The Spiritual Awakening of Mei-Ling?

The following night, I returned to find her standing in the exact position I'd left her, humming the same melody as though she'd never moved, never breathed, never existed beyond that single moment of song. The continuity felt like watching a music box that had wound itself.

"Welcome, detective," she said without turning, her wings folding inward in a gesture that might have been beckoning or warning.

I approached with the caution of someone walking across ice that might be too thin to hold. We stood side by side, both staring at the moon, which had grown so large it seemed to be pressing its face against the sky's glass.

"Isn't it grand?" she asked.

I said nothing.

"We'll begin the ceremony then." She turned, and the heat that rose in my chest was immediate and unwelcome. Her eyes held depths that seemed to swirl with their own currents, and when she moved closer, her body brushed against mine with the casual intimacy of an old lover. My knees felt suddenly unreliable.

"Repeat my name," she whispered.

"I don't know it."

"Remi. That is my name, and you must tell no one else." Her breath was warm against my ear, carrying scents of that which I could not name.

I nodded.

I blinked.

When my eyes opened, the heavy darkness had lifted to its familiar pale twilight, and Remi was looking away from me, humming softly. The transition felt like waking from a dream I couldn't quite remember.

"I've unlocked some gates in your body," she said, her voice distant as wind through empty rooms. "Your ki can flow freely now. You should feel lighter."

I felt hazy, disconnected from my own limbs, but not lighter. If anything, I felt as though I were sinking through the ground.

"See you tomorrow, detective."

---

The third night arrived like clockwork. As I climbed toward the bluff, fragments of the previous evening surfaced like debris from a shipwreck. Xiao Ru had been waiting when I returned home, her colorful eyes aglow with worry.

"You're not yourself," she'd said, her hands fluttering around me like birds afraid to land. "You seem… ill. Please, drop this case."

But I couldn't. Something pulled me back to this place, this woman, with the insistence of the strong nuclear force. The farther I went, the stronger the pull.

Nausea rolled through my stomach as I approached Remi, but I swallowed the bile and said nothing. She reached out, her fingers brushing my hair away from my face with the tenderness of a mother—though a mother that loved or hated her children remained to be seen.

"The moon will fall tomorrow," she said, her feathers catching the bloated lunar light until they seemed to burn with their own fire. "A little earlier than expected."

Through the fog that had settled over my thoughts, a question managed to surface: "Would not an object that size cause an explosion when it hits? Would not the village be destroyed?"

Her smile was all teeth and shadows. "The Mirror Lakes will absorb it. The moon will fall through the sky on the other side."

Could a single lake contain something so vast? As I tried to process this impossibility, I felt her arms circle my waist, her breath hot against my ear, whispering words that seemed to bypass my ears and write themselves directly onto my brain.

I blinked.

I gazed starward, and noticed the moon, as if it transfixed me upon that moment frozen in time. Stranger still, it seemed slick, with sheen, so vibrant. Would not such a moon appear chalkier, its light less filtered? Before I could dissect further, the gloaming had once more bled across the sky, and the silhouette of Remi was a scar upon the precipice, her low, unending dirge a thread of sound in the stillness. I made my way homeward, a pilgrim through streets whose geometry was a quiet and elegant psychosis, rearranging themselves just beyond the periphery of my gaze. I was a somnambulist trespassing in the ossified remains of another’s nightmare.

---

On the final night, I approached the bluff with three ceremonies carved into my skull like notches on a blade. The moon hung so close I could trace every crater that pocked its flesh, each wound a mouth frozen mid-scream. I paced the precipice's edge, neck craned until my spine felt like a badly tuned violin.

"Nervous, detective?" Remi's voice sliced through my restless circling. Cold sweat had plastered my shirt to my back like a wet leaf.

I looked at her, then placed my hands behind my head as if a penitent awaiting absolution. I nodded.

So did she.

She approached with the silent, inexorable purpose of a river changing its course, her arms winding around my neck, drawing me close enough to taste the graveyard musk of her breath. In that moment of contact, my form shimmered like heat rising from sun-baked stone—Xiao Ru's face emerging where mine had been, her violet eyes blazing as she locked onto the tengu with the devotion of a bear trap embracing bone.

Remi's yelp tore itself from her throat like a prayer said backwards.

From behind a boulder that crouched like a sleeping gargoyle, the real me stepped into moonlight, Xiao Ru at my side. I watched the satellite begin its descent toward the lake's waiting mouth—no celestial fire, no atmospheric shrieking, just a moon sliding through space like a pearl down a dead woman's throat.

"Mhm," I said, folding my arms.

"What transpires here?" Remi gasped, struggling against the clone's embrace like a butterfly pinned to foam.

"Xiao Ru disguised her duplicate as me," I explained, savoring the satisfaction of solved arithmetic. "When she teleports, she can birth temporary flesh from borrowed moments."

The clone had confirmed my suspicions about the moon's impossible theater—how it remained pinned overhead like a painted eye on a cathedral ceiling, mocking every law of perspective. We'd tested it by walking opposite directions, watching for the shift that physics demanded but never delivered.

"How could you pierce my veil?" Remi snarled through gritted teeth.

"The reflection filtered through the lake's surface was too surgical, too clean. Like looking at a photograph of water instead of water itself. I see naught a star for it to reflect light, lest you tell me it illuminates all on its own?"

The moon kissed the lake's rim with the tenderness of a coroner closing a corpse's eyes.

"At this distance," I continued, "parallax should be obvious as blood on snow. But silence. Why silence what should sing?"

The clone dissolved into silver mist, and Remi collapsed, finally permitted breath. "Adequate detection, detective. Though your perception crawls like winter honey."

Xiao Ru examined the ink-stained parchment, her face souring like cream left in August heat. "The feedback feels like static electricity made of butterfly wings. Nothing that would drown a mind."

"Your flesh carries frequencies from elsewhere," Remi wheezed, massaging her bruised ribs. "I could have unlocked its chambers, worn your body like a dress tailored from midnight."

She lunged forward with the desperation of the damned grasping for one final blessing.

Xiao Ru's arrow bloomed in her chest before she'd crossed half the distance.

Blood painted Remi's lips like rouge applied by mortuary hands as she tumbled down the bluff, her form spinning toward the lake's eager edge. I approached the precipice and stared down at her broken silhouette.

With breath escaping like steam from a punctured kettle, she shrieked upward: "The moon is the Great One's herald! Marvalyn draws her first breath! Your flesh would have served as temple, but victory remains—the moon arrives!"

The lunar surface erupted through the lake's floor like infection bursting through skin, reality splitting like overripe fruit dropped on stone. Water transformed into screaming pillars as the moon birthed itself through folded space, sending spirals of raw chaos clawing at heaven's belly. The earth convulsed beneath us like a dying horse's final spasm, and we pressed ourselves flat against its trembling hide as existence rewrote itself in alphabets that predated language.