"Quintessence. What does 'quintessence' even mean…?"
I turned to the back of the book, hoping for a glossary entry that made more sense. Like earlier, I was disappointed. If anything, the carefully worded paragraphs of text, that seemed to dance across the page, made the subject harder to understand, not easier.
I sighed and put the book down next to me and stared up at the sky. At least it wouldn't throw around technical jargon around like fried rice.
The sun was high in the blue sky and the clouds were massive. I've always liked cloud watching and could do it for hours, though the real reason I was here was to test out the charm you'd made. It was a small thing, just a little piece of wood, about the size of a clothes tag, and tied onto the end of my tail with a bit of string. If it worked, you said you'd make a better tie with some leather scraps. Personally, I was alright with the bit of string. It made me look like a toy in a shop.
You didn't laugh when I said that, but I could see the amusement in your eyes.
There was a shout in Chinese, and I came back to the present to find something round flying fast toward at me. Lucky for me, my reaction time is pretty good, and I caught the basketball firmly between my hands. There was a patter of feet and a few kids ran up to me.
I was on the roof of the Walled City, or rather, on one of the roofs, one with a makeshift basketball court painted on it. With it just being kids playing around here, even if the charm failed to hide my tail, it wouldn't cause too much of a fuss. At least that's what I hoped.
"Here you go," I said, shooting the ball to the nearest kid, though perhaps I should say he was a teenager.
"Thanks!" he said to me in English as he caught it. He started to head back to his friends then stopped. "Want to play with us?"
I looked at the group. There were three of them, two boys and a girl. One boy and the girl had similar looking school uniforms on while the third, the one I'd thrown the ball to, had a different one. It was lunch hour, a good time to be playing ball, an idea shared by new fewer than a dozen other kids who were all playing various games across the roofs.
"Alright," I said, jumping up.
You, bless your soul, had lent me a massive tome to read on the basics of Western herbalism to try to give me some easy to digest basic knowledge, but right now, basketball was looking like the more fun option.
Half an hour later, I said goodbye to Arthur, Yoong-Yoong, and Coral as they dashed to the stairs in an effort to not be late for class. I wished them good luck in my heart and sat back down heavily on the ground.
I like sports, but I hadn't expected to do that badly, especially not with kids.
"Tired?"
I looked around to find a woman had arrived when I wasn't looking and sat down next to my, your, book.
"Just a bit," I said with a grin and got up to get the book. The woman didn't look like a thief but the book wasn't mine to lose. She looked relatively young, maybe mid or late twenties, but there was a heavy, melancholic air about her that made her seem far older. Her hair was a salt-and-pepper, long and loose, and despite the heat, she was wrapped in layers of lacey shawls.
"Interesting read," she said when I neared, gesturing to the book. She had a mild Scottish bend to her voice, much like my own accent.
"Yeah," I agreed. "Bit hard for me to understand though." I checked the cover of the book and saw that it made no effort to hide its magical bent. I felt thoroughly embarrassed.
"Like me to help?" she asked.
"You… know about this stuff?"
She gave me a smile. Well, I describe it as a smile, but her overall demeanor was so melancholic that it just made her look sadder. "A little," she said. "My grandmother used to tell me stories about ravenous beasts and beautiful fairies."
I sighed inwardly. She thought the book was just some self-serious novel.
I sat next to her. "I'd love to hear a tale," I said.
The woman's eyes widened a little, she had clearly not expected me to agree. Her smile broadened.
"You must understand," she began, in a low voice that floated on the wind, "that there is a natural flow to things. It isn't good or evil, it merely is. There is no invisible hand that guides it nor can the small lives within its flow change its course, but it knows, as all things know truly, that while equilibrium is where its heart is and will forever be drawn to, it will never arrive. It will be as a moon forever orbiting a sun, getting close, oh so close, then missing the mark, and flying out once again.
A sudden cool breeze washed across the tops of the buildings of the Walled City, tugging at the hair of the playing children and the washing their mother's had so meticulously hung out to dry. Beside me, the woman's many shawls also rose, and, for a moment, she looked like she wasn't wrapped in fabric but in thick, feathered wings.
"We may be saddened," she went on, her voice even softer than before, "we may gnash our teeth in frustration, but you must understand that it is from the swinging pendulum that life emerges, ever new, ever changing, and we must obey our nature to forever walk toward the spiral's centre."
I couldn't say I understood her, yet her words made my heart ache, and a single tear rolled down my cheek.
The woman reached over to me and brushed the tear away.
I blushed and quickly turned to look at the playing children. The woman laughed. The sound was like distant mourning bells.
I waited for her to continue her yarn, or at least to poke a little fun at me, but she didn't.
A time passed and neither of us spoke. Instead, we watched the children, one-by-one, wave goodbye to their friends and disappear, some by themselves down the stairs and some hand-in-hand with a parent.
Finally, only the woman and I were left.
"Do you have children?" I finally asked, hoping to break the silence. I'd noticed the way she held her hands in her lap, sort of crooked around her abdomen - protective like. It reminded me of a pregnant mother I'd seen long ago, but I couldn't quite recall when.
The woman shook her head. "I did have a child once, but… she was taken from me. I lost her."
"I'm sorry." I really was.
She shook her head again, smiling that sad smile. "Nüwa formed us from the dirt, and it is to the dirt that we will return, no more and no less than we were."
I thought of the grandfather and his pamphlets and wondered how he was faring.
"It's hard losing a child," I mumbled.
"You've lost one too?"
"No, no, I just saw a man handing out missing posters today. For his granddaughter."
The woman's eyes seemed to say that she wanted to know more so I reluctantly, I pulled my bookmark from the book and unfolded it. It was the missing person's notice. I'd felt a bit awkward about using a scrap piece of paper from your aunt's house, so the pamphlet was the only thing I could use.
The woman took the paper in hand. "Oh… that is so sad…"
"Yeah…"
Tears began to well up in her eyes and she touched a shaking hand to the girl's face printed on the paper. I immediately regretted bringing it up even more. I tried to think of something to say, something to change the subject…
But the tears did not fall and after a moment, the woman folded the paper again and handed it back to me. "Thank you for telling me. I will pray that she is found."
Up till that point, everything the woman had said was infused with cold, tired sadness, but there was something else in those last words. There was something else there, something like a spark, like ember of a flame.
Abruptly, the woman rose, shawls swirling around her. She nodded to me, then left the rooftop.
I stared after her, still somewhat stunned.
For the first time I was alone on those rooftops, and I shivered. That cold breeze had returned. I looked up at the sky. The clouds were still towering but there was something intimidating about their magnificence. In the distance, I heard a low rumble.
A storm was coming.