Chapter Text
As mentor and disciple were speaking, they disturbed the Great Sage, who shouted from the base of the mountain, “Who is up there on the mountain composing verses to expose my faults?” When the Bodhisattva heard those words, she came down the mountain to take a look. There beneath the rocky ledges were the local spirit, the mountain god*, and the Heavenly sentinels guarding the Great Sage…
[He cried] “Thank you, thank you for coming to see me! At this place every day is like a year, for not a single acquaintance has ever come to visit me.”
~Journey to the West, chapter 8
(Anthony C. Yu translation)
* 山神, Shanshen
There was a mountain where her home had been.
The earth spirit took a long time to understand this, her senses muddled and heavy in the aftermath. For thirty or forty years, she lay fully insensate, and for ten or so after that she drifted in and out of consciousness, understanding only that it was dark, and that something was deeply wrong.
Occasionally an unfamiliar voice shouted, or screamed—terrible, bestial screams—and the mountain shivered around her. Through her.
Dimly, horribly, she began to understand that the mountain was her.
It was much, much too big. She was horribly stretched. All her spiritual senses buzzed and ached, with the ugly numb feeling she’d only ever before associated with a jarring blow.
She had been among the lowest and smallest of immortals: the tutelary deity of a small rocky patch of land, on which a family of poor farmers—the Chens—grew hawthorn berries. She had looked after them as best she could: she chased the beetles from the blossoms and the birds from the fruit, and coaxed the trees’ roots deep. And sometimes on festivals, she pulled a solid form around herself and danced amid the trees, and ate the flesh of hawthorn berries as well as their spirit. Within only a few decades, she was established as the farmhouse’s dìzhǔ shén, with a small shrine of her very own, and a tiny little carving of herself nestled inside. She tried very hard not to be arrogant or vain about this. But it was such a lovely carving!
The shén had settled in blissfully, and in all her reports to Heaven had signed her name Zhā: hawthorn.
It wasn’t her name anymore. She wasn’t a guardian to the Chen family; she wasn’t the god of a hawthorn orchard. There was no orchard. There were no Chens.
There was a mountain.
And, under the mountain, someone screaming.
***
It took her five more years to pull her consciousness down into proper spirit-shape—a dense small knot of power with the vague outline of a human woman—and drag herself out of the mountain.
It shouldn’t have been so difficult. She was used to moving through earth and stone. But the mountain was so much heavier than it should be. None of it was at all like the gray round pebbles from her orchard; this was glossy, dense, greenish-black…and all one piece.
That was not natural. There should be cracks, patches of other stone, layers and loose bits and long fissures she could glide along. But instead it was all one thing, and she had to shove her way through it, painfully.
This would have been bad enough, but she was still weak and numb and—pulped was the only word bad enough for how she felt. And everything was made worse by that voice.
It was not a nice voice. It was by turns frantic, and pleading, and furious—more furious than she had known anything could be. It raged and ranted and howled, echoing up through the stone, shuddering through the shén’s injured spirit-self and tearing each injury wider. Covering her ears did no good: it was in the rock, and so it was in her, too.
But she shoved grimly onward, until one day she finally emerged from the stone, blinking painfully in the moonlight. And she had her first look at herself.
For a mountain, she was oddly shaped: four irregular peaks—nearly mountains unto themselves—and then a shorter fifth peak, set some distance away. Not a single plant grew on the slick solid surface. And the stone did not match any of the surrounding landscape, which was thrown up in concentric circles around her base, like ripples.
So her crushed, uncertain memories were actually correct: the mountain had fallen from the sky.
***
There was a seal attached to the very top, and the faint impression, only half-visible even in spirit-sight, of glowing chains wrapping the entire mountain. She could not read the seal, but she could feel the power radiating off it. It was a lock, a binding. This was what had fused the five peaks into a single piece, turned the whole monolith into a vast magical stopper to plug up—what? What terrible threat required an entire mountain to subdue?
Why had Heaven done this?
Somewhere at the mountain’s base, the voice began howling again, hoarse with agony and rage. The mountain shuddered.
It was a prison, she realized. Her home had been destroyed, her land, her family, her lovely little shrine, her name, her self—all crushed and distorted, in order to imprison…
Who?
