipation gave her time to put away her weaving and take out her stellar dial board. She hopped up to the open chamber on top of the tower and gave a single wave to her sister as she descended out of the sky. Then she moved to set up the game.

  Like her younger sister, Artemay had blue skin, but in contrast to the pale and glowing Itinay, the older sister was softly dark, with flat-shaded tones, midnight blue hair, and a habit of dressing in outfits of light-drinking indigo. She also perpetually wore a hood over her head, an affectation unique among the immortals of the Celestial Origin Sect. Narrow fingers, pale as ice and bearing long, razor-sharp nails, betrayed her affiliation as an alchemist, as did the red and yellow bands embroidered at the edges of her dress. She possessed dual-shaded blue eyes without pupils, giving her an inscrutable countenance.

  “Good to see you sister,” Itinay motioned to a silken cushion she'd laid out for her fellow immortal. “I did not expect to see you quite so soon.”

  A visit from Artemay was inevitable. In the sixth layer of the celestial ascendancy realm, she stood behind only Iay among the sisters, despite being much younger. Eccentric though she might be, a status she seemed to embraced with hilarity, this only aided her cultivation. Further, as head of the alchemy pavilion, and therefore the supply of pills, she had a certain leverage over the rest of the sect, though she almost never utilized it.

  “Maybe I just wanted to play against you,” Artemay dropped to one of the fine silk cushions with easy grace directly from flight, not taking a single step upon the stones with her silk slippers. Her voice was low and husky, as if speaking through a cloud of smoke. “When it comes to the game board, you are the most challenging opponent available. Orbit race?” She named the most common of the many chase games the elders used to while away the hours.

  Taking the complement, one she had worked hard to earn, Itinay used the opening for a counter-offer. “Sequencer?” This choice was far more obscure. Few outside the sisters even knew it existed.

  “You like that one too much,” the hooded face tossed out one of the mysterious grins for which Artemay was well known, and thoroughly feared. “Agreed.”

  Decision made, their hands blurred as they laid a series of colored disks out onto the complex board. Artemay, who as the guest retained and utilized the right to go first, picked up the dice. The colored polyhedrons flashed in the light as the spectra falling through the atmosphere pierced their hollow forms.

  When they fell, a single long nail moved over and slid a pale red disk around the edge of the dial in an extremely aggressive opening move. “It seems we may have a new elder.” Her initial verbal maneuver was considerably more restrained.

  “That would be beneficial,” Itinay admitted prosaically. She rolled the dice and moved and orange disk inward, similarly mismatched between the tactics of word and piece. It was an old dance, one she knew her older sister enjoyed greatly. “We can always use progress. Though the tribulation is a gamble, no matter what we might desire.” She very much wished it were otherwise, and that there was some way to avoid the matter. Su Yi's choice to purse advancement was a complication she'd anticipated, but did not need and had hoped to delay.

  It the woman perished it would be a tragedy, but it would also be a problem.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Very true, and yet you have hatched an egg not ready to face migration. A little old to start gambling with such stakes, aren't you?” Artemay smiled, slowly expanding it to a smirk. A wicked expression pressed across blue lips. She enjoyed teasing immortals about age, something most never mentioned.

  “Maybe I simply found a set of odds too valuable to pass up,” the catty replies escalated as pieces moved about the board with great speed.

  The Stellar Dial board had begun its existence as the geomantic compass used by ancient cultivators before the coming of the fourth sage to chart qi flows as they moved through great channels deep within the earth. When that purpose became obsolete it was turned to other purposes. Recast to image the vast skies above and the motions of celestial bodies, it facilitated a variety of games meant for elder cultivators. Pieces flew back and forth, responding to commands controlled by a combination of will and the randomness of the dice.

  Dice they rolled merely out of ancient habit. The motion achieved nothing beyond triggering the true randomization.

  For a flickering moment, Itinay wished she could go back to the days when she could roll bones and not know the outcome even as they left her hand. Instead, the immortals relied upon tiny crystals embedded in the dice that were bound using specialized rituals. These reacted to variations in the frequency of light and displayed a number accordingly each time they came to a stop. A necessary manipulation when every participant in the game could toss a die with absolutely perfect accuracy and attain precisely the desired result ten thousand times in a row.

  For the same reason, they could not play games without a random component, having left chess, go, and other such constructions behind long ago. Able to memorize countless thousands of paths in such a situation, pure repetition replaced any use of skill. Devising games that those in the celestial ascendancy realm could play against each other was no easy task, and most of those the Celestial Origin Sect used came from their mother or one of the other sages of the distant past.