***
The shanshen was too weak to go far from the mountain—her mountain—her self. But she knew that if she was going to put together a proper legal appeal to have the thing removed, excised from her land and spirit like a wart, a tumor, hateful hateful excrescence, then she needed as much information as she could gather. She huddled near a bramble thicket at the mountain’s northern slope until she spotted a rabbit spirit, and begged the whole story from him. He was delighted to have such a rapt audience for his tale.
A demon monkey, he told her, eaten up with arrogance and conceit, had demanded from Heaven a title, and actually been granted it. But his demand had been a ruse, a low and dirty trick to infiltrate the sacred orchard of the Heavenly Queen Mother and devour her divine immortality-granting peaches—fruit that took nine thousand years to ripen.
Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, had gobbled up every last one.
And then, the rabbit spirit continued gleefully, as she covered her mouth in horror, that vicious greedy ape had smashed up the Hall of Divine Mist, stolen Heavenly wine and magical elixirs, and carted the wreckage of the Queen Mother’s feast back to earth for his demonic allies.
“And so they sealed him under the mountain,” the shanshen murmured.
“Oh, no,” said the rabbit spirit. “They sent the armies of Heaven to arrest him, but he fought back. He beat Prince Nezha in single combat, and the Four Heavenly Kings, and I don’t know how many mighty warriors besides. But they caught him eventually, and slaughtered his allies and his armies, and brought him to Heaven to be executed.”
The shanshen blinked bewilderment. “But…”
“Nothing worked,” the rabbit spirit explained. “Blades, lightning, fire, nothing. Even Lord Laozi’s furnace couldn’t off him.”
“The peaches,” she whispered.
“They say he practiced forbidden methods of immortality even before stealing the peaches,” he told her, darkly. “They say he fought King Yama himself and crossed his name off the ledgers of the dead.”
“That—that cannot be true,” said the shanshen. “No one…Surely no one could be so…” She couldn’t even come up with a word for the callous arrogance, the effrontery.
(They took nine thousand years to ripen! The poor Queen Mother must be so upset!)
“He overset Heaven three times,” the rabbit spirit argued. “I don’t know how they finally managed to pin him under that great ugly rock—” he flicked an ear at the shanshen’s mountain— “but by all that is good in the world, he surely deserved it, and worse. Long may he rot.”
“…Oh,” she said. Understanding, cold and ugly, was seeping through her. There had been no mistake. Her life, and all of the Chens’, had never been worth considering, weighed against the need to contain such a monster.
There could be no appeal. Heaven would never, never risk removing the mountain, not if there was the tiniest chance Sun Wukong might wriggle free.
She had lost everything, forever.
The shanshen had never hated anyone before. It felt like catching fire, like being drunk, like the sound of Sun Wukong’s furious screams reverberating through what was left of her shredded spirit.
She hated, hated, hated the Monkey King.
***
But the shanshen’s hatred was as small and insignificant as the rest of her. The so-called “Great Sage Equal to Heaven” was imprisoned beneath her mountain, and he had no idea she even existed.
Upon consideration, she decided to content herself with that. She wanted nothing to do with the Monkey King. Even though he was imprisoned—hopefully forever—his very presence felt threatening. Someone who could fight off a hundred thousand Heavenly soldiers could probably obliterate a mountain god like her with a sneeze. No. She would stay far, far away.
She might hate him—oh, oh, she hated him—but she felt no compulsion to add to his punishment: it was clear that he was having a very bad time under her mountain, indeed.
He was pretty well immobilized beneath the sealed stone, but his head stuck out, and both hands. Presumably he’d been worming his way out from underneath when Heaven placed its seal, and trapped him for good. But he’d wormed his way into a small depression, lower than the rest of the land around the mountain and cupped on either side by two outstretched wings of rock, and it was predictably filling with water and sediment and plant life, burying him again. He kept the area around his face open as best he could, but that meant any dirt he shook off just built up into a wall around him, cutting off his lines of sight.
He objected to this, noisily and at length. It was one of his favorite topics of—not conversation, he wasn’t talking to anyone, he was just talking.
She had not actually known that someone could go frantic with boredom, but Sun Wukong sounded very nearly insane, most days. It had only been fifty years! But he shouted threats, and sang rude songs, and occasionally just yowled long wordless monkey-wails, for no purpose the shanshen could determine other than to hear his own horrible voice. For one whole week he shook the mountain with rhythmic thuds; some careful long-distance spying revealed that he was flinging his head back against the stone. She was certain his skull would crack.
It didn’t.
Neither did the mountain.