  Important work that, it would not do for immortals to grow bored, and gatherings between them required distractions lest tempers flare. Food and drink were not viable options for those who consumed neither, and displays of art that stirred those who could produce daily masterworks were not easily acquired. Thankfully, the sages had supplied them with a great many games and the Twelve Sisters had preserved almost all of them across the madness of the Demon War.

  Artemay had been instrumental in that act of archiving.

  “I admit,” the hooded sister mused as she made an outwardly absurd move that upset the entire structure of the board. “Invisibility is a good trick, I just don't think you've decided on the proper use for it.”

  “At present, I'm not using him at all,” Itinay always made a deliberate effort to refer to Qing Liao as a person. It was all too easy to consider the young man nothing but a tool, and that would be a dangerous mistake. “He lacks the strength to be let loose.”

  “You think we have the luxury to wait?”

  Itinay's hand stumbled at these words, for it was nowhere among the things she'd anticipated her sister saying.?In the same moment, Artemay made another bizarre move, throwing the board into complete chaos. Though this left the older immortal in a vastly stronger position, it erased all influence of strategy in the same act. Now the dice, and their randomness alone, would determine the outcome. All control was gone.

  “Everyone else thinks so,” she struggled to regain equilibrium, relying on consensus even as she knew it to be a weak source of argument that would never serve to convince her iconoclastic sister. “And there is evidence behind it. We won a great victory, in no small part thanks to Qing Liao. The number of enemy immortals is reduced by three. Within a few decades,” hardly an interval worth considering. “The sect will reach true record numbers.”

  “True.” Dice rolls played out rapidly. In the end Artemay lost the race by a single interval. She began to replace the pieces even before the final tally was determined. “But what if we are thinking about everything backwards? Consider, perhaps, that every victory only brings us closer to doom?”

  Itinay grabbed hold of the dice and held them fast. It took great care to avoid crushing the carved quartz constructions in her palm beneath her sudden surge of suspicion. Perfectly still, she made no move to resume the game. “Sister, I think you should explain matters in greater detail.”

  “The Fuming Shade,” Artemay mused. Though deprived of the dice, she used long nails to slide the disks around the circular board. Slowly, they were positioned such that a single move would allow each side to take the other entirely. “I remember that one. I saw him during the war, do you remember? Many times. He loved to blanket formations in ash, shattering them. Back then, he was only in the third layer.”

  After the battle they had checked the archives, confirmed present status against the past. Artemay's assertion was true. The Fuming Shade had acquired three whole layers since the war ended, something he could only have done by plundering other hidden lands. He must have killed elders by the score, including multiple immortals, to gain such new strength.

  “An ambitious man, and cruel.” The musing continued, soft and sly. “Do you think such a man would remain subordinate to another? If he had the choice?”

  It did not take long to grasp the implication laid upon those words. “You think he would have challenged Bloody Roam if he reached the seventh layer?” Itinay thought that unlikely. The Fuming Shade's battle plan had been cautious, careful, almost sufficient to escape the trap. He did not seem likely to make such a reckless gamble. “Cultivation is not the only measure of power. Only a fool would think it suffices to match that monster.” Bloody Roam was among a very few beings with confirmed kills of others standing at the very edge of ascension. He was unmatched in battle, a being even the Entwining Blight had feared. Had he not been so dangerous, the war would have ended very differently.

  “True enough,” agreement came with a soft smirk. “But numbers can overcome the gap. You just proved it.”

  “A coup?” Itinay supposed it was possible. In the old world it was not unusual for sects to collapse through such upheaval, though it usually only happened after a failed attempt at ascension. “But to what end? Why risk their living driving Bloody Roam from his throne of skulls only to rule a wasteland? The master of the demonic cultivators has fewer subjects than I do with one little pavilion.” It was strange, truly, to think that her modest textile workshop trumped the numbers of those who had despoiled the world, but the numbers could not be discounted. “It is not as if they can absorb each other’s qi.” Orgies of internecine violence during the final stages of the demon war had proven that point with extremely explicit results. “Why slaughter their own allies?” The demonic cultivators could not renew their strength. Every one who perished diminished their forces permanently. That truth was the entire foundation of the Celestial Origin Sect's core strategy.