Eventually he gave up. She had nearly a whole week of silence, after that, as Sun Wukong nursed his headache and his ego.
She felt very nearly proud of her horrible mountain.
***
About a month after she learned the identity of the prisoner—her prisoner?—visitors came to her mountain.
They didn’t travel in any of the usual ways, over land or through the sky. They simply appeared near one of her foothills, silently.
They were wardens from one of the Buddhist hells, she learned later. They were skinny and potbellied and blue, with blank cruel faces and black shiny eyes, like beetles.
“Little shanshen,” one of them said—or possibly all of them said, simultaneously. The voice was curiously layered and buzzing. No one’s mouth moved. “You will keep well away from us, and the condemned. Do not interfere.” All five of them took a single, swaying step toward her. They didn’t carry weapons, only short iron hooks. Two of them carried clay vessels full of something that smoked and steamed and stank, like metal or blood.
“You too can be made to suffer,” said the wardens, with a subtle intonation that said they had already learned, from a glance, exactly how best to hurt her.
The shanshen dropped into a kowtow, forehead pressed hard against the earth, and did not move until they had been gone for ten minutes. In the distance, she heard Sun Wukong’s voice, rising in urgency.
Then the screaming started.
Then, very abruptly, it stopped.
He made no further sound for nearly a week. The shanshen did not dare come within a quarter mile of where he lay pinned, not even to determine if he was still alive. When she finally heard his voice again, hoarser than before and angry-angry-angry, she was not relieved, exactly, but she was…thoughtful. And grim.
So there was more, still, that could be taken from her.
She would not interfere.
***
The shanshen forced herself to grow accustomed to her new seasons and routines. Her mountain’s surface was only just beginning to accumulate plant life: the magically sealed stone was too dense and unforgiving for tree roots, and would be for many decades yet. She worked hard, scraping cracks and furrows into the stone so that it might support first lichens and moss, and then tiny, tough alpine flowers. She stole sackfuls of rich soil from a neighboring spirit’s land, until he threatened to report her. She attempted to wheedle the local wind god into depositing dust, but instead had to endure him shouting at her for nearly two hours about how her mountain had disrupted all his usual routes, and the paths of several migrating birds and insects, besides.
And worse, the wind god snarled, her prisoner was uncouth and obnoxious and entirely too loud; she could expect no further winds at all from him—and no rain from his friends in the Water Bureau, either—unless she did something to mitigate his noise.
Sun Wukong, and this mountain, and its shanshen, were a disgrace to the neighborhood.
“He’s not mine!” she cried, over and over, but the wind god would hear none of it.
So there was no wind, and very little rain.
She seethed. But she flatly refused to be the deity of a bare lump of rock. Too much had been taken from her already; she would not lose the comfort of green and growing things. She promised the tiny dragon-spirit of a nearby stream that she would keep the willows from growing near his banks and sucking up all his water; in return he grudgingly allowed her to haul away half the preserved water in willow baskets plastered with clay.
She was very grateful to be immortal: no human could have endured the workload she put herself through in the following months.
But the wildflowers grew, and put down roots: tiny threads prising apart the stone, and making room for more.
The shanshen’s bruised heart began to feel the first stirrings of something like peace. She hoarded snow over the winter—the snow god disliked the local wind god, and was amenable to a little scale-tipping when she kowtowed shamelessly to him—and the next spring was easier, and greener.
She began to feel that she could make a life here. Not as happy and kind as her old one, but doable. The stark rugged emptiness of her mountain was…peaceful, she told herself.
Mostly peaceful.
She was careful to stay well away—as far away as her tethers to the mountain would permit—whenever the five wardens appeared with their hooks.
It wasn’t nearly far enough.
Every time, her prisoner tried to talk to them, begging not for respite from—whatever they had come to do—but for news: What happened to my tribe, my sworn brothers, my tribe, my little monkeys, why hasn’t anyone come to see me, how long have I been here, what did Heaven do to them? My marshals, my brothers, do they know I’m here, how long will I be here, are they alive, just tell me if they’re alive! Say something, damn you—!
They never did.
***
As the years slipped by, the shanshen took to watching him more. Always from a safe distance, or hidden within an outcropping of stone, nothing but eyes and nose peeping out.
He had the most ridiculously expressive face. His eyes were big and vibrant— brilliant gold, lined in scarlet. Auspicious colors. His ears twitched and wiggled. So did his nose, when dirt or snow showered down on him from the slope above. Everything he felt was painted large, like he was a caricature of himself. And his fur stuck up in all directions, like a dandelion spirit gone rogue.
It was an appealing face, and entertaining to look at. Even if it hadn’t been, it would still be pleasant to see a—anyone.
She had insects on her mountain now, and mice, and she was doing her best to lure birds despite the wind god’s petty efforts to keep them away. She delighted in every tiny creature, even the hawthorn beetles she had once battled so ferociously. But they had their own things to do, in their short little lives.
And all her neighbors knew, by now, that she was gaoler to—possible accomplice of?—the dangerous war criminal Sun Wukong, and avoided her.
She had no idea what had happened to her place in the bureaucracy: none of her superiors among the land-gods had contacted her, and the few messages she had managed to send—with passing animal spirits, usually—went unanswered.
She tried hard not to think of their silence as another condemnation.
She missed her Chens. They would sing as they worked in the orchard, and bicker, and laugh. Some of them had kissed, under the flower-laden branches, with the moonlight filtering down around them soft as rain. They told stories and riddles, and made good food, and bad food too. They slept intertwined before their tiny hearth, and took care of each other. And she took care of them.
Now she took care of moss and beetles.
And—and she loved them! She did! But it was very quiet. Winters in particular were…
Very quiet.
Peaceful, she reminded herself fiercely.
She had found several human skeletons, crushed to powder, beneath the roots of her mountain. She thought—hoped—maybe there weren’t as many powder-smears as there ought to have been. She decided not to count, in case she was wrong.
***
The years passed. The Monkey King sang less, lately. He’d stopped yelling threats altogether. Sometimes he stared at nothing, unmoving, for days. She had been sure she wanted that, but…the blankness just…didn’t fit his face. Like watching a star go out.
***
The next time he started shaking the mountain—boredom or rage or fear or just an itch, she had no way of knowing—the shanshen slid a matted sledge of stolen bamboo poles and her own carefully-nurtured creeper vines down to cover the little depression he lay in, to make a kind of slanting roof. He couldn’t know, of course, that no bamboo grew anywhere above him. He’d have no reason to suspect anyone was here.
It wouldn’t protect him from the wardens, but it would keep off the scorching summer sun, and prevent more snowmelt and debris from sliding down onto his head, like he was always whining about. Maybe it would calm him down. Small dark spaces were very calming, in her experience.
Even taking into account his unpleasant silences, lately, she had never met anyone more in need of calming than the Monkey King.
For a brief moment, she thought it had worked: he stopped moving immediately when her makeshift roof dropped. But then he made a cracked little noise of horror. “Nonononono,” she heard him muttering, frantically. “No no no, shit, that’s not—that’s not good, haha. Okay. Okay, Great Sage. One more hard shake to fling it off. That will…definitely not bring down anything else, gods. Okay. Maybe wait until it rots? How fast does bamboo rot? Hahaha, probably not fast enough to prevent you losing it.
“…Shit.”
The mountain started to quake again, but only small tremors. He wasn’t trying to accomplish anything; he was just…shaking. He did that after the wardens came.
The shanshen had made a terrible mistake.
And she couldn’t figure out how to get it off without revealing herself. She felt like the worst kind of coward, listening to him panic and not helping, but—
He still scared her so badly. He was so angry. And the wardens had said to stay away from him.
You too can be made to suffer.
Eventually she reached out and very carefully wiggled the bamboo roof in time to his quaking. He swore to himself for a while, in a preparatory sort of way, and then lurched violently against the imprisoning stone. The shanshen nearly missed her opportunity, but she shoved the makeshift roof as hard as she could, and it slid right down past the Monkey King’s head and on down the slope a few feet.
He let out a long, shuddering breath, and was quiet for several days afterward, face turned up to the sky.
***
Another year passed, and the shanshen had begun playing a game with herself. How much wildlife could she coax (or occasionally startle) across Sun Wukong’s path before he grew suspicious?
It was a stupid, dangerous game. But he’d been so delighted with the dormouse the other day. He’d whispered silly nonsense to it while it stood grooming itself, and pouted when it ran away again. His stupid expressive face scrunched up like a child’s. He was ridiculous.
And also a terrible person.
But he didn’t sing anymore. And it was so, so quiet on her mountain.
And anyway he was her prisoner. The only inhabitant on her land. She could do as she liked.