  “So logical,” her hooded sister giggled. “Is that how demonic cultivators think? Don't they all hate and fear each other? Perhaps they consider that threat more important than anything else? Remember sister, we're the odd ones, what others called a strange little cult.”

  Twenty-five hundred years was a long time for matters to remain unchanged. It made it hard to recall, sometimes, how different the old world had been. Artemay's harsh words served to shock those memories free from the deep ice. A world of thousands of sects, all in constant competition, endless squabbling for resources, techniques, talismans, and more. Immortals dueling each other in the skies, even killing each other at times over pointless feuds. World-spanning war restrained only by the truth that such an act would slaughter all the mortals and leave no source of new cultivators.

  It had been a pleasant time, compared to the wastes that now remained, but not an idyllic one.

  Despite the guidance of memory, Itinay could not shift her thoughts all the way to reach the distant frame her sister had adopted for this debate. “So the demonic cultivators fight among themselves. Plausible enough, but does not such internal discord and slaughter benefit us? Should we not rejoice in the reduction of the ranks of the foe?” If someone did realize the dream of the Fuming Shade, launch a coup, and kill Bloody Roam, Itinay would cheer.

  “Normally, yes,” the hooded head nodded. Then, suddenly, Artemay reached down and swept half the pieces off the board. “But there is a critical point. How many demonic cultivators would it take to destroy Mother's Gift? To be absolutely certain of victory?” The wicked smile reappeared. “I know you sister, you've made that calculation.”

  “Twenty-nine,” Itinay gave the answer flatly, automatic. She had indeed run the numbers, made countless calculations. Her mind contained a thousand scenarios attempting to resist seemingly overwhelming force, but none, no matter the most hopeful possible parameters, could breach that wall.

  “Twenty-nine,” Artemay agreed at once. “Well, I have some numbers of my own. I project that not even sixty demonic cultivators remain. Do you think Bloody Roam could rouse them all at once?”

  It was, by any estimation, highly unlikely that such a thing could occur. The demonic cultivators were scattered across the whole of the world, and the world was vast. Such a move would take years of effort at best, and have a significant failure rate. Doubtless some would go so far as to fight back rather than serve in such a mission.

  Recognizing this, Itinay was able to finally grasp the perspective of her sister and unwind the rest. It was a truly frightening projection. “As the numbers fall, it means they must push harder to launch an overwhelming attack, or lose the chance forever.” She almost shivered. “They can't find us alone,” a thin reed of protection, but important. A single scout, approaching too close, without a horde for cover, was nothing more than a sacrifice. They had detected, ambushed, and slain such fools before. “But there have been twenty-four hordes. If Bloody Roam has kept good track,” Itinay found it brutally painful to admit that she truly knew very little of the man, of his intent, and his strategy. “Then he may have guessed we are here. The next horde, or certainly within the next handful, could bring him in force.”

  Should such a thing happen, it was the end. They would make a valiant stand, everyone knew that, but it would be final. The disparity in numbers could not be overcome. Twenty-nine was the absolute limit, and far too hopeful for her comfort. In truth, she doubted they could easily survive an assault of twenty of more. Nine times in ten such an attack would obliterate Mother's Gift and all it contained. Itinay could see it, the contingency that had hung over them for two and a half millennia, the assured doom.

  That their own success would make such an end more likely seemed a poor jest by the heavens.

  She could, and would, develop countermeasures of her own, but with the limited capabilities of concealment talismans their ability to reach beyond the gateway was meager. Only Qing Liao, in time, would have the power to move freely in the Ruined Wastes. “Sister, none of that makes him ready.” Itinay felt terrible sadness settle over her as she said these words. “It cannot be risked.”

  Truthfully, they both knew it. Some things even immortals could not change.

  Long nails reached out and pushed all the game pieces together. Then they made a slow circling motion around them, producing a ringing sound against the bronze plate of the board. “True, but I will not gamble entirely on this youth. There are plans we can make, possibilities to explore, you and I. We must consider every last possible option, and every possible enemy reaction, before the next horde forms. The current pattern has endured too long.”

  Itinay put the dice down, layering them atop the stacked disks, and the agreement was made. “Let us begin,” she decided. It was time to rewrite the strategy of ages. Qing Liao was but one piece on the board, and they must be willing to consider every possible use. Including sacrifice.

  feng shui. The cultivators here have repurposed it for use as a variant form of tables board - most familiar as the board used for backgammon - with a circular format.