The shanshen tried to give him at least one encounter every day, more if she was feeling reckless. Today she was feeling reckless. He’d already had a vole and a grasshopper. But there was a thrush singing nearby, and the shanshen had acquired no less than four snails with which to lure her in.
She was so engrossed with the strategy of snail-placement that she didn’t notice the wardens’ arrival until they were practically on top of her.
They didn’t see her. She was very, very good at hiding these days. But she didn’t dare move, lest she attract their attention.
Keep well away from us, and the condemned.
One of the wardens stepped on an escaped snail; it died with a wet crunch and a tiny flare of spiritual agony. The warden did not react.
“You again,” said the Monkey King, craning his neck painfully to see the wardens’ faces. “I was actually having a good day, too.”
The shanshen felt a ridiculous little burst of pride at that, somewhere under all the frozen terror: her vole had worked!
“Look,” said the Monkey King, “I get that you guys have this whole silent schtick going, I can appreciate that, very useful for intimidation, but there’s really no point intimidating me, y’know? I am at rock bottom, here, haha. So you might as well just tell me—Hey, hey, wait, just—Dammit, wait! What happened to my monkeys? Are they even—N-no, wait wait wai—”
The iron implements that the wardens carried weren’t weapons. They were to hook the Monkey King’s mouth open, and hold it wide.
The clay pots were full of molten copper.
They made him drink it.
The shanshen went reeling backwards out of her hiding place, and fetched up against a boulder. She crouched there, so frozen in shock and disbelieving horror that she watched for a full ten seconds, as Sun Wukong’s tongue blackened and his vocal cords burnt away, as his guttural screams crisped away to silence.
Her mountain shook as he writhed.
She clamped both hands over her own mouth, and bolted.
***
That…wasn’t right.
That wasn’t right.
It was such a stupid thought, but it was the only one left to her, clanging around in her head for hours afterward as she huddled deep in the heart of her mountain, trying not to cringe at every agonized shiver that rocked the stone.
Maybe the rabbit spirit hadn’t told her everything? Maybe Sun Wukong had—had actually committed…
The shanshen curled up into a ball. She couldn’t think of any crime terrible enough to merit a punishment like that.
The way he always begged for information, instead of reprieve, didn’t seem ridiculous anymore. She had thought he was just being stupidly proud. But the next time the wardens came, she watched those empty beetle-black eyes (“Just tell me if they’re alive!” the Monkey King insisted. “You have to know something, tell me!”) and felt something for the wardens that wasn’t hatred or fear.
It was contempt.
That was a new emotion for her, too. But who could hurt a helpless prisoner? Who could do that? And who could face down the Monkey King’s selfless, stubborn, stupid courage, over and over again, and feel…nothing?
It wasn’t right.
***
She spent the next two days in a frenzy of activity. She had been without even the basics of civilization for so long, she had forgotten how many steps went into making anything. To distill herbs one needed a pot, and for that clay, and fire, and therefore wood, and a sheltered place so that stupid wind god wouldn’t try anything—
And she had to be solid for all of it: exhausting.
But on the third day, she had a little pot full of an herbal drink to soothe the throat: mint, honey, cicada slough, spiritual water. And, trickiest of all to manufacture, a drinking-straw.
She had a very good plan. She could take things through the stone with her if she wrapped her spirit-self around them completely, so she would wait until he was asleep, push the little pot out of the rock a little to the side of the Monkey King, and then use a stick to nudge it into position, inside his reach. He would wake up and be so pleased, and his throat would feel better, and—and then—
She wasn’t sure. But it seemed like a good place to start.
What she hadn’t planned on was the little dip in the ground that surrounded his hands and face. Specifically, she hadn’t planned on the pot tipping when it reached that little dip.
Sun Wukong’s reflexes were terrifyingly fast. The clay pot made the faintest scraping noise as it tottered, and red-gold eyes snapped open, and one clawed hand snatched the pot mid-wobble. “Who’s there?” he snapped.
The shanshen froze, half-out of the small outcropping of stone that encircled one side of Sun Wukong’s little dell. Careless, careless, stupid—
“I know you’re here,” said Sun Wukong. His eyes were lit fiery gold as he peered around, craned his neck as far as the rock would permit.
The shanshen bit her lip and began to withdraw noiselessly back into the rock.
“There! Ha!” he said triumphantly, and the shanshen felt the red-gold light of his gaze go through her, right through her chest like a spear.
She turned and fled.
The Monkey King lurched against the rock. “Wait wait wait no—no, come back, I’m sorry, I didn’t—Come back!”
The shanshen sped up to her mountain’s peak and went corporeal enough to pat herself down all over. There was no wound. She’d only felt like the light had gone through her. Once she had calmed down a little she could admit it hadn’t even hurt, any more than sliding through rock hurt. It had been more—invasive, than anything. Just being seen felt invasive, these days.
She remembered the times, before the mountain, when she’d allowed one of the Chen children to glimpse her among the hawthorn trees: that nervous thrill of vulnerability and connection. I exist, and you are permitted to know it.
Who remembered—or cared—that she existed, anymore?
I know you’re here, the Monkey King had said.
Threat? Or…
She pressed her fists against her eyes.
The very idea felt like a betrayal of her murdered Chens, but—she couldn’t help thinking that it would be…nice. Occasionally. To have someone speak to her, or even just—react to her. Prove she was still a person. She could tell him about…Well, he probably wouldn’t care about her work with lichens and flowers and insects. He was a king, a Celestial, a warrior who could defeat Prince Nezha in single combat. She was an earth spirit, among the lowest xian. Probably he’d despise her.
She despised him, she reminded herself fiercely.
She was lonely, she could admit. All right, she was so lonely that getting through every single day felt like eating her own heart. But that was his fault!
Sort of.
Not really. Certainly he had not asked to be here.
Except—hadn’t he, when he committed such outrageous crimes against Heaven? He couldn’t have known he’d be hurting her Chens, specifically, but from the stories she really doubted that would have stopped him.
He was lonely, too.
And she’d been a dìzhǔ shén before becoming a shanshen: she was supposed to be a guardian to those who lived on her land.
Do not interfere. You too can be made to suffer.
“Hello?” Sun Wukong called, over and over, into the silence. “Hello, is someone there? Do you want your cup back? The drink was nice. Come back! Hello…?”
But she was a coward. Or perhaps she was just loyal to her poor dead mortal farmers, whom she had failed so spectacularly.
She stayed away. Eventually he stopped calling.
***
The next time the wardens came with their hooks and their pots of molten copper and their flat empty stares, Sun Wukong didn’t say anything to them at all. No mockery or defiance. No questions.
Their expressions never changed. But as the shanshen watched them leave, clay pot empty, she thought that something about their stride seemed—satisfied.
The prisoner lay still afterward, shuddering with pain, and made no sounds.
It wasn’t right.
For the next several days she paced the mountain peak, bare feet cold on the glossy stone, before she shed physicality and melted back down through the rock, down down down through hundreds of tons of black crushing weight, and out into one of the wings of stone that cupped Sun Wukong’s little hollow.
His head hung at that painful angle that meant he was asleep; his hands dangled limply.
The shanshen blew out a breath, one part frustration and nine parts profound relief. She could wait a little longer.
His ear twitched. “You came back,” he whispered.
She froze.
Sun Wukong lifted his head very slowly. “I’m sorry I scared you the other day,” he murmured. His voice was still sooty and raw; his breath made a dry noise like tearing paper. “You—you’re an earth spirit, right?”
The shanshen let herself breathe, quietly, quietly. But the Monkey King’s ear flicked madly at the sound. “Will you come out?” he asked. “I won’t hurt you. I can’t hurt you.”
He already had.
“You shake the mountain,” she whispered.
He sucked in a breath at the sound of her voice: the first he’d heard besides his own in over a century. She could see him straining not to move, the tendons standing out on the backs of his furred hands. “I won’t,” he said.
The shanshen twisted her own hands together, feeling them slide into each other, into the rock.
“I won’t,” he insisted roughly. And when the silence stretched, he added, desperate, “I’ll swear any oath you like, not to hurt you. You set the terms.”
She sank back a little, eyes widening. That was—a much more generous guarantor than she had any right to. But she couldn’t actually be surprised. She understood how lonely he was. Probably no one else could ever understand that as well as her.
“To stay here forever,” she said, merciless.
Something like a laugh wheezed out of him. “That…wow. Uh, yeah, good choice, I wouldn’t risk that one.”
She waited.
“All right,” he said abruptly. “I swear: If I hurt you, little earth spirit, may I be trapped beneath this m-mountain for eternity.”
He stared expectantly in her direction.
The shanshen slid out of the rock.